Cold Blooded Murders (21 page)

He was a skilful and fast driver, though
shortly after the 1961 Grand Prix, driving the same Sunbeam he had raced in
that event, he killed a pedestrian. He drove the car on to a road island. He
claimed he was avoiding the man who, he said, had suddenly stepped onto the
road. The coroner returned an open verdict. Ang was subsequently fined $30 for
negligence.

At home, Sunny was obedient and helpful to
his mother. He was the odd-job man in the house. He was kind to stray cats and
dogs. Even during his trial he was concerned for a sick dog on the farm, and
from the prison gave detailed instructions for its proper care.

There is ample evidence to show that Sunny
Ang’s lying and thieving began at about the age of 10. The thefts started in
his own home, then the homes of neighbours, and eventually in shops in the city
and society at large. He was in his teens when he bought a set of oxyacetylene
cutting instruments to better equip himself for future burglaries; but he sold
them before he could use them, to help a friend who had lost his bicycle.

He stepped up his burglary activities after
he was grounded from flying. He chose shops in the main shopping centres which
were empty at night; he abhorred physical violence. At 1:00
am
in the morning of 12 July 1962, he
was caught trying to burglarize a radio shop. David Marshall, Singapore’s
foremost criminal lawyer, defended him and successfully saved him from a prison
sentence, Ang being placed on probation. Staring at Mr Marshall coldly and with
disdain (when counsel had expected a smile and a sigh of relief), Ang walked
out of the dock without a word of thanks. He had apparently expected to be
acquitted. That night David Marshall said to his wife, “Today I got a man off,
and for the first time in 25 years’ practice at the Bar I will live to regret
it.”

On probation, Ang worked hard on his farm,
though he exasperated his probation officer. He also took stock of himself. He
had left school seven years and had achieved very little. He would like to
study law, and was confident that he could get a degree within 18 months if he
went to Britain for his studies: but he did not have a Higher School
Certificate. Nor the money to travel. He now felt that he would like to do well
in society. “If I cannot beat them,” he told the psychiatrist, and by ‘them’ he
meant the police, society, “then I will join them.” He probably remembered the
words of his father the very morning of the day he was arrested in the radio
shop. “Do not underestimate the ability and the power of the police,” his
father had warned him. Ang made inquiries at the University of Singapore, but
met with no encouragement. He read law books in his spare time. And then,
sometime in 1963, his father introduced him to a friend, an insurance agent.
Sunny began to sell insurance policies. It was about then that he conceived the
murderous idea of a quick way to raise money to finance his trip to England to
get his law degree.

Dr Wong came to the conclusion that in the
legal sense Ang was not of unsound mind. He had no psychotic illness or
insanity. There was no defect in his reasoning. In the context of the
M’Naughten’s
Rules for Criminal
Responsibility
he would be considered fully
responsible for his actions.

As Ang was a psychopath, Dr Wong felt that
the abnormality of his mind would be such as to have substantially impaired his
mental responsibility. On medico-legal grounds he recommended a reprieve, but
hastened to add that, with the facilities available in Singapore at that time,
he saw little hope for a cure for Ang. He felt that a sentence of life
imprisonment for Ang, ‘with his superior intelligence and his almost classical
degree of psychopathy’, should mean what it says. “He is a dangerous person, if
released prematurely. Ang has said simply but significantly, ‘I would do it
again.’”

When it was known that the Privy
Council had rejected Ang’s appeal, friends and relatives at once began to
organize a petition to President Yusof bin Ishak to spare his life. Late in
October 1966, this petition, and a plea from Ang for clemency, were submitted
to the President. The President must accept the advice of the Cabinet. On the
last day of January 1967, Ang was told that President Yusof bin Ishak had
rejected his appeal for clemency. He would be executed on Monday, 6 February.

Even then Ang did not abandon hope. He was
planning a dramatic escape. During exercise time a helicopter would fly over
the jail compound, with a rope dangling down, and Sunny would be whisked away
to freedom. The coded letters failed to get to his accomplice.

On Friday he was told there was no hope. He
accepted this unemotionally and requested the prison chaplain, the Rev. Khoo
Siaw Hua, to baptize him. Then he wrote the chaplain the following letter:

Dear Rev. Khoo,

There is so much that I want
to say to you but I am finding it very difficult to put my thoughts into words.
So forgive me for this, my farewell letter, being so brief, and, 1 fear,
incoherent.

Do you remember the day you
first saw me here, how I kept repeating to you ‘I’m an atheist!’, almost with
pride? But as I watched you come here so often, spending so much of your time
and giving so much of yourself to the Pulau Senang boys and the rest of us,
expecting and receiving nothing in turn, I asked myself, ‘What is it that
motivates this man to such altruistic acts? Is there really a God as he so
undoubtedly believes?’ This, plus my brother Victor’s example, led me to spend
hours on end pondering over the question of Life. Death, the Existence of God,
truth of the Bible and other related matters, my mind ranging far and wide into
hitherto unexplored realms. The conclusion I came to were foregone, but I still
refused to open my heart to God as I had some unfinished business to carry out,
viz. a vendetta.

Months passed without any
change: but one day, the 17th of December 1967—for no apparent reason I was
overwhelmed by a desire to kneel down in prayer and pour out my heart to God, surrendering
myself to Him and admitting to Him that revenge was in my heart He listened and
understood and as I got to know Him better through the succeeding days and
weeks, He told me that I should be above revenge and hate, that only love and
understanding should occupy my thoughts and guide my actions.

How I wish I could have met
you in less tragic circumstances and derived the benefit of your courses. But I
nevertheless thank you for everything you have done for me and will be doing
for me in the next few days. Through you I found Christ and through Him I shall
find the Kingdom of Heaven. We’ll meet again in happier circumstances.

Till then, fare thee well.

Yours in Christ

Sunny Ang

Sunny Ang spent the last few hours of his
life praying with the Rev. Khoo, and reading the Bible. The chaplain said, “We
talked only about religion and nothing else. He was all the time calm and
smiling.”

Ang was told that acccording to prison
regulations he could have a last meal to the value of $5. He said, “I just want
a nice cold glass of milk.” Milk is not a popular drink with Asians.

Shortly before dawn, Ang, apparently
unrepentant and unafraid, walked steadily the 100 paces from his cell to the
gallows. The noose was slipped around his neck, the trap-door opened, and at
5:55
am
, on the morning of
Monday, 6 February 1967, Sunny Ang paid the penalty for his crime.

The hangman grimly closed the final chapter
of a murder case that made legal history in Singapore. This had been the first
murder trial without the body of the victim: it was the first time a man
charged with murder had been found guilty entirely on circumstantial evidence.
The case was also unusual in that it was a crime of coldly calculated murder
for greed and gain, a crime in which the death of the victim, and not robbery,
was the primary consideration.

At 9:00
am,
Juliet Ang, then recently admitted to the Bar, arrived at the prison in a car
driven by a magistrate. She entered the prison and identified Ang’s body. Half
an hour later she emerged and the car that brought her drove away. About the
same time a van from the Singapore Casket Company arrived. Sunny Ang was buried
at Bidadari Cemetery that afternoon.

***

Sunny Ang was a Chinese. The judge was born
in Australia. The foreman of the jury (most of them Chinese) was a Dane. The
prosecuting counsel was a Chinese, his assistant a Malay. Ang’s defence was
conducted by two Indians. The witnesses were Chinese, Malays, Indians,
Eurasians and Europeans. Evidence was given in Chinese dialects. Malay and
English. Ang killed Jenny (a Chinese) when Singapore was a self-governing
British colony. His trial began when Singapore was part of Malaysia, He was
found guilty three months before Singapore was separated from Malaysia.
Singapore had become an independent republic by the time his appeals were
heard, and President Ishak rejected his plea for clemency. Justice Buttrose
retired from Singapore in 1968 and went to live in England. He was the last of
the British expatriate judges to serve in Singapore, where he had worked in the
legal profession for 23 years. He became a High Court judge in 1957. The Chief
Justice, Mr Wee Chong Jin, described Justice Buttrose’s retirement at the age
of 65 as a ‘great loss, especially in that he was a judge with immense
experience and knowledge, not only of the country’s laws, but also of the
people’.

Sunny
Ang thought he had planned
the perfect murder. He
considered his execution an injustice because he had been found guilty for the
wrong reasons. “I did not kill her that way. I killed her another way,” he told
a visitor just before the end. “But I suppose it’s poetic justice,” he added
with a grim smile, “that I should die.”

What he boasted he did was to give Jenny
instructions, which if carried out properly, would inevitably have resulted in
her death. He had told her, just before she descended, to take a deep breath,
to fill her lungs completely, as she was about to surface. She was to hold that
breath all the way up. The air in Jenny’s lungs would have distended with
increased pressure thereby forcing air bubbles directly into her blood stream
and eventually leading to obstructions in the blood vessels in her brain. Death
would have been instantaneous.

Ang was a great reader. He had a passion for
detective stories, a deep interest in psychology and law. He had a collection
of law books. He also had many books on flying, and several Teach Yourself
books, including books on chicken rearing, tomato planting and scuba-diving. In
one book on scuba-diving the corner of a page had been turned down. There was a
warning on this page against divers holding their breath when surfacing. The
author warned that death had occurred this way.

This manner of death was set out in detail
in
Harrison’s Principle of Internal Medicine,
1963, which Sunny Ang had
also read: This stated that,

If a diver breathing
compressed air holds his breath during ascent to the surface, the intrapulmonic
(inside the lung) pressure becomes relatively higher than the hydrostatic
(liquid or blood stream) pressure. A difference in pressure in excess of about
80 mm of mercury may overdistend the lungs so that gas is forced or aspirated
(sucked) into the blood stream (traumatic air embolism). Gas emboli (bubbles)
transported to the left ventricle (i.e. the heart) are disseminated to the
central nervous system (i.e. the brain) to produce the most serious injury in
diving. Fatal accidents have occurred during ascents from only 13 feet to the
surface.

Ang intended that Jenny’s body should be
recovered (so he said), for, he argued, a post-mortem could have shown only
accidental death. No one could ever have accused him of being in any way
responsible for this highly technical accident. He maintained that he had, in
fact, made an earlier attempt, two days before, in the same boat, hoping, with
many others around, to have the benefit of witnesses to testify to his
innocence. Unfortunately that attempt failed (probably Jenny did not obey his
instructions fully), though she complained of pains in her chest. On the
fateful Tuesday he tried again hoping that her damaged lung condition would
favour his plans. This time he succeeded. Jenny was never seen again.

Ang was completely callous. That Jenny had
to die was a misfortune on her part: her death was no more than a mere incident
in his own life. All that he regretted, he said shortly before he was hanged,
was that he did not give her a decent last meal. He also regretted that he had
failed to insure her for a higher figure. Curiously enough, he had decided
that, with part of the money he hoped to get from the insurance companies, he
would provide for Jenny’s two children during their childhood.

His callousness was evident immediately
after her death. When he informed the police and the insurance companies of the
tragedy, he did so calmly, and with such lack of compassion that suspicions
were aroused. Noted K. B. Ong, a police officer in his report, ‘The general
conduct of Sunny Ang after the disappearance, and during interrogation—he does
not appear in the least worried or depressed.’

Ang was confident he could never be
incriminated for Jenny’s death. Why should he worry? Life, until his arrest 16
months later, went on as usual—chicken farming and girl-chasing. He sat for the
Higher School Certificate in 1964. Throughout his trial his confidence actually
increased and he made little effort to conceal his disdain for, and contempt
of, the legal machinery. He insisted upon directing counsel for the defence,
supremely confident his guilt could never be proved. Against the advice of Mr Coomaraswamy
he insisted on entering the witness-box entirely for the immediate emotional
satisfaction of crossing swords, matching wits, with Mr Francis Seow, the state
prosecutor, whom he hated as the representative of society and law and order.