Orchard Towers double murders
The Orchard Towers double murders was the case of two deaths occurring at Balmoral Park, Singapore, before the victims' bodies were discovered at a carpark in Orchard Towers, thus the title of the case. The victims were 46-year-old Kho Nai Guan and Kho's 29-year-old Chinese girlfriend Lan Ya Ming, and they were both murdered by Kho's British employer Michael McCrea. McCrea was assisted by his girlfriend Audrey Ong Pei Ling in disposing of the bodies before they both fled Singapore to Australia, where they were caught.
The outcome of the case was Ong and McCrea being extradited back to Singapore in 2002 and 2005 respectively, where they were charged with offences ranging from causing disappearance of evidence to culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and sentenced to lengthy jail terms of 12 and 24 years respectively for their roles in the murders. The Orchard Towers double murder case was known to be one of the most infamous murder cases that occurred in Singapore.
Discovery of the victims at Orchard Towers
On 8 January 2002, a security guard named Mohammed Yaacob responded to a report relating to a silver Daewoo Chairman parked on the seventh floor of the Orchard Towers carpark, where it appeared abandoned given that it was sighted at the same spot for the past four days. As Mohammed approached the car, he detected a fetid odour coming from the car. Suspecting that something was wrong, Mohammed called the police.Upon receiving Mohammed's police report, a team of police officers headed to the Orchard Towers car park where Mohammed found the car. The police then forced open the car and made a gruesome discovery of two decomposing corpses inside the vehicle. One of the corpses was found inside a huge wicker basket placed at the car's rear seat. The first corpse belonged to a 46-year-old Singaporean male named Kho Nai Guan. The other body was found in the boot of the car, wrapped in blankets and the head covered with plastic bags and neckties tightening the bags around the neck area. The other body was certified to be female, and her identity was Lan Ya Ming, a 29-year-old China-born immigrant and teacher who first came to Singapore in October 2001 to apply for a teaching job. Lan, who was Kho's girlfriend, was married with two eight-year-old twin sons at the time of her death, while Kho himself was a father of three who was estranged from his wife.
Both Kho and Lan were certified to have died from strangulation and suffocation respectively, according to the forensic pathologist Dr Paul Chui. Lan's body was later reclaimed by her 32-year-old Chinese husband and telecommunications worker Lin Jia Song ten months after her death, while Kho's family were able to recognise him from his Thai tattoos and reclaimed his body.
Lin said that before his wife was murdered, he often received weekly calls from Lan while she stayed in Singapore and the last time he heard her voice was on 29 December 2001, three days before her death. He stated she did not turn up at their family home in Fujian for Chinese New Year as she promised and he could not contact her for three months before he received the Singapore Police Force's notification that his wife possibly was the female deceased victim they found at Orchard Towers. In fact, the police could not establish Lan's identity immediately after they discovered her body and it took ten months before they finally identified her through her belongings and DNA samples provided by Lin.
Police investigations yielded the last address of both Kho and Lan, which was located in an apartment at Balmoral Park, owned by a British expatriate and financial adviser named Michael McCrea, who hired Kho as his personal driver after being impressed by the latter's driving skills as a taxi driver. The $146,000 Daewoo car, where the bodies were found, was bought and gifted to Kho by McCrea himself. However, McCrea had already left for London on 5 January 2002, three days prior to the discovery of the bodies. McCrea's 22-year-old Singaporean girlfriend, Audrey Ong Pei Ling, who lived with McCrea in the same apartment as Kho and Lan, had also left for London on the same day. The apartment was reportedly in complete disarray and looked as though something had happened.
Later, McCrea's acquaintances were brought into questioning. One of them, Gemma Louise Ramsbottom, a former secretary of McCrea, told police that when she arrived at the apartment on McCrea's request, she was shocked to see Kho lying dead in the living room and McCrea, who appeared injured, using a knife to threaten her to not reveal the gruesome finding, as well as forcing her to help him dispose of the bodies and the victims' belongings. Another man, Augustine Justin Cheo Yi Tang, also told police that McCrea and Ong sought his help to provide them acid to dissolve the bodies and cleaning fluid to clean up the flat. In both cases, Ramsbottom and Cheo received word from McCrea that he did not mean to kill Kho and Lan, as it was due to a fight that ended fatally.
As such, both Michael McCrea and Audrey Ong were placed on the police's wanted list for their alleged involvement in the deaths of Kho and Lan, which were classified as murder. Interpol also received and approved Singapore's request to set out an international fugitive notice for both McCrea and Ong. Five months later, the two were arrested by the local authorities in Melbourne, Australia, where they sought refuge from the home of McCrea's then estranged pregnant wife after spending some time hiding in London.
Michael McCrea
Michael McCrea, born in Britain in 1958, was a school drop-out who did not complete his secondary school education and left school without an O-level exam certificate. He did, however, possess a talent in business, and he became publicly acknowledged in the media for his business savvy. McCrea was also recognised as "Nottingham's Million Pound Man" in 1980 after he was able to earn a profit of £1.2 million in nine months on behalf of a financial-services firm he was employed at. McCrea went to South East Asia in the 1990s, and worked as a financial adviser in Singapore, the same country where he first met and married his Australian wife Brunetta Stocco, with whom he had four children, including a son named Callum. Their marriage reportedly ended, according to Stocco, when he came to her house in Australia with Ong.Under the alias Mike Townsend, McCrea wrote and published a book titled Expat Survival Kit, which gave advice to his expatriate clients about financial strategies in business. He was reported to have violated financial regulations and fined for his misconduct in Singapore at one point. McCrea, who rented an apartment at Pinewood Gardens Condominium in Balmoral Park, was said to have a lifestyle of throwing noisy parties near the pool of the condominium, which often drew complaints and annoyance from his neighbours. McCrea's wife also left him to live in Australia due to her disliking her husband's lifestyle. McCrea also learned amateur boxing at one point in his lifetime. He became engaged in a romantic relationship with pub waitress Audrey Ong, whom he first met through a friend at a pub in June 2001 and later lived with him.
In 1998, McCrea first met Kho Nai Guan, a taxi driver whom he formed a close friendship with and later hired as his personal driver six months after they met. Kho was formerly an electronics business owner whose business went bankrupt after a few years of operation in 1989, before his employment at his brother's pet-food business and his failed venture to establish his own business in 1992. Kho was known to be a friendly and well-spoken individual to his friends and his excellent services as a taxi driver gave him commendation and awards in 1997. Kho moved into McCrea's home in 1999 after he became estranged from his wife, and he later lived together with his girlfriend Lan Ya Ming. Kho was also known to be philandering and often spent nights with foreign women and prostitutes. Still, it did not affect his brotherly relationship with McCrea, who often affectionately called him "Ah Guan" and paid him decently for his job.
The defendants' account
The following account below was what happened to Kho Nai Guan and Lan Ya Ming, according to Michael McCrea and Audrey Ong after their arrests and trials. According to the duo, it resulted from Kho allegedly calling Ong "jian huo", which was a Chinese derogatory term that means "slut" when translated to English, and this provoked McCrea in fighting and killing Kho in the process; Lan was later killed in the aftermath of the fight. Initially, McCrea claimed it was due to Kho stealing his cash to buy drugs, which sparked a fight between them both and ended with Kho's death.It was after midnight on 2 January 2002 when McCrea gathered with Ong, Lan and Kho to drink champagne to celebrate the New Year's Day from the day before. During the session, Kho spat at Ong and called her a slut in Chinese. For this, McCrea was angered and confronted Kho. Kho, who got pushed against the wall and punched on the face, retaliated by breaking a vase on his employer's head, but it only led to McCrea kicking him, fracturing his ribs before he held him in an armlock to punch him repeatedly. During the fight, McCrea used too much strength and it led to fractures in the bones around the throat, leading to 46-year-old Kho Nai Guan to die from strangulation.
Lan tried to attack McCrea with a knife but she was knocked unconscious by McCrea, and brought into Kho's bedroom. It was at 4.30 am when McCrea realised Kho had died, after seeing that his body was cold and his legs turned purple. He and Ong tried to resuscitate Kho with CPR but their efforts were fruitless. McCrea spent the next two days frantically trying to cover up Kho's death by gathering Kho's belongings for disposal, and also enlisted the help of both Gemma Ramsbottom and Augustine Justin Cheo during this period. Lan Ya Ming, who was locked in Kho's bedroom and fed some water, chocolate and cranberry juice, was pressured into revealing the whereabouts of Kho's cash, including the $20,000 bonus McCrea paid to Kho a month prior.
On 4 January 2002, after stuffing Kho's body and belongings into the wicker basket, McCrea tied three plastic bags over the unconscious Lan's head, and tightened each layer of plastic bag around Lan's neck with his personal necktie. 29-year-old Lan Ya Ming, who was still alive at the time, later suffocated due to strangulation by the neck and died. It was mentioned that Lan struggled and convulsed as McCrea tightly wrapped her head with plastic bags. McCrea also wrapped up Lan's whole body with blankets and plastic strings before he and Ong placed the bodies of Lan and Kho into Kho's car and drove it to a carpark at Orchard Towers where they abandoned it. Afterwards, they left for London the next day after obtaining air tickets for their destination.