by Alex Josey
The Inquiry
SIX DAYS LATER ANG AGAIN APPEARED in court and was given a discharge not amounting to an acquittal by the magistrate, Mr Sachi Saurajen. Ang’s counsel, Mr Punch Coomaraswamy, objected to Ang being kept in remand while the prosecution was unable to fix a date for the preliminary inquiry, and successfully applied for Ang’s discharge. Counsel said that the alleged offence was committed 16 months ago, and if the prosecution was still not ready with the case, Ang should be let free. Senior Inspector T. S. Zain told the Court he had received no instructions to fix a date for the preliminary inquiry.
About an hour later Ang was re-arrested, and, the following morning, charged again with the same offence before the same magistrate, Mr Sachi Saurajen. Mr Punch Coomaraswamy again raised objections to the prosecution’s application for a week’s adjournment. He asked the Court to fix a date for the preliminary inquiry. Otherwise his client, he argued, should be released on bail. Senior Inspector T. S. Zain regretted he had no instructions to fix a date for the inquiry, only to ask for a week’s adjournment.
‘In the interests of justice’, the magistrate adjourned the Court until after lunch in order that the Inspector could contact his superiors. When the Court resumed, the deputy public prosecutor, Mr K. S. Rajah, hastily summoned, explained that the prosecution asked for a week’s adjournment because of ‘certain circumstances’. He admitted it was true that the alleged offence had been committed 16 months ago, but Ang, he pointed out, had only been arrested on 21 December, the day before he appeared in Court. Mr Rajah added that the prosecution wanted to ‘tread warily’. The alleged offence he said was not a trivial one. Twenty-live witnesses would be called, and ‘further evidence might come to light’.
Mr Coomaraswamy replied that although Sunny Ang was arrested on 21 December, the police must have started their investigation long before then. The magistrate decided to grant the week’s adjournment, and Ang was remanded in Outram Prison. His request for bail was refused.
Fixed for 24 February 1965, the preliminary inquiry into ‘a tentative murder charge’ did not in fact start until the following day. This was because Mr Punch Coomaraswamy failed to turn up. He was engaged on another case in Kuala Lumpur. Mr Francis T. Seow, senior crown counsel, spent almost the entire day in Court, and protested that Mr Coomaraswamy should at least have had the courtesy to inform him he was on another case. Mr Coomaraswamy apologized when the inquiry began the next day.
The inquiry lasted seven days and Ang was committed for trial. Mr Seow started off by asking the Court to warn ‘in the strongest terms’ parties concerned against what he called any future suborning of prosecution witnesses. Mr Seow also asked the Court to exclude from the hearing Ang’s mother, Madam Yeo Bee Neo, whom, he said, stood to benefit by $400,000 from the death of the murdered girl. In addition he wanted the Court to exclude all members of the Ang family, as well as any other persons who might be called by the defence as witnesses.
Mr Seow alleged that attempts had been made to suborn his witness, Yusuf bin Ahmad, a boatman of Pulau Brani. Mr Seow protested that Yusuf, his main witness, had been approached on two separate occasions by Ang’s mother and his brother Richard after Ang’s arrest. “Money in fact had been given to this witness, and a gift in kind, before this witness was brought to counsel for the defence. Money had also in fact been given to Yusuf after he had seen counsel.” Mr Seow said the implications were very clear. “It is nothing but an attempt to suborn a witness for the prosecution.”
After an exchange between the two counsels, Mr Seow said, “Mr Coomaraswamy saw Yusuf in his chambers. He had no business whatsoever to interview or record a statement from this witness. What is the object of giving this witness money? Not only money, but also a gift in kind?”
Mr Coomaraswamy replied, “In view of Mr Seow’s categorical statement I am happy to say that I did see this witness. I did it knowing full well what I was doing, and after obtaining professional advice on the matter. I am conscious that an allegation of this nature would be made without any foundation. I have taken the fullest precautions and am prepared, if necessary and at the appropriate time when asked, to state that I have acted with the utmost propriety, both as an officer of this Court, and also as an honest man.”
Yusuf told the Court that after Ang’s arrest, Ang’s younger brother saw him at his house. The brother brought him a tin of powdered milk ‘for my family’. He accepted the tin, but ‘being afraid to consume it’, he later sold it for $4.50—less than market price. Yusuf added that Ang’s brother said he would take him to see a lawyer ‘to make a statement’. Later the brother called again and gave him $10. On another occasion, Ang’s mother took him to see Mr Coomaraswamy. After interviewing him, Mr Coomaraswamy gave him $30 to compensate for his loss of earning for the day, and his fare. Yusuf added that his minimum earnings were $3–4 a day. The highest he had ever earned was $20. He agreed that Mr Coomaraswamy told him not to receive any money from any other persons in connection with the case.
The magistrate issued a general warning that it was most serious for anyone to try to suborn any witness, but he did not address his remarks to anyone in particular. He thought that at this stage it would not be justifiable to exclude Ang’s relatives from the Court, or indeed anyone wishing to attend.
But he did, the following day, on the ground that if the case went up to the High Court Madam Yeo would almost certainly be a witness. Mr Coomaraswamy said he could not speak for Madam Yeo, as she was not his client, but he said the hearing must be open to all, and there should be no breach of that principle.
What The Straits Times called ‘another highlight’ of the day’s proceedings at the inquiry, was the sudden collapse in the witness-box of the crown’s principal witness, the boatman Yusuf. Yusuf fell to the floor with a thud as Mr Coomaraswamy began to cross-examine him. Yusuf was taken in an ambulance to the General Hospital, where he was X-rayed and later sent home by the police. He was not injured. Under cross-examination, Yusuf revealed that an insurance company had offered him $6,000 to tell the truth, the whole truth. He said he told the police about this.
Another prosecution witness, Captain Vernon Bailey, of the Singapore Marine Department, testified that the waters around the Sisters Islands were extremely hazardous. He produced an admiralty chart which showed that the straits had a minimum depth of 30–35 feet. He gave details of tidal streams and eddies.
Lee See Hong, managing partner of the Odeon Bar and Restaurant, said that Jenny worked only a couple of months in his bar. She left in mid-July 1963. Her salary was $90 a month. He estimated that her daily tips from customers came to about $10.
“This Court,” declared Mr Francis Seow, on the seventh and last day of the inquiry, “is not being asked to make any finding of facts. It is only a Court of Inquiry, and all that you need to do is to be satisfied that there are sufficient grounds to commit the accused for trial. We are only asking you whether the evidence so far is credible enough, and that is all.”
Mr Seow spoke of what he called the ‘overwhelming, the overpowering, motives’ in the case. He asked, “Why should an ex-waitress, with little or no money of her own, be insured to the tune of $400,000? Why should the accused pay the premiums? Why should all the lies have to be told to various insurance companies?”
Earlier, evidence had been given that Jenny left all her money to Ang’s mother, whom Jenny had never met. Evidence was also given that Madam Yeo, Ang’s mother, applied to the High Court on
4 November 1964, for a motion to have Jenny presumed dead. Jenny went skin-diving on 27 August 1963 and failed to surface. Eileen Toh, unemployed, told the Court that Jenny was her half-sister. They had grown up together. She said Jenny was married, and had a son and a daughter. Both children were with her husband from whom Jenny was separated. Jenny’s spoken English was not good because she had left the English school at Standard Three, “We were very close, and we previously lived together in Lim Liak Street, and later in Tanglin Halt.” Toh said that Jenny
met Ang for the first time in the Odeon Bar. “Ang then became Jenny’s boyfriend. She was very fond of him.” Ang visited Jenny three or four times a week.
Among the exhibits produced at the inquiry was a skin-diver’s flipper, with clean cuts on a strap. The prosecution claimed that this had been recovered, near where Jenny failed to surface, by David Henderson, formerly of the RAF Changi Sub-aqua Club. He was one of the divers who took part in attempts to find Jenny. Phang Sin Eng, a government chemist, told the Court that the flipper had two clean cuts on the top and the bottom of a strap, and a tear right across it. He said it was most unlikely from the positions of these cuts, and the tears that followed them, that the cuts could have been made by coral. But the cuts could have been made by any sharp instrument, like a pair of scissors, a knife, or a razor blade.
A schoolboy, David Benjamin Woodworth, identified the flipper. He was a classmate of Ang’s brother William, in Singapore, in 1963, and he also knew Sunny Ang. He said he lent two pairs of flippers to William: this was one of them.
Another important exhibit were the four books which Inspector Richard Lui of the Special Investigation Section of the Criminal Investigation Department seized at Ang’s home when he arrested him on 21 December 1964. The books were Atkinson’s Skin-Diving, Hampton’s The Master Diver and Underwater Sportsman, Ivanovic’s Modern Spear Fishing, and Du Ros’s Skin-Diving in Australia. These books, one in particular, were to play a vital role in the case against Sunny Ang at his trial.
Altogether, the prosecution called 39 witnesses at the inquiry. Several were from the insurance companies. An official from an insurance company produced a letter dated 28 August 1963, the day after Jenny disappeared. It was from Sunny Ang, writing from 57 Sennett Road, Singapore 16. The letter was read in Court. It said:
This is to inform you that Madam Cheok Cheng Kid, who is insured with your company bad met a tragic accident while scuba-diving in one of the islands off Singapore at 5:00 pm yesterday.
She is presumed to have been either drowned or attacked by sharks. Her body is yet to be found. Further information about the incident can be obtained from Inspector Aziz of the Marine Police.
Please acknowledge receipt of this letter. Thank you.
Another letter, from Ang, written the same day to a different insurance company referred to ‘a tragic accident at sea’.
Mr Coomaraswamy addressed the Court for an hour. He dealt exhaustively with the functions of a magistrate in an inquiry of this nature. He explained why he had cross-examined only some witnesses, and he finally submitted that the prosecution had not made out a case for committal. The evidence, he said, was not of a nature which would lead a Court to say that the only one and irresistible inference was that Jenny was dead. Even assuming she was dead, it had not been ascertained how she died. Even if there had been a death, there must be evidence that it resulted from a voluntary act on Ang’s part. Counsel argued there was no such evidence.
Mr Saurajen adjourned the Court for 20 minutes and then gave his verdict. He said, “Having heard the evidence in support of the prosecution case, I am of the opinion that on the evidence as it stands the accused should be committed for trial.”
Mr Coomaraswamy said that Sunny Ang reserved his defence.
What is Murder?
Singapore’s criminal law follows closely the pattern of British law upon which the Singapore legal system is structured. Over the 140-odd years of Singapore’s existence in a legalistic sense, first as a British trading post, then as a colony which rapidly developed after the Second World War into a protected self-governing state before becoming part of independent Malaysia (Singapore became an independent sovereign state in August 1965), there had been many murder trials. But there had always been a body. This was the first time a man stood in a Singapore Court charged with the murder of a person whose body could not be produced.
And no one saw the murder. No one saw the girl die.
At the time Jenny died, her body swept out to sea, her air tank probably exhausted and her flipper lost, Sunny Ang was talking to the boatman. The prosecution argued that Ang did not dive in at all that afternoon because he wanted to remain in sight of the boatman, his alibi. It could therefore never be said of him that he went under the water and killed Jenny. He was with the boatman all the time. By remaining in the sampan throughout the entire incident he could always say it was an accident with which he was in no way concerned.
Thus, not only did the prosecution have to satisfy the jury that Jenny Cheok was dead, a conclusion to be reached only through circumstantial evidence, for her body had disappeared, but the prosecution, by the same means, by circumstantial evidence, had also to prove that Sunny Ang was responsible for the accident which was intended to cause Jenny’s death.
“Murder,” Justice Buttrose told the jury, “is the unlawful killing or causing of death of one human being by another human being with the intention of doing so. An accidental killing or causing of death is not murder because, in such a case, the intention to cause death was absent. The intention to kill, therefore, is of the essence of the offence.”
On the question of intention, the judge said that “every person is presumed to intend the natural and probable consequences of his acts. In other words, that he intends to do what he in fact does.” He gave an example. “If two persons are walking together along a high cliff-top, with the sea and the rocks hundreds of feet below; and as they approach a certain point on the cliff which is known to one of them to overhang the rest of the cliff and to be in a dangerous condition; and he turns to the other—his intended victim, whom he intends to murder—and says, ‘You go along the edge and have a look over because the view is superb and you can see the breakers crashing on the rocks below’; and the unsuspecting victim goes on, while the other who has asked him to go on has conveniently discovered a pebble in his shoe, and he steps behind to take off his shoe and to get rid of this imaginary pebble; and his victim on reaching the cliff-edge, it caves in, and he is dashed to his death on the rocks below—now that, members of the jury, is murder, just as if the other had gone along and pushed his victim over the edge.”
“Similarly,” explained Justice Buttrose, “if you take a novice scuba-diver to waters which you knew to be inherently dangerous with the intention that this novice scuba-diver shall dive into those waters, and you intend that by so doing she will never come up again, that she will be killed—for whatever reason at all is quite immaterial—if that is your intention, that this novice diver should go down into those waters and you intend that she should be killed, then that is equally murder as if you had accompanied that novice diver down to the bottom of the sea-bed and strangled her with your own hands.”
Justice Buttrose said the prosecution had to prove three things. First, that the death of a human being had taken place. Second, that such death was caused by or in consequence of the act of the accused. Third, that such act was done with the intention of causing death.
On the first point, the judge went on, “If no death, then of course no murder. You will observe that I have deliberately and intentionally said, ‘If no death, then no murder’, not ‘If no dead body, then no murder’. The difference in phraseology is vital because the distinction is very real. It seems to have become a popular fallacy that there can be no conviction for murder unless the body of the victim is found and produced. Nothing could be more fallacious or more untrue. I direct you, as a matter of law, that a person may be convicted of murder without the body of the victim being found or produced.” Justice Buttrose said that what the prosecution must do was to prove the death of a human being, not to produce a dead body. The production of the dead body, of course, made the proof of death very easy. The absence of a dead body, of course, made the proof of death more difficult, and the onus on the prosecution of proving it, heavier. But that was all.
The judge warned the jury they must be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that Jenny was murdered by Ang, in that he caused her death with the intent
ion of causing her death. “There is no actual eye-witness as to how she died. There is no one who can tell us what happened, down on the sea bed some 30–40 feet below the surface, to this young girl of 22 years of age on this fateful afternoon, the 27 of August 1963. Only Jenny herself could have told us, but, according to the prosecution, her lips have been sealed forever.”
The prosecution case was that Jenny was dead, and that Ang deliberately and intentionally caused her death. They relied entirely on circumstantial evidence to prove it. “Now,” said the judge, “in case there should be any idea in your minds that circumstantial evidence is intrinsically or necessarily of any less value than the direct testimony of eye-witnesses, let me at once disabuse you on it.” Justice Buttrose said that the fact of death may be proved, and proved quite adequately, by circumstantial evidence, as may the fact that murder had been committed be proved, and proved quite adequately, by circumstantial evidence.
“But,” added the judge, “there are two things I must tell you about circumstantial evidence. The first is that it is the cumulative effect of all the evidence that is important, not one isolated link in the chain of circumstantial evidence. It would be quite wrong for you to consider the case link by link, and looking at one link in the chain, say to yourselves, ‘Well, that is certainly very suspicious, but not enough’, and discard it: and so on through each separate link doing the same thing until nothing is left. That would be an utterly erroneous approach to this question, and you must consider circumstantial evidence in its totality. The cumulative effect of every one of those links must be considered together, not individually. The second thing I must draw your attention to is that the question in this case, depending as it does on circumstantial evidence, is whether the cumulative of all the evidence leads to the irresistible conclusion that it was the accused who committed this crime. Or is there some reasonably possible explanation such as, for example: was it an accident?”