Kallang River body parts murder
The Kallang River body parts murder was a murder and dismemberment case that occurred in Singapore in June 2005. The case earned its name due to the body parts of the victim, 22-year-old Liu Hong Mei, being found disposed off in Kallang River. In this case, Liu's 50-year-old supervisor, Leong Siew Chor, used a towel to strangle her to death, and severed her body into seven pieces - mainly her head, upper torso, lower torso, legs and feet - before disposing them off in Kallang River and other locations in Singapore.
Leong, a married man with three adult children, was revealed to have engaged in an illicit sexual affair with Liu for a year before murdering her on 15 June 2005, as a result of wanting to cover up the affair and theft of Liu's credit cards and money from her bank account. He was arrested three days after the murder, and the police also managed to locate five of her body parts. Liu's severed feet were never found.
Leong was eventually found guilty of Liu's murder and sentenced to death by the High Court. After failing to receive an acquittal of the murder charge and clemency from the Court of Appeal and the President of Singapore respectively, Leong was executed in November 2007. This case became one of the most notorious murder cases to have occurred in Singapore, as well as earning its recognition as one of the famous cases taken by criminal lawyer Subhas Anandan, who represented Leong in his trial and recorded the case in his memoir.
Discovery of body parts at Kallang River
On the morning of 16 June 2005, 27-year-old cleaner Murugan Kaniapan chanced upon a waterlogged, brown cardboard box sealed with masking tape lying on the banks of the Kallang River. Murugan went to pick up the parcel to dispose of it but the water damage was too severe. The damage caused the box to fall apart in his hands, and a green plastic bag fell out of the parcel. He discovered the severed lower torso of a woman inside it. The naked body part had been cleanly severed at the pelvis and knee joints. Murugan described that the body part looked like fresh meat, and it was so fresh that it looked as though the woman did not die at all. He said there was no blood and no smell, and the exposed knee bone looked white.Murugan contacted the police, who were told of the discovery. The police combed the nearby areas of Kallang River on a two-kilometre radius for possible signs of other body parts. A short while later, at about 200m away from where they found the body part, a red-and-white printer box was discovered and inside it, it contained a woman's severed upper torso with arms and hands attached. The body part was wrapped up in plastic bags and some torn pages of old issues of a local Chinese newspaper Lianhe Wanbao. The two body parts were later matched and found to be coming from the same person.
The pathologist who conducted an autopsy on Liu, Dr Teo Eng Swee, was unable to determine the cause of death, as there were no defensive injuries found on the victim. The head, shins and feet were also missing from the body, which made it hard to pin down the cause of death. He also verified there was no sexual assault since there were no DNA found in the swabs made on her sexual organs.
Investigations and arrest of the suspect
The Singapore Police Force commenced their investigations as soon as the body parts were discovered. The forensic experts who received the body parts in the mortuary managed to extract fingerprints from the upper torso. After searching in their database, the police found a match to the fingerprints, and they belonged to a 22-year-old Chinese national named Liu Hong Mei. Liu, the third out of four children, was a native of Changchun, China, who first came to Singapore to work in 2003. Her sister was also in Singapore and was soon to be married to a Singaporean some months later. She was found to be employed at Agere Systems Singapore as a production operator. Her colleagues had earlier filed a missing persons report of Liu, who was absent from her night shift since the night before.The police then headed to Agere, where they interviewed Liu's colleagues. Liu was said to be well-liked and was a cheerful colleague who got along well with others. However, as the police enquired further, they found that Liu was promoted twice soon after her employment. The short period of time she spent between her first employment and promotion earned some dissatisfaction from the people in her workplace, and it was aggravated by many instances where Liu was physically intimate with her supervisor Leong Siew Chor, a 50-year-old married man and father of three. These intimate behaviours include kissing and hugging. They had been reprimanded after a colleague complained to the management about their inappropriate behaviour.
The police decided to interview Liu's supervisor Leong Siew Chor. At that point, the investigators did not tell him that Liu's body was found. However, Inspector Roy Lim noticed that Leong was acting suspiciously. He acted defensively, denying any relationship with Liu, and his hands were trembling. Inspector Lim even noticed a few small cuts on Leong's fingers. It was then the police took him back to the police station for further questioning. Ten hours after being detained, Leong confessed to the police that he killed Liu, but he stated it was done so out of consent from Liu, who made a lovers' suicide pact with him, and he also confessed to having an affair with Liu since a year ago. On 18 June 2005, merely three days after the discovery of Liu's body parts, 50-year-old Leong Siew Chor was charged with murder. If found guilty, Leong would be sentenced to death.
Upon receiving news of his arrest, Leong's wife and eldest child, a daughter, who were on their holiday trip to Thailand, quickly returned to Singapore to meet up with the couple's younger two children, a son and another daughter, and they together went to be present at the hearing where Leong was first charged. The family later engaged Singapore's leading criminal lawyer Subhas Anandan to represent their father and husband in the court process. Anandan, who was well known for defending high-profile criminals, including notorious wife-killer Anthony Ler, accepted the case. Anandan's nephew and newly qualified lawyer Sunil Sudheesan assisted him to defend Leong. However, in view of pending and ongoing investigations, Anandan was not allowed to meet Leong until 9 July 2005.
The murder not only made headlines in Singapore, but also reported extensively in China, especially in the region where Liu was born and raised in. Many people who knew Liu Hong Mei and her family tried to conceal the truth of her death from her parents.
Perpetrator
Leong Siew Chor, a Chinese Singaporean, was born on 19 April 1955. He had an identical twin brother, who grew up and lived with him in Singapore.Leong was married to an unknown woman after reaching adulthood. In total, the couple had three children: a son and two daughters. His eldest daughter was a teacher while his only son was still an undergraduate student at the time Leong faced charges of murder and theft. Leong, who completed his pre-university education and National Service, joined Singtel as an employee and worked for approximately 20 years between 1976 and 1996. During his employment at Singtel, Leong was enrolled in a diploma course in Singapore Polytechnic and obtained a diploma in Electronics and Communication Engineering in 1983. Leong was able to understand English as a result of his relatively highly educated background.
In February 1996, Leong decided to leave Singtel and set up his own business, which failed. In April 1997, Leong decided to apply as a production supervisor at Lucent Technologies Microelectronics Pte Ltd, which was eventually restructured and renamed as Agere Systems Singapore Pte Ltd. Leong was deployed at Agere's factory in Serangoon North Avenue 5 and assigned a permanent night shift from 7:00pm to 7:00am the next day. As of May 2005, his gross monthly salary as a factory supervisor was worth S$3,743, not excluding his shift allowance.
Leong's neighbours described him as a loving father and husband to his family. Many who knew him were shocked to first hear that he was the suspected murderer when the media was full of the news of his arrest.
According to Liu's coworkers, Leong had given her a hard and stressful time as her supervisor for the next 3 months after their first meeting. It was later revealed in court that Liu Hong Mei became Leong's lover, despite her age being younger than two of Leong's children and being half of Leong's actual age. This affair started when she was first assigned to work under Leong's supervision. From this affair, Liu was promoted twice and they became close to each other, to the point that they became publicly intimate and kissed and hugged each other.
On 14 September 2004, they were finally caught and reported for kissing each other. Both Liu and Leong were given a verbal warning by the company's higher staff for the inappropriate behaviours in the workplace. Leong claimed that he did so because it was Liu's birthday on that day they were caught. Liu's colleagues noted that she started to have doubts about the affair following this warning. Despite that, the pair continued their illicit relationship, and it lasted for about a year before Liu's murder.
Further investigations
Search in Leong's matrimonial home
On 18 June 2005, after he was charged for murder, Leong was brought back to his flat in Lorong 3, Geylang, where many reporters filmed scenes of police officers entering and leaving the ninth-floor unit with collected evidence for purposes of their investigations.Among the items collected were a partially damaged meat cleaver, a rubber mallet, some Chinese language newspapers with their pages missing, plastic bags, some of Leong's clothes previously worn before his arrest, and a towel he allegedly used to strangle Liu to death. Forensic pathologist Dr Teo Eng Swee, who conducted an autopsy on the victim, found tiny shards of metal fragments stuck to the muscles of Liu's severed left leg. These metal fragments were later matched to the meat cleaver, which Leong claimed to have used to dismember Liu.
The torn pages of newspapers found wrapped around the body parts were also revealed to be the missing pages from Leong's subscribed newspapers, which the police confiscated. The fabric fibres found on the boxes were also matched to those of Leong's clothes, and the masking tape found on the carton boxes also came from Leong's home. The plastic bags used to wrap the body parts were the same as those found in the bedroom of Leong's 24-year-old son.
The police also searched the toilet where Leong dismembered the body, as what he told the police. The bathroom was clean and spotless without any stains or smell of blood. According to Inspector Roy Lim, he stated that the unusual cleanliness of the crime scene reminded him of a superior's case report which he read about ten years ago. In another murder case in Singapore, British serial killer John Martin Scripps, who was executed for a South African tourist's murder in a Singapore hotel, has also dismembered the body and disposed of it, before he cleaned up the hotel room's bathroom. Similarly, the crime scene was clean without bloodstains or smell, but under the sink, Lim's superior found a bloodstain that belonged to the dead victim. Having recalled this, Lim checked under the sink but there was no bloodstain. It was only when he looked underneath the toilet bowl then he discovered a small red stain. The forensic tests later confirmed that red stain was blood, and it matched Liu's DNA.
It was also revealed that during the course of investigations, Leong's family were being repeatedly harassed by many members of the public, who came to their flat to disturb and condemn them out of anger over the murder of Liu. Some also burned joss sticks outside the flat to pray for lottery numbers and to cleanse the flat, while others threw things inside the flat. This harassment also caused a nuisance to the Leong family's neighbours. They were eventually forced to move out to get some peace. Nobody wanted to buy the flat for fear that the place was haunted and warrant bad luck for people, since a murder took place in it. The HDB unit remains as one of the notorious death flats where it involves an unnatural death or murder.