The prosecution then called its tyre expert. The young New Zealander admitted that his final conclusions were done in Singapore after he had seen the tyre marks and other evidence related to it. When it was my turn to cross-examine him, I put it to him that his preliminary opinion that the same tyres caused the tyre marks was mere speculation. He did not respond and kept quiet. He also remained silent when I asked if he just wanted a free trip to Singapore. I remember Justice Lai asking me to go slow on that.
The prosecution finally finished presenting their witnesses and it was now the defence’s turn. I asked the judge to make an exception and to allow me to call my experts first before calling in the accused because the longer the experts stayed in Singapore, the greater the expenses I had to incur. It is the usual procedure in criminal cases that the accused takes the stand before the witnesses. Justice Lai consented because the two witnesses whom I wanted to call were expert witnesses and I had cited cases where there was a precedent. The prosecution made no objection.
My first witness was Dr MacDonald, the expert on DNA. He gave his evidence and explained that the evidence of the prosecution experts could not be accepted because the method used was wrong and thus the finding could be wrong. He said that the experts had ignored important issues and gave his reasons. He was cross-examined extensively by the deputy public prosecutor, with the prodding and prompting of his own expert who was sitting beside him. Next, my other expert on tyres took the stand. He explained why the prosecution expert’s findings were not reliable. He was also cross-examined extensively.
Subsequently, Nadasan gave evidence. He said he had nothing to do with the murder and didn’t know how the tooth came to be impaled on his van. Apparently, according to Ramipiram’s husband and son, she would open beer bottles with her teeth. Nadasan said that they used to rendezvous in the van and were sometimes intimate and would share a beer underneath the van. It was possible that she could have cracked her tooth on one of those occasions.
The prosecution also produced an expert witness to say that it would not take 30 to 40 minutes to repair the carburettor of the van, as Nadasan had claimed. Under cross-examination, that testimony was shredded to pieces because it was obvious the witness did not know much about Nadasan’s old van. Nadasan explained why his van would start and stall over and over again.
When the trial ended, we handed in written submissions. Despite our efforts, Justice Lai convicted my client and sentenced him to death. There was much wailing and crying in court. The judge called the DPP, Amolat Singh and me into his chambers, and we remained there until the crowd was cleared by the police. Only then did he allow the DPP to leave through the back of the court. I was very disappointed with the judgment. I felt that Justice Lai always dealt more harshly with people who commit adultery. I also felt that as a church elder, and because of his personal convictions, he tended to take issues other than the law into consideration. Of course, I filed the Notice of Appeal.
I should also share that some gold items were found in the van too. The prosecution said they belonged to the murdered woman but did not provide any expert evidence to back up their claim. Nadasan explained that he hired out his van for transporting guests during weddings and the gold items could have been accidentally dropped by them. Since there was no proof to connect the gold items worn by the deceased with the items found in the van, the evidence was referred to as neutral evidence. I remember Justice Lai saying that his father was a goldsmith and he knew a little about gold and had his opinion about things.
Anyway after we had filed our Notice of Appeal, Justice Lai wrote his Grounds of Decision explaining why he convicted my client. When I read the Grounds of Decision, I found the judgment to be very weak and one that did not reflect what actually happened in the trial. It was a ‘wishy-washy’ sort of judgment with the usual ‘mumbo-jumbo’ when you want to convict somebody, stating nothing much other than that he accepted the evidence of the prosecution’s forensic experts and did not believe my client.
When it was time for the appeal, the family had no more money. They had spent it all on the experts. I got myself assigned by the Supreme Court registrar and did the appeal as an assigned counsel.
Together with Amolat Singh, we argued before the Court of Appeal comprising Chief Justice Yong Pung How, and Justices of Appeal M Karthigesu and L P Thean. We put forward our case and argued why Justice Lai had erred in convicting and why he should not have accepted the forensic evidence submitted by the prosecution. Of course, the DPP fought back aggressively. In one instance, when arguing about the tooth in the van, Justice Thean retorted: “So what if the tooth was found? Does that mean that he killed her? There was an explanation given, wasn’t there? Why don’t you look at the explanation?” He cut the DPP short on that. I was a bit surprised. I think he found Justice Lai’s judgment weak and the arguments of the DPP even weaker. The judgment of the Court of Appeal was reserved.
A month or two later, judgment was delivered and the Court of Appeal unanimously allowed the appeal. They squashed the death sentence and ordered Nadasan to be freed. He cried loudly when he heard the result. When I went to see him in the underground cell at the Supreme Court, he was still wailing. I shouted at him to stop and the wardens told me that they were tears of joy. I said, “Even with tears of joy, there’s a limit.” I told him to shut up and listen to what I had to say.
They took him back to Changi Prison and returned his belongings to him. That evening he was released. He made headlines in all the newspapers and on TV. Winning the appeal gave both Amolat Singh and I great satisfaction. It’s very seldom that you get a conviction on a capital case squashed in the Court of Appeal. The system very seldom allows such things to happen. So we had good reason to celebrate.
One of the things I must say that struck me as funny was the extent to which an accused would go to impress a judge. Nadasan, who was a staunch Hindu, somehow learnt that Justice Lai was a Christian and a church elder. After a couple of days of hearings in court, Nadasan started carrying a Bible. The interpreter who had earlier thought that Nadasan was a Hindu informed me that Nadasan now was carrying a Bible. I said, “Never mind, let him carry whatever he wants.” I did not question Nadasan’s decision to carry the Bible. However, when the time came for him to give evidence, he told the interpreter that he wanted to swear on his own copy of the Bible. I went towards him and told him: “You can be a Christian, you can be a Buddhist, I don’t care what you are. But if you want to swear on the Bible, you take the oath on the court’s Bible. Why the hell do you want to use your own Bible? What are you trying to prove?” He felt a little embarrassed. I demanded that he not make an issue out of this. He swore on the court’s Bible. I knew that it was just a ploy to impress upon the judge that he was a good man. Still, Nadasan was promptly convicted and taken to the condemned cell. The first letter he wrote from the cell was to ask me to do the appeal because he was not guilty. At the top of that letter, he had written “Om Shakti”. So, he had forgotten about the Bible. Since he was now convicted, he had chosen to revert back to Hinduism. These are some of the things that accused persons sometimes do when they are under pressure or in a depressed state or if they want to impress somebody in the hope that it will help their case
I still see Nadasan in the temple with his family. He always comes to me and says hello. His wife still complains that I have yet to go to their house for a meal, an invitation that has been long-standing. They are very grateful. Each time I meet with his family, his wife says to me: “We pray to the God that we cannot see but whenever we see you, we feel that we see our God in you because you saved my husband’s life.” I always reply that I didn’t save her husband’s life and that sometimes the system works.
SIXTEEN
LEONG SIEW CHOR
The Body Parts Murder
Factory supervisor Leong Siew Chor looked like any ordinary Singaporean. Slightly built, bespectacled and balding, the 51-year-old was described as a loving father and husband by his fami
ly. He was seemingly not a danger to anyone. So, it came as quite a shock to everyone who knew him when he was arrested in connection with one of the most brutal murders that Singapore had seen in recent times. The body of 22-year-old Liu Hong Mei was hacked into seven pieces, stuffed into five cardboard boxes and plastic bags, and dumped in various locations. Madam Liu had worked as a production operator in a semiconductor company, Agere Systems Singapore, at Serangoon North Avenue 5. She was under Leong’s supervision. She was also his lover.
Their love affair apparently turned sour after Madam Liu lost her POSB ATM card. She reported the loss to the police on June 14, 2005, and told her sister and a colleague that she had lost her bank card. Police later learnt that Leong had withdrawn a total of almost $2,000 from her account at different teller machines within cycling distance from his home. The next day, Madam Liu failed to turn up for work. She worked the same night shift as Leong, starting at 7.00 pm. On June 16, a box containing the lower torso of a woman was found by a cleaner along the shores of the Kallang River. Shortly after that, police discovered another box in the vicinity containing the upper torso of a woman. Further investigations revealed that other parts of the body might be at the Tuas South Incineration Plant. On June 18, while sieving through rubbish collected from the Singapore River, police officers retrieved a plastic bag containing a decomposed head. A further search into the rubbish uncovered a pair of lower limbs. The severed feet and the personal belongings of the deceased could not be found. DNA tests conducted by the Health Sciences Authority confirmed that all the dismembered parts belonged to Madam Liu’s body.
Leong was charged with the murder of Madam Liu on the same day. He had done the horrible deed in his own Lorong 3 flat in Geylang on the morning of June 15. His wife and one child were away on holiday in Thailand; his two other children were not at home, though his daughter was due home by 6.00 pm. The actual killing was relatively straightforward—strangulation with a towel. Leong claimed that Madam Liu’s death was part of a mutual suicide pact which he backed out of after seeing her turn blue. Leong said Madam Liu had wanted him to leave his family and return with her to China, but he had told her he couldn’t bear to leave his family.
After her death, he had to dispose of her body. Imagine killing your lover in your own home, knowing that one of your daughters was due back in a few hours. His mind must have been racing. He didn’t have the cover of night to steal away the body nor did he have a vehicle other than his bicycle. So he dragged the body into a toilet and started hacking it into seven pieces. He then systematically dumped the body parts. He cycled to the Kallang River and made two taxi trips to Clarke Quay and Boat Quay respectively where he disposed of some parts and then threw the other parts into the Singapore River. He said that he recalled a Chinese belief that ashes of the dead should be thrown into the sea in order to set the spirit free. But Leong showed attributes of a cold-blooded killer because he went to work on the same day he murdered Madam Liu. When a colleague informed him that Madam Liu had not turned up for work, he asked her to give Madam Liu a call to find out what had happened to her.
The police only caught up with Leong during the evening shift on the following day. Leong was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in May 2006. In August 2007, he failed in his second appeal to escape the gallows. A plea for clemency from the President also failed and Leong was hanged in November 2007.
The Kallang body parts case, as the media called it, was truly an unforgettable case. First, the photographs of the dismembered body were gruesome. I’ve seen some horrifying photographs in my life but these were the worst: legs here, a head there, some parts already decomposed. Some of the girls in the office felt nauseous looking at the photographs while others, strangely enough, were studying them with great intensity and commenting on the size of the bloated legs and the clarity of the colour photographs. I’ve noticed over the years that there are very different reactions to gruesome murder pictures. Some people feel nauseous and sick, some are drawn in a kind of morbid fascination, while others are indifferent.
(When I showed these photographs to my current colleagues, I recall a nasty trick I played in the 1970s on the three girls in my office, one of them my wife-to-be. On that day, I had forgotten to ask them to get me lunch. I was hungry and when they came back with their lunch, I beckoned them to my desk and said,“I’ve got something interesting to show you.” I showed them photographs of a murder case I was working on. Two of them immediately lost their appetite. My future wife was not affected and I had two lunches that day.)
The body parts murder case attracted many people to the court hearings. It is no surprise to me that the gruesome cases tend to draw people out of the woodwork. There appears to be a thirst to find out details. I don’t think it has anything to do with wanting to learn from the case to prevent the same thing happening to you. It’s just a deep curiosity that’s innate in most people. It’s really difficult to put your finger on what drives this but it’s always evident. Perhaps it’s the same driving force you see when people gather around fatal traffic accident or murder scenes.
Right at the start, I could not understand why Madam Liu became involved in a relationship with Leong in the first place. He was married with grown-up children, while she was attractive and young. To better understand her motivations, I had to analyse why the affair took place. It could have been because he was a supervisor in a different department, got her transferred to his department and quickly promoted her. I think, being from China, Liu was interested in getting promoted and earning a better income. One would expect such factors to typically drive people who are settling down in a new country. So, she must have been grateful to him. In fact, there were complaints from other employees that the couple was kissing in the factory but nothing came out of the complaints.
As mentioned earlier, Leong said that his reason for killing her was that they had made a suicide pact. The prosecution, however, contended that he had killed her because he had taken her money and she had reported the theft to the police. The police was going to produce some CCTV photographs for Liu to see which would idenitfy the culprit. The prosecution’s stand was that Leong was afraid that Liu would identify him. I asked Leong, “Why did you go and take the two thousand over dollars? Surely you’re not that hard up for that money.”
If I remember rightly, the theft of the ATM card occurred when they were in a room in Geylang. While she was taking a shower, he had looked into her handbag for a comb, saw the ATM card and took it. He knew her Personal Identification Number and that night he withdrew money from different teller machines.
I asked him: “You were doing quite well. You were having enough money for yourself. Why did you need to steal her money? I find this very odd. Why did you do that?”
His reply was strange. “I suppose it’s greed,” he said.
While the investigations were going on and when the public knew that I was acting for Leong, I received two phone calls informing me that my client had killed Liu because she was unfaithful to him. I asked the person on the line, “Why do you say that?” On both occasions the response was: “She was seen with other men. Mr Leong knew about it and that’s the reason.” I had to ignore the information because the people who gave it never came forward. But there may have been some truth to what they said. While Liu was supposed to be having a steady relationship with Leong, she was also registered with a dating agency, apparently to be introduced to other men in the hope of marriage. Was she thinking of leaving Leong because she realised that there was no future with him? We do not know.
Was there any other reason why Leong killed her? Was it because he was afraid that she would find out that he was a thief and report him to the police? If they were intimate, he could have easily confessed to her and asked for her forgiveness. Did he need to kill her because of that? I don’t think so. Was there a need for a suicide pact? Would the suicide pact solve anything? What was he going to do? She was having a good job and he ostensibly had a stable f
amily life. Why the sudden need for a suicide pact? Or was there any other reason that prompted him to kill her? There were so many questions that could not be answered in the course of the trial because Leong stuck to his suicide pact story. We just have to wonder about what really happened.
I can say though that Leong’s family suffered a lot. Their flat was ransacked. Some people burnt joss sticks outside it while others threw things into the flat. They were eventually forced to move out to get some peace. I felt really sorry for his wife and the three children. They were very good children too. No one wanted to buy the flat and they had to sell it back to the Housing & Development Board at a loss. We had to prepare a Power of Attorney for Leong to sign for the flat to be sold back to the HDB. No one wanted to buy it because, generally, Asians believe that it is bad luck to live in a flat where a murder had been committed.
I visited Leong before he was executed. He had put on a lot of weight in prison. He was very calm and relaxed, nothing like the mad man when he was first charged in court. He told Sunil and I that he was very grateful for all that we had done for him and that he had no complaints. He knew that we had done our best for him and we had fought hard to save his life. But he said it was fated that he must hang and there was nothing we could do about it. He said that certain things cannot be prevented and this was just one of those things. He was quite philosophical. On the day I met him, he also told me that he had just shared his lunch with Tan Chor Jin, the One-eyed Dragon. They had become friends and talked to each other quite often. He was ready to go and was not afraid.
The Best I Could Page 16