Bunny Ears Kept as a Trophy: Hyun Jong Song
Hyun Jong Song, known to nearly everyone in her adopted country as Cindy, was born February 25, 1980, in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to the United States in 1995 at fifteen years old to live with relatives in Springfield, Virginia, near Alexandria. By the fall of 2001, at twenty one years old, Cindy had built an entire American life for herself, enrolled as an integrative arts major at Pennsylvania State University and on track to graduate the following spring. She stood a little over five feet tall, wore her ears and navel pierced, and was, by every account from those who knew her, someone with genuine plans and momentum in her life rather than any indication of personal turmoil that might explain a sudden disappearance.
A Halloween Party and a Bunny Costume
On the night of October 31 into the early morning hours of November 1, 2001, Cindy attended a Halloween party at Player's Nite Club in State College, Pennsylvania, dressed for the occasion in a bunny costume complete with a pair of bunny ears. She left the club around 2 a.m. and stopped by a friend's home for a couple of hours afterward. At approximately 4 a.m., another friend dropped her off outside her residence at State College Park Apartments, mildly intoxicated but otherwise entirely ordinary in her behavior. That drop off marks the last confirmed sighting of Cindy Song by anyone who has ever come forward with a verified account of what happened next.
A Backpack Left Behind, a Purse and Keys Gone
Cindy was not reported missing until November 4, once friends realized she had gone several days without making any contact at all, behavior everyone close to her agreed was completely out of character. When investigators eventually searched her apartment, what they found suggested she had, in fact, made it home that early morning before disappearing. Her backpack and various costume accessories remained inside, along with nearly all of her other personal belongings. Only her keys and her purse, containing her credit cards and driver's license, were missing entirely. Investigators found no signs of a struggle anywhere in the apartment, and no suspicious activity ever showed up on her phone records, her credit cards, or any email account connected to her afterward. Adding to the sense that she had not simply chosen to walk away from her own life, investigators later noted she had concert tickets scheduled for just a few days later and a receipt for a new computer that was due to be delivered, the kind of near future plans someone intending to disappear voluntarily rarely bothers arranging.
Cindy's own family reportedly destroyed some potential evidence unintentionally while cleaning her residence in the anguished period following her disappearance, an understandable but costly mistake that likely eliminated forensic material investigators might otherwise have been able to examine more closely.
A Witness in Philadelphia
One early lead took investigators well outside State College entirely. A woman in Philadelphia reported seeing another woman matching Cindy's description riding in a vehicle alongside an unidentified man, in the city's Chinatown neighborhood, and claimed the man told her directly to leave once the woman in the car appeared to be signaling for help. Investigators pursued the account seriously at first, but the witness's own story reportedly shifted several times under further questioning, and the man she described was never identified or treated as an actual suspect in the case, leaving that particular lead unresolved.
A Bank Robber's Confession Two Years Later
The case's most significant break came in 2003, when an informant connected to a man named Hugo Selenski came forward with information tying Selenski directly to Cindy's disappearance. Selenski, already known to investigators as a bank robber, reportedly told the informant that he and an accomplice named Michael Jason Kerkowski Jr. had kidnapped a woman years earlier and kept her body inside a freezer. Selenski went on to confess more specifically that he and Kerkowski had taken Cindy, claiming that Kerkowski was the one who actually killed her, and that Kerkowski had kept her bunny ears afterward as a personal trophy from the crime. Selenski told investigators Cindy's body had been buried somewhere on property he owned in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.
Bodies in the Yard, but Not Hers
Acting on Selenski's account, investigators excavated his Luzerne County property and discovered multiple sets of human remains buried there, at least five in total according to later reporting. Among those remains were the bodies of Michael Kerkowski himself, the very man Selenski had named as Cindy's actual killer, along with Kerkowski's own girlfriend, Tammy Fassett. In other words, the accomplice Selenski blamed for Cindy's death had himself been murdered and buried on Selenski's own land, apparently by Selenski, well before investigators ever went digging. Cindy's own remains were never among the bodies recovered from that property, eliminating what had briefly seemed like the case's most promising lead and leaving investigators without any confirmed physical evidence tying Selenski's confession to what had actually happened to Cindy.
A Killer Who Escaped Justice Once, Then Didn't
Selenski stood trial in 2006 for the murders of Kerkowski and Fassett, the two victims whose remains had been recovered from his property. Despite the physical evidence of at least five bodies buried in his own yard, the jury acquitted him of one murder and deadlocked on the other, and a judge subsequently ruled he could not be retried on the count the jury had hung on. His only conviction from that trial was for abuse of a corpse. That initial legal outcome left Cindy's family, along with investigators who suspected Selenski was directly responsible for far more than what he had actually been convicted of, without any meaningful accountability for years afterward. Selenski was never formally charged in connection with Cindy's disappearance specifically, since investigators were never able to independently verify enough of his account to build a prosecutable case. It would take until February 11, 2015, when Selenski was finally convicted on two counts of first degree murder for killing Kerkowski and Fassett, strangling both of them with flex ties after beating Kerkowski to extract information about drug money he had hidden. A jury spared him the death penalty despite the brutality of the crimes, and he was sentenced instead to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A Mother Who Crossed an Ocean to Search
Cindy's own mother traveled from South Korea to Pennsylvania in the aftermath of her daughter's disappearance, working to keep both the search effort and ongoing media attention alive during a period when investigators had little to offer in the way of concrete progress. That sustained attention, along with continued advocacy from within State College's broader community, has kept Cindy's case from fading entirely even as it stretched across decades without resolution. Local reporting has noted the case file connected to her disappearance now spans more than twenty separate folders of accumulated information, stored within Ferguson Township's own archives, a physical testament to just how much investigative effort has gone into a case that has never actually produced her.
Still Missing, More Than Two Decades Later
Cindy Song's disappearance remains formally unsolved, handled currently by the Ferguson Township Police Department, more than two decades after she was dropped off outside her own apartment early on the morning of November 1, 2001. What the case leaves behind is a genuinely unsettling structure, a confessed kidnapping from a man who blamed an accomplice he had already murdered himself, a property that yielded multiple bodies but not the one investigators were actually searching for, and a killer eventually held fully accountable for the murders he committed against Kerkowski and Fassett while the truth of what he did, if anything, to Cindy Song herself has never been independently confirmed.
Sources
- The Charley Project: Hyun Jong Song
- True Crime Edition: The Disappearance of Cindy Song
- Community United Effort: Cindy Hyun Jong Song
- CBS News: Man convicted in Pennsylvania double homicide to serve life without parole
