Prosecutors Cite Twin’s ‘Recipe’ to Murder Sister

Along with two teenagers, 23-year-old Jeen Young Han concocted a “recipe for murder” out of Pine Sol, garbage bags, duct tape and twine to kill her identical twin sister, a prosecutor alleged Thursday.

“She wants [her] dead and it’s unequivocal,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Bruce Moore told the jury during opening remarks in Orange County Superior Court.

Jeen Han, dubbed “the evil twin” by police, is on trial on charges of conspiracy to commit murder, burglary and false imprisonment. The prosecution says she enlisted her co-defendants, 17-year-old Archie Bryant and 16-year-old John Sayarth, to help her kill the sister she was feuding with.

But defense attorneys told the jury the trio barely knew each other and never hatched a murder plot. They said the defendants went to Sunny Han’s apartment in Irvine merely to retrieve some of Jeen Han’s belongings, which her twin had refused to return.

“There was never an agreement or meeting of the minds,” said Salvatore P. Ciulla, Sayarth’s attorney. “This just got spun way out of control. It wasn’t a recipe for murder. . . . It was a recipe for disaster from the start.”

The case has drawn widespread media attention, ranging from the Korean press to the cable Court TV channel, which is broadcasting the trial live.

The twins were co-valedictorians of their high school class and once were close but had been feuding in recent years.

Sunny Han and her roommate, Helen Kim, were bound and gagged in their Irvine apartment and held at gunpoint on Nov. 6, 1996, by two men until police arrived. Sunny Han had called police from a cell phone in her bedroom before the men were able to grab her.

Kim broke down on the stand several times. She identified Bryant as the man who burst into her apartment and stuck a gun to her head. When Kim tried to escape, she testified, Bryant told her, “I should shoot you.”

She said an Asian man also was in the room, but she was unable to say it was Sayarth.

When police arrived, Kim said, Bryant told her and her roommate to lie to the officers.

“He started to rip the tape off of Sunny’s head and to take off the rope, and he said, ‘Tell the cops it’s a joke,’ ‘ she testified.

Two Irvine police officers testified they spoke to Jeen Han outside the apartment. One said she was screaming frantically and wanted to know if her sister was all right. Another officer said she told him that she lived at the apartment and was fighting with her roommate.

A bullet and a bullet casing were found in the rental car Jeen Han was driving. A loaded gun with the safety latch off was found in a hamper in Sunny Han’s apartment.

Prosecutor Moore told the jury that before arriving at Sunny Han’s apartment, the defendants bought duct tape and twine from a nearby supermarket. Police also found plastic garbage bags and Pine Sol cleaner in their possession, which he said were “ingredients for a murder--a recipe for it.”

Moore, however, did not say how the ingredients were going to be used. Deputy Public Defender Roger Alexander conceded that Jeen Han had many times made such statements as “I wish my sister was dead” and “Who wants to help me kill my sister?” But he said it was merely “a venting of anger, not someone who had sat down and decided to kill.”

He said his client was angry because the last time she saw her sister, Sunny Han had punched her in the face and had her arrested for using her credit cards and taking her car. He said Jeen Han had told Sayarth and Bryant that she was afraid of her sister and that they would need duct tape and rope in case any of her sister’s friends were at the apartment when they were retrieving the belongings.