Cold Blooded Murders Read Free Page A

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