The Best I Could (22 page)

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.

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 family. 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 Police later learnt that Leong had withdrawn a total of almost $2,000 from her account at different teller machines within cycling distance from his home.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 family 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.

Chocolate and milk—these were what Abdul Nasir bin Amer Hamsah loved most. Whatever spare cash he had, he would buy himself huge bars of chocolate and eat them in the morning, afternoon and night. He loved to drink milk too. This was reflected in his physique. He was a big man and looking at him you could see that he was strong. Abdul Nasir was also quite a good-looking person, and it ran in the family. His two sisters who came to court when I was defending him were really beautiful women. They had no make-up on, yet looked simply exquisite.

Abdul Nasir had gone for a job interview at the Oriental Hotel with his friend, Abdul Rahman bin Arshad. It was for a position as a bellboy. After the interview, the two friends decided to rob somebody as they were short of money. At about the same time, a busload of Japanese tourists arrived at the hotel. One of them was Isae Fujii, who was visiting Singapore for the first time. In fact, it was the first time she had ever left Japan. She took a lift with her roommate Miyoko Takishita to the ninth floor where they had been allocated a room. By chance, Abdul Nasir and Abdul Rahman had, minutes before, taken a lift to the same floor and were hiding at the end of the corridor. When the women entered the room, Abdul Nasir and Abdul Rahman rushed in after them and each attacked one woman. The petite Japanese women, who were in Singapore on a company-sponsored holiday, were both overpowered and knocked down to the floor. The men took their valuables and fled the scene. Takishita survived the robbery but Fujii didn’t. Abdul Nasir had stamped on her face and hit her so badly that her nose broke and her jaw bone cracked.