Cold Blooded Murders (13 page)

Mr Francis Seow: The girl you were
going to marry was obviously in difficulty, if not actually dead already. Why
didn’t you use your skin-diving equipment to go down?

Sunny Ang paused for several long
minutes. The courtroom was hushed when he replied, “I was not quite sure what
sort of difficulties she was in. It occurred to me—it was a vague thought—that
she might have been attacked by sharks. In fact, I remarked upon that to Yusuf.
Not then, but long after the incident.”

His Lordship: You could have gone down
to find out?

Sunny Ang: She might have been attacked
by sharks.

Mr Francis Seow: Was one of the main
reasons that sharks may be lurking where your boat was?

Sunny Ang: Yes.

Mr Francis Seow: Why did you bring her
there in the first place, if sharks were lurking there?

Sunny Ang: The idea of sharks being
there never occurred to me. In fact, it was Yusuf who recommended the spot to
me—I mean the Sister Islands.

Mr Francis Seow: When did you change
back into your street clothes?

Sunny Ang: I think I remember I put
them on, on my way to St John’s Island.

Mr Francis Seow: So that when the Malay
divers were going in you were then in your street clothes, and you saw no point
in joining them?

Sunny Ang: I do not say I saw no point.
I was in my street clothes and there were more experienced skin-divers, and
there were five of them. Besides I knew the chances of finding her were very
slim.

His Lordship: You never got into the
water at all that day? You never got your feet wet?

Sunny Ang: That is so.

Sunny Ang admitted to crown counsel
that on 28 August 1963 (the day after Jenny’s disappearance), Robert Cheok,
brother of Jenny, came to his house and insinuated that Ang had murdered her.

Mr Francis Seow: And didn’t you tell
him that if you had gone down together with Jenny, and if you had surfaced
without her, then he could suspect you, and not otherwise?

Sunny Ang: Yes.

Mr Francis Seow: I put it to you that,
after you insured Jenny heavily, you deliberately took her out to Pulau Dua
where you tampered with her scuba equipment so that she would drown underneath
the sea?

Sunny Ang: I did not.

Mr Francis Seow: So that you could
collect the money?

Sunny Ang: No.

Ang was in the witness-box for eight hours
over three days. His counsel did not re-examine, and, when Ang returned to the
dock, called Yeo Tong Hock of Penang. Yeo gave his evidence in Hokkien. He said
he was a food hawker, but in 1963 a brothel-keeper, and a pimp. At first he
claimed that he had seen a woman similar to Jenny alive in Penang, and later in
Kedah, after her reported disappearance. Later, shown a picture of Jenny, he
agreed it was not the same girl.

He agreed with defence counsel that a
photograph was first shown to him by an insurance investigator. He went to the
High Court in Kuala Lumpur to make an affidavit.

Cross-examined by crown counsel, Yeo
admitted he had bad eyesight. In September 1964, he met Stephen Lim, an
investigator from Malayan Adjustment. He was shown a photograph. The
investigator suggested it might be Jenny Cheok. He said he was prepared to make
a statement but not swear an affidavit.

Crown Counsel: And Lim told you that if
you did not swear an affidavit, and if the girl was subsequently found, you
would not be entitled to any award?

Yeo: Yes.

Crown Counsel: And he told you that
$25,000 would be for you if you swear out this affidavit?

Yeo: No. He said if this person were to
be found then there would be a reward for me.

Crown Counsel: The insurance company
would pay you $25,000?

Yeo: Yes.

His Lordship: Can you say, looking at
this photograph now, in this court, at this moment, that it is the same girl
you saw in Penang?

Defence Counsel: Could he look at both
the photographs?

His Lordship: Certainly. (Photographs
shown to witness.) Tell me. on sober reflection, now, with the greatest care
with your answer—can you say absolutely whether or not that is the girl?

Yeo: Not the same.

As Mr Coomaraswamy rose to re-examine the
witness. the judge told Yeo that he need fear no consequences of any answer he
may give to any question he may be asked.

Mr Coomaraswamy: Now, where have you
been living for the past 10 days?

Mr Francis Seow: I object to that—

His Lordship: How does this come up in
cross-examination?

Mr Coomaraswamy: My instructions are
that he was held incommunicado by the Penang police and threatened that he
would be in trouble if he gave evidence in support of what he said in the
affidavit.

His Lordship: Where have you been for
the past 10 days?

Yeo: I left Penang on 2 May for
Taiping. From Taiping I went to Kuala Lumpur. Last night I received a phone
call saying I was wanted in Singapore.

His Lordship: I am bound to say,
exercising all the restraint I can, that I think it was, Mr Coomaraswamy, a
most unhappy remark for you to say that this witness had been kept
incommunicado by the Penang police for 10 days. There is not the slightest evidence
to support it. I shall have a lot to say about this to the jury when I come to
sum up.

Mr Coomaraswamy: I was doing it on
instruction, my Lord, and the instructions were given to me by a responsible
person.

On the 11
^th
day of the trial (the
fourth day of the defence), Mr Coomaraswamy drew the court’s attention to a
report in
The Straits Times
that Richard Ang was facing charges in
connection with a witness in the case. The judge called for a copy of the paper
and ordered the jury not to read the report.

Defence counsel said that Richard Ang had
been arrested on 22 April and produced in court on 23 April. The case was
mentioned on 30 April and hearing fixed for August. (Subsequently the case
against Richard Ang was dropped). Mr Coomaraswamy complained that it was
significant that the report should have appeared when his intention of calling
him as a witness had already been known. Mr Seow assured the judge that the
prosecution had nothing to do with the report. “I should be horrified if you
had,” said the judge.

Mr Coomaraswamy closed his case after
calling three more witnesses: two police officers who gave evidence about the
car accident, and 16-year-old William Ang. One policeman said he had never in
two and a half years in the area even seen dogs in the vicinity of the accident
and William Ang said that Jenny had learned to swim ‘quite fast’. He said he
had seen Jenny scuba-diving twice off Changi Beach.

Both Mr Coomaraswamy, for Ang, and Mr
Francis Seow addressed the court on the 12
^th
day of the trial. Defence
counsel spoke for two hours. Crown counsel spoke altogether for an hour and a
quarter. Then the judge began his summing up. He addressed the jury for
three-quarters of an hour on Monday, 17 May 1965, and for another hour and
three-quarters on Tuesday morning.

In his two-hour speech for the
defence, Mr Coomaraswamy spoke from rough notes. He submitted there were
numerous ways in which Jenny could have met her death—if, in fact, she was
dead. She could have been swept away, or struck her head against some coral and
become unconscious and subsequently lost her flipper. She might have been
attacked by a shark. She might have been suffering from nitrogen narcissus (a
form of numbness). “In a case like this, you cannot act on evidence that maybe
she is dead. You cannot even act on evidence that allows you to say, ‘You may
be pretty sure she is dead.’ You have to go beyond that and act only if you can
be morally certain beyond reasonable doubt that she is dead.”

He submitted that on the evidence, the jury
could not say beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused did kill Jenny in the
manner alleged by the prosecution.

Quoting extensively from a law book on the
assessment of circumstantial evidence, Mr Coomaraswamy said that the prosecution
evidence, put simply and stripped of all the trimmings, was that the accused
stood to gain by the death of Jenny, that he was with her when she disappeared,
that after her disappearance he made representations that he presumed her to be
dead, and that he had told untruths in the witness-box. “On this basis the
prosecution is going to ask you to return a verdict that he is guilty of
murder.”

Dealing with the allegation that Ang told
untruths in the witness-box, Mr Coomaraswamy read extracts from accused’s diary
and submitted that if the diary was a ‘diary of truth’, as the prosecution
contended, it was strange that it contained no entry on 8 June of a telephone
call to McDougall (a director of Edward Lumley Limited, the insurance company).

Ang had also been cross-examined on certain
representations he had made to institutions of higher learning as to his
qualifications and his name. “What has this to do with the case?” asked
counsel. “For this, are we going to convict him of murder?”

He asked the jury to consider the accused’s
evidence as a whole and his evidence in relation to the statement he made to
the police soon after the incident, when there was no time for fabrication.
They could then ask, was he telling the truth or not?

Mr Coomaraswamy also invited the jury to
look at those parts of the accused’s evidence, where he could easily have lied,
but where obviously he had given truthful answers. For instance, there was an
important matter on which he could have lied: that he and not his mother was
the real beneficiary by Jenny’s death.

Mr Coomaraswamy reminded the jury that, as
the prosecution had freely acknowledged, the evidence against the accused was
purely circumstantial and, correspondingly, the prosecution’s task and burden
was greater. In other words, the prosecution must produce in seven ‘independent
minds’ a degree of persuasion very much greater than it would have had to
achieve had there been direct evidence of death and the mode by which death was
achieved.

Counsel then cited a long passage from an
authority on the assessment of circumstantial evidence, with the tendency of
police officers to form a conclusion, and then seek out evidence to support
that conclusion.

Counsel said that within two to three weeks
of the alleged offence, accused was subjected to a long interrogation and he
made a ‘full and frank statement’. Counsel submitted that the prosecution had
all the evidence it wanted by October 1963, but it was not until 16 months
later that the accused was arrested.

Mr Coomaraswamy said that it was always
possible to place a suspicious interpretation, if one so wished, on any piece
of evidence. For instance, the prosecution had asked the accused if he knew
that Jenny treasured a ring, which was handed over to the Marine Police.
Accused had admitted that he did. The interpretation sought to be placed on
this admission was that this man, who had so professed his love for the girl,
would have wanted to retain the ring as a memento. But if the accused had, in
fact, retained the ring, he would have been described as an evil man who, not
satisfied with the money he stood to collect from her death, also took the ring
that belonged to the girl. “What the prosecution is going to ask you to do is
to act on suspicion and speculation.”

Nevertheless, the prosecution had not yet
tried to crystallize the speculation and theories so that the defence could
meet them. One clue to the prosecution’s speculation was in crown counsel’s
question to the accused, suggesting that after he had insured her heavily he
took her out to Pulau Dua so that she could drown at sea, and so that he could
collect the money.

Counsel said that the evidence should be
examined to see how it fitted this theory. Jenny was a bar girl, who
encountered a large number of men, each adopting different methods to win her
favours. “To put it shortly, you must accept it that she was a worldly-wise
girl,” said Mr Coomaraswamy. He submitted that Jenny wanted insurance for her
own reasons. The jury must believe that there were limits to gullibility even
for a bar girl.

Dealing with the question of the beneficiary
under the insurance policy, defence counsel said that accused had said in his
police statement that his mother, Madam Yeo Bee Neo, had been named beneficiary
because he himself was a bankrupt.

With regard to the will, counsel said that
it was difficult to conceive the circumstances in which an unwilling or
uncooperative person would make one. He submitted that in this particular
instance there was very good reason for a girl like Jenny to make a will. She
was married and estranged from her husband, and in the event of her death the
only person who could enforce any claims on what Jenny might have had would
have been the estranged husband. “It is in my submission quite clear that Jenny
knew exactly what the will was, knew the consequence of making it and knew its
effect,” said Mr Coomaraswamy. The evidence was clear that she was a full and
willing party to the making of this will.