Sunny Ang
Sunny Ang, also known as Ang Soo Suan, was a Singaporean racing driver and part-time law student who gained notoriety for the murder of his girlfriend Jenny Cheok Cheng Kid near Sisters' Islands. Ang was charged and tried for murder in the High Court of Singapore solely based on circumstantial evidence and without a body. His case attracted substantial attention in Singapore and Malaysia given that he was the first to be tried for murder without a body in these two countries.
On 19 May 1965, Ang was found guilty of murder by a unanimous decision in one of Singapore's last jury trials before its abolition in January 1970. The jury recommended the mandatory death sentence, which the High Court imposed on Ang. His case became a landmark in both Singapore and Malaysia as he was the first to be found guilty of murder and undergo capital punishment solely based on circumstantial evidence and the first to be convicted and sentenced to death for murder without a body. Ang lost his appeals against the sentence and he was eventually executed on 6 February 1967. Cheok's body was never found.
Early life
Ang was born in 1939, one of the children in a middle-class family in the British Colony of Singapore.Ang was English-educated, and he started school very young. With an IQ of 128, Ang was shown to be extremely intelligent and was always among the top 10 in school. He also had a hobby of reading books. Ang completed his secondary school education at Victoria School in 1955, and he obtained his Senior Cambridge Grade One certificate in the following year. He was trained to be a teacher in 1957, but he later gave up and underwent training as a pilot under a government scholarship. However, he was sacked as he repeatedly ignored safety regulations. Ang began his career as a one-time Grand Prix driver by participating in the 1961 Singapore Grand Prix – a tourism event at the Old Thomson Road circuit.
Ang ran afoul of the law twice during this period. He was first charged and convicted of negligent driving after he killed a pedestrian during an accident in 1961, and was issued a fine. In 1962, Ang was arrested and sentenced to probation for attempting to commit burglary. After this second conviction, Ang decided to study law part-time and wanted to go to England to obtain a law degree, but he became bankrupt in 1962 due to his lavish lifestyle.
Ang had once resorted to stealing his father's money, which amounted to $7,000, and fabricated it so that someone else was held responsible. Later, when the truth was exposed, his father drove him out of the house. It was only because of Ang's mother, Madam Yeo Bee Na, who reportedly always pampered her son, that Ang was allowed back home. David Saul Marshall, a lawyer who once defended Ang when he was accused of theft, had once expressed that during his years as a lawyer, he never met someone as arrogant and unrepentant as Ang, and felt regret for helping him escape the theft charge.
Relationship with Jenny Cheok
In May 1963, at Odeon Bar and Restaurant at North Bridge Road, Ang, then 24, met Jenny Cheok Cheng Kid, a 22-year-old bar waitress who worked in the restaurant.Jenny Cheok, birth name Cheok Cheng Kid, was born in 1941. Her father died when she was young, and her mother later married Toh Kim Seng and had another daughter, Irene Toh, in 1947; reportedly, Cheok was close to her half-sister. Cheok spoke little English as she had only attended three years of elementary school before dropping out. In 1957, Cheok married a man named Yui Chin Chuan by Chinese practices, and had a son and daughter with him. A few years later, Cheok became estranged from her husband. By the time she met Ang, Cheok was already separated from Yui, who took custody of their two children.
From the time they first met, Cheok and Ang slowly developed a close, romantic relationship that surpassed that of friends. Due to Ang's charming nature, his education, and his intelligence, Cheok became completely attracted to him; he often flattered her with close attention. They were only in a relationship for a short time before Cheok was convinced that she wanted to marry Ang, a wish that Ang shared. He sometimes gave her swimming and scuba-diving lessons.
Disappearance of Jenny Cheok
On 27 August 1963, Ang and Cheok hired a boatman, Yusuf bin Ahmad, to take them to Sisters' Islands, where they planned to go scuba diving and collect corals. Ang brought along a guide rope, three air tanks, two pairs of fins, two knives, a small axe, aqualung equipment, and a transistor radio. The waters around Sisters' Islands were known to be dangerous and deep.Thirty minutes later, when they reached Sisters' Islands, after putting on her dive belt and taking the axe, a knife, and a metal weight, Cheok went into the water alone for the first time. Ang tied a rope around her to guide her. According to Yusuf, who had once taken the couple to another diving trip, Cheok was not a skilled diver. Yusuf saw Ang diving and Cheok swimming. Ten minutes later, Cheok resurfaced.
After Cheok resurfaced, Ang changed his girlfriend's air tank for her, and allowed her to dive by herself again. This time, Ang did not dive in with her even though he was in his swimming trunks. Later, after testing his air tank, Ang asked for help from Yusuf, saying that his air tank was leaking, and the washer had a problem. Lending a helping hand, the boatman helped Ang to improvise one, but it still failed to work. All the time Ang and Yusuf were repairing the air tank, Cheok was still underwater.
It was only then that Ang tugged on the rope and found that Cheok was missing. He asked Yusuf where his girlfriend was but Yusuf said he did not see her. Ang repeatedly tugged the rope again, but to no avail. Yusuf then took the boat to St John's Island to contact the police. Ang approached Jaffar bin Hussein, a guard from the island along with five or six other fishermen, who went into the waters around Sisters' Islands to search for Cheok, but this proved futile. According to Yusuf, he and Ang did not go overboard to find Cheok before seeking help. Ang did not go into the water to search for Cheok even though they had sought help from the fishermen, and Yusuf claimed that Ang seemed calm and not anxious, which was strange when he, as Cheok's boyfriend, was supposed to be extremely worried about his girlfriend's safety.
Police were later contacted and on the sixth day after Cheok's disappearance, several frogmen from the British Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force's Changi Sub-Aqua Club went underwater to search for Cheok's body, but it was never found. The frogmen only found a flipper, which belonged to Cheok and was worn by her before she went missing. The flipper was found to be severed cleanly at the top and bottom, possibly by a sharp instrument such as a knife or razor blade. An expert witness later testified that the loss of a flipper would have resulted in a diver's loss of equilibrium and affected the person's mobility. Since Jenny Cheok was inexperienced in swimming and diving, she might have panicked and got swept away and drowned in the strong ocean currents around the islands.
Murder charge and trial
Investigations and indictment
Police investigations began the moment 22-year-old Jenny Cheok went missing. Immediately, Ang became a suspect in the case.The police found that less than 24 hours after Cheok went missing, Ang had notified several insurance companies that Cheok was dead and demanded compensation. Ang even tried to look for lawyers to rush the coroner's report about whether Cheok was dead or not. This aroused the suspicion of the police since it was not even concluded that the missing Cheok was dead when Ang went to demand the companies to issue the payouts. As he was an experienced diver, he stood to gain from the payouts of the insurance policies he may have bought for Cheok. The police then decided to re-classify Cheok's disappearance as murder on 6 September 1963, and started their formal investigations.
On 21 December 1964, police arrested Ang, and brought him to court to face a murder charge the next day. Ang was initially discharged of the murder charge on 29 December 1964, as the judge did not accept the prosecution's request for more time to prepare their case. However, the police re-arrested him again an hour later, and detained him for a day before charging him with murder a second time. This time, the magistrate approved some time for the prosecution to build their case given that it involved a possible, but serious, offence of murder, and ordered Ang to be remanded at Outram Prison to await trial.
Trial
On 26 April 1965, Ang stood trial for murder in the High Court before a seven-men jury; High Court judge Murray Buttrose presided over the trial. Senior Crown Counsel Francis T. Seow led the prosecution, and lawyer Punch Coomaraswamy was hired to represent Ang. Since the crime of murder was a capital offence in Singapore, Ang faced mandatory capital punishment should the jury find him guilty, either by a majority or unanimous decision under the law of Singapore.The trial attracted much public attention due to the unusual case of a person charged for murder without a body. The prosecution's case was based entirely on circumstantial evidence. Seow, in his opening statement, described the case in the trial as "an unusual case insofar as Singapore, or for that matter Malaysia, is concerned. This is the first case of its kind to be tried in our courts that there is no body." However, Seow did not mince words when he stated that even if a body was not present, it did not mean that anyone would escape a murder charge as it would have meant that some despicable killers might go free and escape punishment from the law. The lack of a body only meant that the prosecution had a higher burden of proof when prosecuting a person for murder. It was rumoured that Ang's father, who worked as a civil servant, had unsuccessfully tried to plead to Seow in private on his son's behalf.
In the trial, it was revealed that before her disappearance, Ang had helped Cheok to purchase several insurance policies, and stated that these payouts would be given to her estate or his mother, who would become Cheok's mother-in-law once they became married. He also helped Cheok to find a lawyer to set a will that when she died, her estate would be given to Ang's mother. Cheok's and Ang's mothers had never met one another. These insurance policies had a total coverage of $450,000 for Cheok. One of the insurance policies had expired the day before Cheok went missing, but Ang had extended it for five days just three hours before the diving trip. These policies were purchased under the claims that Cheok was an heiress of a chicken farm. Cheok, who only earned about $90 per month and had resigned from her job a month before her disappearance, had little money to pay the premiums for her insurance policies. The prosecution alleged that due to his undischarged bankruptcy, Ang needed money and thus had a motive to help Cheok buy the insurance, and later solicited her alleged murder. Yusuf bin Ahmad, the boatman who accompanied Ang and Cheok in their trip to Sisters' Islands, became the prosecution's key witness and testified about Ang's demeanour in the course of the search for his missing girlfriend.
The trial also revealed a possible attempted murder made by Ang on Cheok's life. Ang had once driven a car in Malaysia, returning from a holiday trip with Cheok in Kuala Lumpur, but they had an accident, in which the passenger side was severely damaged. Cheok managed to escape with only a few injuries. Ang, skilled enough to take part in a Grand Prix, said it was because he was trying to avoid a dog. Before the couple's return trip, Ang took out two accident policies — $30,000 for himself and $100,000 for his girlfriend.
Ang later elected to go on the stand to give his defence. Ang argued that he was innocent, stating that Cheok was the woman he loved and intended to marry. When he was asked why he did not go into the water to look for Cheok, Ang only said that Cheok might have been attacked by sharks, and said that the fishermen who dived in were more experienced. Ang claimed that he let Cheok go into the water first out of the basic courtesy of "ladies first". Ang also claimed that Cheok had made good progress in learning how to swim and scuba dive, which was in contrast to the many witnesses' testimonies about Cheok's lack of experience and skills. He said he put his mother's name on the beneficiaries' list for the insurance policies to avoid arousing suspicion should anything happen to Cheok. Ang also denied that he had a motive to murder Cheok.