Authors: Alex Josey
Mr Ghows suggested that Stephen Lee’s
allegations about assaults, threats and inducements were ‘a complete
fabrication’.
The High Court decided to admit all the
confessions as evidence. The Judges said they were satisfied that they were
given voluntarily without any promise, threat or inducement.
Goh, Ngo’s widow, told the Court that her
husband, on the day of his murder, returned home from work at about 5:00
pm
. After taking his dinner and playing
with their 15-month-old daughter, he went upstairs to wrap the 120 gold bars.
She helped him. The gold was wrapped in 24 packets of five bars each. Leong and
Ang arrived at about 9:00
pm
. The
telephone upstairs rang at 11:25
pm
and she picked it up. She recognised the caller as Andrew Chou who asked for
her husband. She handed the telephone over to her husband. After a two-minute
conversation, he went downstairs to change. Later, after the gold bars were
placed in the Mercedes Benz, Ngo, Leong and Ang drove off. She locked up and
sat on the sofa waiting for her husband to return.
Mr Wong, Andrew’s counsel, suggested that
she had fabricated her evidence so as to get Andrew convicted of murdering her
husband. Ngo’s widow said she bore no malice against Andrew. “I have no feeling
against him. The matter is for the law to decide.”
Augustine Ang went into the witness box on
31 October. He ended his testimony 10 days later. During most of this time, he
was cross-examined by six defence counsel representing the nine accused. He
said that the Chou brothers attacked the three victims and that he helped them.
He told Mr Wong that he became a prosecution witness to save his own neck, but
he denied he had been granted a pardon. He was a Criminal Law detainee.
Augustine said he had been made a prosecution witness because he ‘cooperated
with the police and told them the whole truth’. He denied Mr Wong’s suggestion
that he was the one who first suggested a plan to rob the victims of their
gold. He said it was Andrew’s idea to kill and then rob. Ang said the victims
had to be killed ‘otherwise they would take their revenge’.
Asked how he felt on the evening Andrew told
him to get the boys ready as somebody would be delivering gold that night,
Augustine said he felt as usual. He did not feel excited or anxious. He said he
took his girlfriend out to dinner and took her home before contacting the boys.
Augustine admitted to Mr Goho that he had
made some mistakes in his evidence in the preliminary inquiry because he was ‘a
bit scared’. Ang agreed with counsel that the boys had never been told that the
victims were to be robbed of gold. He also agreed that the main reason for
telling the boys to stay in the kitchen that night was to prevent them from
seeing the gold.
Counsel: Why did you want the boys not
to see the gold?
Augustine: If they were to see the gold
they might demand more money.
Augustine denied counsel’s suggestion that
it was Ang’s intention to use the boys as stooges to take the blame and put the
police off the track of the real culprits.
Fernando Lee gave evidence that he backed
out of the plot to kill Ngo and the others after he received $650 as part
payment for the job. He told the High Court he never intended to do the job and
that, as an excuse for backing out, he made up the story that one of the boys
originally recruited had been detained by the police. Fernando said: “I
understood Augustine to mean that he wanted us to beat the men to death. The
job was to be done clean and quiet. There was to be no bloodshed. No weapon to
be used except wood and rope.”
***
The Solicitor-General closed his case on the
30th day of the trial after calling 47 witnesses. He offered 12 other witnesses
to the defence. The last witness for the prosecution was Detective Inspector Oh
Chye Bee, the Investigation Officer in the case. He told the High Court how he
found the bodies of the three victims in Bedok on 30 December 1971. He said he
saw green nylon ropes around the necks of Ngo and Leong. Ang’s body was lying
in a pond and there was a piece of rope lying on top of his body.
Inspector Oh said Andrew and David Chou were
arrested on suspicion of murder on 31 December. He said Fernando Lee was never
placed under arrest, but was taken to the CID on 4 January 1972 to make a
statement. He agreed that Fernando and Ringo Lee were brothers.
Cross-examined by Mr Leo Fernando for Alex
Yau, Inspector Oh agreed that Alex was one of the persons he had in mind as ‘a
candidate for the coveted position of being a prosecution witness’.
Mr Fernando: Augustine Ang was
eventually chosen because he was the best speaker?
Inspector Oh: Yes. In my opinion he
was.
The inspector said that the choice was made
by Mr K.S. Rajah, who was then Senior Deputy Public Prosecutor. Inspector Oh
also agreed with Mr John Tan Chor Yong (for Ringo Lee and Stephen Lee) that
Stephen Lee had also been taken to see Mr Rajah for the purpose of selecting a
prosecution witness.
Mr Tan: Is it not correct that you
thought Stephen Lee, being young, might not be able to withstand the
cross-examination of all the defence counsel?
Inspector Oh: That was one of the
grounds.
Mr Tan: In respect of Alex, is it not
correct that he was not chosen because he did not know as much as Augustine in
the matter?
Inspector Oh: Yes.
In his defence Andrew Chou said that
Augustine Ang persuaded him to agree to the plot to rob the victims of their
gold. He at first refused but finally agreed after Ang pestered him. Andrew
said they were close and intimate friends. It was to be a robbery, nothing
more. Ngo was to be detained until the gold was sold. Then he was to be offered
part of the proceeds. There was to be no violence. He told the
Solicitor-General under cross-examination that he allowed Augustine Ang to
mastermind the robbery because he trusted him. Andrew said another reason was
that he himself had never before taken part in a robbery, and he did not know
‘how gangsters or robbers would carry out a robbery’.
Mr Ghows: You did not make any arrangements
to hide the victims, or to provide food for them, because they were to be
killed?
Andrew Chou: That is not true.
Augustine said all would be arranged. I trusted him.
Called as a witness for the defence, Jessie
Chou (27 years old), sister of the two brothers, said she did not notice
anything amiss when she returned from church on the night her brothers and
others attacked three persons in the compound. Miss Chou said she was a
confidential secretary. She said she came home by 10:30
pm
. Their mother was sleeping. She went to bed 15 minutes
later.
“I did not notice anything out of the way
that evening or that night. The next morning I got up at 6:15
am
as usual. Andrew had already left
for work in my car.”
Andrew spent four days in the witness box.
When he stepped out, his brother, David stepped in. David said he became an
unwilling accomplice in a robbery plot after he had failed to persuade his
brother from going through with it. “I had no choice at that time. I agreed to
catch only one man.”
Mr Ghows: Wouldn’t the simplest thing
for you to do, to stop the robbery, be to call your mother to come and sit in
the living room without having to tell her anything at all?
David Chou: It would be a risk because
I did not know when the robbery would take place.
Justice Chua: Here you are, afraid to
wake up your mother but not afraid to join in the robbery!
Seven of the nine accused made their defence
from the dock. They were Peter Lim, Alex Yau, Ringo Lee, Richard James, Stephen
Lee, Stephen Francis and Konesekaram. Stephen Lee said that Augustine Ang gave
him money for himself and five others after the killings and told him to keep
his mouth shut. They all denied taking part in the murders. Stephen Lee said
the affair was a nightmare to him and he was very frightened. He did not sleep
that night.
Mr Wong addressed the Court to plead for
Andrew Chou. He said the three men might well be alive but for Augustine Ang,
the mastermind behind the plot to rob them. He urged the Court to remember that
Augustine was an accomplice and that his evidence should be treated with great
caution. He submitted that Ang’s evidence was a complete fabrication tailored
with the devilish intention to implicate all the other accused and to show
Andrew as the mastermind of a plan to kill and rob the victims of their gold.
“It is clear that Augustine was the central figure in the tragedy and if not
for him the victims may be alive today. Augustine has told so many lies that
the Court should treat his testimony as unworthy of credit.”
Mr Wong argued that Ang had kept and sold
the gold with all the confidence of ownership. “Augustine accepted the price
and manner of payment without consulting Andrew who appeared to have no say in
the sale of the gold. If Andrew was the mastermind he would have displayed a
greater interest in getting the proper persons for the job. He did not even
know Ringo Lee, James, Francis and Konesekaram until the night of 29 December.
It was Augustine who talked to all of them and Andrew had no knowledge of what
he might have told them. These boys were never engaged by or instructed by
Andrew. They were engaged by Augustine and were acting strictly on his orders.
Andrew never instructed anyone that the men were to be killed and if Augustine
had instructed the boys to do this Andrew would have had no knowledge of this.”
Counsel submitted that it was incumbent on
the prosecution to prove that Andrew had the actual intention to cause death
and not merely show that death had been caused. The prosecution must also prove
that Andrew was, at the time when death was caused, a member of the unlawful
assembly whose common object was to cause the deaths of the three persons. Mr
Wong said nobody was in a position to say if the three were in fact dead when
they were taken away from the house. “There is doubt on this,” Counsel said the
evidence that they were tied and gagged was a clear indication that the victims
were alive. “It is possible that death might have been caused accidentally
while they were being moved to the place of disposal.” The ropes with which
they were tied might have constricted their necks in the process of movement.
Andrew said that the robbery was not to involve violence but the fact was that
there was some violence and it was beyond him to stop it. Andrew made a clean
breast about his part in the robbery. But this was a far cry from murder. He
had exclaimed in surprise when told by the police that Ngo and his colleagues
had been killed. There was no evidence that Andrew had faked surprise.
Mr Giam argued that it was clear that
Augustine was the mastermind and that he arranged the whole episode. Mr Gopalan
followed the same line of reasoning. Mr Fernando said that the prosecution’s
‘star witness’, Augustine Ang, ‘is clearly an accomplice of the worst type’.
Apart from being an accomplice ‘in the most despicable manner’, Ang was also a
witness who had the Sword of Damocles hanging over his head. His evidence
should thus be regarded as tainted and approached with suspicion and extreme
caution. Mr Tan contended that on the evidence, Ringo Lee and Stephen Lee were
never part of the unlawful assembly. They played the part of the undertakers.
“Even if they knew that their job was to take away dead bodies that did not
mean they shared the common object to kill someone.” Counsel also submitted
that even if it were true that Ringo Lee and Stephen Lee had pulled a rope
around the neck of a motionless victim, it could not be deemed murder if their
victim was already dead. Mr Goho argued: “If you are going to have people
killed in your backyard for some animosity or vengeance, you must give
directions to those doing the job as to how it should be done. The fact that my
clients were not told about any such plan only indicates that they were never
told to kill at all.”
The Solicitor-General had the final word at
the trial. He named Andrew Chou as the ‘prime mover’ of the conspiracy to rob
and kill the three men. David Chou was in charge of operations and Augustine
Ang was Andrew’s errand boy. “David said that his greatest fear was that his
mother might wake up and see what was happening at their house that night so he
had no choice but to join in the attack to expedite removal of the victims from
the house. That is the lamest of excuses I have heard in my 20 years’
experience in Court. All he needed was to wake up his mother and ask her to sit
out with them and Andrew would never have dared to commit the robbery. Andrew’s
and David’s story about a plot to rob the victims and confine them for a while
and later release them after giving Ngo back some of his own gold is so stupid
that I don’t know why they even bothered to tell us.”
Mr Ghows said that unfortunately for the
conspirators the five recruits they got were of the ‘irresponsible type and
they threw the bodies in a bush, not into a well as they were supposed to. If
they had been more responsible people even now the police would still be
looking for Ngo and his friends.’ All the accused, he contended, knew of the
conspiracy to kill. “When all these boys rushed out of the kitchen that night
the bodies were still alive and so they joined in the killing so that they
would have some bodies to bury for $8,000.”