On 13 March 1997, at one of the HDB flats in King George's Avenue, Kallang, 53-year-old Sivapackiam Veerappan Rengasamy was discovered dead in her bedroom by her son. Sivapackiam was found to have been stabbed three times in the neck and she died from the wounds. During police investigations, Sivapackiam's tenant Gerardine Andrew, a 36-year-old prostitute, told police that on the day of the murder, she returned to the flat and saw three people attacking her landlady and robbing her, and they threatened her to leave after briefly holding her hostage.
On 2 November 1984, 19-year-old interior designer Lim Hwee Huang was thrown off a tenth storey HDB flat at Kallang Bahru, after she was raped by 27-year-old Eurasian Singaporean Hensley Anthony Neville, who fled to the neighbouring country Malaysia. He was on the run for more than two years before he was finally arrested by Malaysian police, who sent him back to Singapore in March 1987 for the charge of murdering Lim. Neville, who was caught in the Malaysian state of Selangor, was also a suspect behind two unsolved killings in Malaysia.
On 28 March 1983, 28-year-old housewife Soh Lee Lee and her two young children, three-year-old Jeremy Yeong Yin Kit and two-year-old Joyce Yeong Pei Ling were brutally murdered inside their flat at Ang Mo Kio, and some of their possessions were also stolen from the flat. The police investigated the case and within a month, they managed to arrest two suspects, Lim Beng Hai and Michael Tan Teow, for the killings. One of them, Tan, was Soh's tenant.
On 25 July 1980, 16-year-old student Ong Ai Siok, birth name Goh Luan Kheng, who stayed at home to study overnight while her adoptive parents went out for supper, was murdered by her unemployed relative Lau Ah Kiang, who entered her home to commit robbery as a result of his desperation to discharge his debts and settle his unpaid living expenses. Six years after his arrest, Lau, who denied committing the murder despite his confession, was sentenced to death in February 1986 after the trial court found him guilty of murder.
On 22 November 1990, 20-year-old National Serviceman Lee Teck Sang, who deserted from his army and hid himself at the campus of Singapore Polytechnic for 17 days, used a knife to murder a 45-year-old lecturer during a robbery. The victim, Tan Chin Liong, died as a result of being stabbed thrice. Although Lee claimed that he only meant to rob and the stabbing was meant to incapacitate Tan, the High Court rejected Lee's defence and found Lee guilty of murdering Tan, and sentenced him to death. Lee's appeal was dismissed and he was hanged on 29 July 1994.
On 22 January 1995, 47-year-old Lee Kok Yin, a taxi driver, was murdered by four Thai workers during an attempted robbery at Woodlands. After four months of investigation, two of the four suspects were arrested while the remaining two attackers remained at large.
On 23 May 1996, a 38-year-old Indonesian businessman named Benny Probocemdana Oen was mortally wounded by an assailant during a stabbing incident at Pacific Plaza before he died in hospital. The suspect, identified as 19-year-old Sim Eng Teck, was arrested more than a year later and charged with murder. Sim, who put up a defence of alcohol intoxication and also put forward claims that he only intend to stab the victim's arm during the knife attack, but Judicial Commissioner Amerjeet Singh found that Sim had intentionally inflicted the fatal injuries on Oen and described the killing as a "daringly cold-blooded" murder, and sentenced Sim to death in May 1998. Sim lost his appeal on 1 August 1998, and he had since been hanged.
On 28 June 2003, 68-year-old Chi Tue Tiong, a caretaker of one of the rental apartments in Geylang, was murdered by a couple who rented one of the rooms of the apartment. Chi, who had been bludgeoned on the head at least nine times, died as a result of brain injuries and extensive skull fractures. The police managed to trace the two suspects, but only the male assailant, 35-year-old Zailani bin Ahmad, was arrested and charged with murder, because the second suspect, who was Zailani's Indonesian girlfriend, had fled from Singapore to Batam and was not extradited to stand trial. Zailani, who argued that he suffered diminished responsibility and had killed Chi under the influence of sleeping pills, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death in March 2004.
On 9 January 2003, at a flat in Chai Chee, Singapore, 26-year-old Thabun Pranee, a Thai citizen, was raped and murdered by an acquaintance of her Singaporean husband. Thabun's killer, 29-year-old Tan Chee Wee, who was a Malaysian and an assistant store supervisor, was arrested the next day after he committed the brutal crime. Nine months after his arrest, Tan was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death on 29 September 2003, after the trial court did not accept either the defence's theory of someone else being the killer or the claims that Tan killed Thabun in self-defence or during a fight. After losing his appeal against the death sentence, Tan was hanged on 11 June 2004.
Between 1996 and 2000, over a period of four years, a young girl was raped by her mother's boyfriend Peh Thian Hui, a married father of three. Peh had committed the sexual assaults for at least fifty times throughout the four-year period before he stopped in December 2000. The sexual offences were eventually reported to the police by the victim, who was 15 years old as of November 2001, leading to the arrest of Peh and her mother, the latter who had abetted Peh to rape her daughter.
On 2 March 2004, 47-year-old Esther Ang Imm Suan was murdered by her two Indonesian maids, Siti Aminah and Juminem, who also stole her jewellery and money from her house. It was alleged that Ang had been harsh in her scolding of the maids and expectations of her maids' performance and it caused them both to resort to violence and therefore committed the killing. Both Juminem and Siti were charged with murder, a crime which warrants the death penalty under Singaporean law.
On 25 March 1988, at Bukit Timah, 49-year-old lorry driver Yeu Lam Ching was robbed and murdered by two men. The two men, Abdul Aziz Abdul Rahman and Mazlan Maidun, were swiftly arrested and charged with murder. Mazlan, who directly stabbed the victim to death with a knife, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, while Abdul Aziz, who only robbed the victim and never took part in the stabbing, was found guilty of armed robbery and thus jailed for ten years and given 12 strokes of the cane. Mazlan was hanged on 21 January 1994 after losing his appeal.
On 28 June 2008, 25-year-old Wu Yun Yun, a Chinese national and wife of opposition politician Tan Lead Shake, used a fruit knife to stab both her brother-in-law and sister-in-law. The brother-in-law, who was Tan's 33-year-old brother Tan Lead Sane, died after he sustained several knife wounds on his chest and abdomen, while the sister-in-law Huang Mei Zhe, who was Tan Lead Sane's wife, survived the stabbing. Wu, who was said to have committed the stabbing due to mistreatment from her in-laws and jealousy towards the supposed better life of Tan and Huang, was charged with murder and attempted murder. Eventually, in November 2008, the charges were reduced to manslaughter and attempted manslaughter due to Wu suffering from depression at the time of the murder. Six months after she pleaded guilty, Wu was sentenced to 16 years in prison on 17 November 2009.
On 2 June 2001, at a vacant area in Kian Teck Road in Singapore, 23-year-old Thai national Saenphan Thawan was attacked by a gang of six Thai workers, after he had allegedly offended one of the attackers' girlfriend, who told her boyfriend about the victim's actions. Saenphan, who was the head operator of a drug trafficking and prostitution ring at Kian Teck Road, died as a result of the brutal assault, and out of the six killers, four of them were arrested and charged with murder, while the remaining two assailants remains on the run as of today. Out of the four captured, three of them were sentenced to death for murder and a fourth was given a jail term of nine years with caning for manslaughter.
On 3 June 1999, seven-year-old Andy Ang Wei Jie collapsed in his home and died due to multiple injuries on his body. Four years later, Ang's mother and her boyfriend were both arrested for murdering him, and it was revealed that the boyfriend, Chong Keng Chye, had ruthlessly and relentlessly abused the boy from October 1998 until 3 June 1999, when the boy died.
On 16 October 2008, during a heated argument inside her car, 47-year-old Choo Xue Ying, alias Jennifer Choo, was assaulted to death by a business partner Rosli bin Yassin, and abandoned it at Bukit Batok Nature Park, where Choo's skeletal remains were discovered four days after her death. Rosli, who was later found to have committed cheating following the murder itself, was arrested and charged with killing Choo, and his girlfriend was also charged with abetting him to commit cheating. Rosli's murder charge was subsequently reduced to manslaughter, and after pleading guilty to the reduced charge and several other unrelated charges for cheating, Rosli was sentenced to 12 years of preventive detention on account of his long criminal record, and subsequently, through the prosecution's appeal, Rosli's sentence of preventive detention was raised to the maximum of 20 years for the same reason, as well as due to his high risk of re-offending and his original sentence was manifestly inadequate.
On 22 September 2005, 37-year-old film-maker Ho Kien Leong, alias Jayson Ho, was found dead inside his flat at Indus Road, Bukit Merah, and he was certified to be stabbed to death around nine days before his highly decomposed corpse was found. Ho's killer, Lim Ah Liang, was arrested in Johor, Malaysia, where he was hiding after he killed Ho by stabbing him 13 times during an argument, and Lim was extradited back to Singapore to be investigated for killing Ho. Originally charged with murder, Lim, who suffered from depression at the time of the murder, was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to life imprisonment on 17 January 2007. Lim later lost his appeal for a lower jail term and is currently in prison serving his life sentence since 2005.
On the midnight of 4 February 2002, at their rented flat in Singapore’s Rangoon Road, 34-year-old Jin Yugang, a cleaner from China, had a drinking session with his 32-year-old roommate Wang Hong and other friends, but an argument broke out between the both of them, and it resulted in Jin using a knife to stab Wang multiple times, resulting in Wang's death.
On 12 March 1997, a loan shark named Tan Tiong Huat was shot to death at a carpark in Singapore's Beach Road. The suspected gunman fled Singapore for Thailand, where he was eventually caught and extradited back to Singapore for trial seven years later. The gunman, Lim Thian Lai, was charged with murdering Tan before he was put on trial for an amended charge of illegally discharging a firearm to cause death. Although Lim put up a defense that he was innocent and it was another person who killed Tan, the trial court found him guilty of shooting Tan to death under the Arms Offences Act and sentenced him to the mandatory death penalty for the crime.
On 2 May 1999, at a coffeeshop in Singapore's Geylang, 56-year-old rag-and-bone man S. Salim Ahmad was brutally battered to death by a man whose girlfriend was allegedly harassed by Salim. The murderer, identified as Seah Kok Meng, fled Singapore for Malaysia, where he remained in hiding for a year before his arrest in May 2000. Seah, who claimed that he was acting under sudden and grave provocation and had no intent to fatally assault Salim, was found guilty of murdering Salim and sentenced to death in November 2000. Seah's appeal was dismissed and he was hanged on 30 November 2001.
