Murder of Frankie Tan
On the night of 24 October 1984, a 39-year-old American Express banker, Tan Tik Siah, otherwise known as Frankie Tan, was ambushed and attacked by four men as he arrived home from work in Singapore. He was strangled to death by his assailants and his body was found by his wife, who reported the murder to the police. Three of the assailants and the victim's wife were arrested and charged in the death.
The murder was a classic case of a crime of passion that started with the extramarital affairs Frankie Tan had engaged in and the abuse of his wife, which led the wife, Lee Chee Poh, and Tan's adoptive brother Vasavan Sathiadew to plot the killing as revenge for the victim's infidelity and abuse. Poh and Sathiadew paid three Thai construction workers to murder Tan.
Throughout the 45-day murder trial, the three murderers, who challenged the validity of their confessions, tried to deny their guilt in the trial by pleading diminished responsibility and placing the blame on the fourth man and fugitive who was still missing as of today, blaming him as the one who killed Frankie Tan while their intention was merely to wallop the murdered victim. The lower division of the Supreme Court of Singapore rejected these defences and sentenced the three killers to death. The death sentences were affirmed by the Supreme Court's higher division and this affirmation resulted in the trio's executions on 23 October 1992. Lee Chee Poh was the only one of these four accused who escaped execution and instead received a 7-year prison sentence in a separate trial for manslaughter due to the sympathetic circumstances surrounding her life under the abuse of Tan, which drove her to the plot to kill her husband.
The crime
Discovery
At around 2:15 in the morning of 25 October 1984, after some shopping and a session of mahjong with her friends, 50-year-old married housewife Lee Chee Poh, also known as Rose Lee, returned home. As she entered through the front door of her Laguna Park flat, she would make a shocking discovery. As she entered the study room of her banker husband Tan Tik Siah, also known as Frankie Tan, Lee was shocked to see her 39-year-old husband lying there dead with a nylon rope around his neck, and bruises on his face and body. Full of grief and distraught at the sight of her husband's dead body, Lee managed to wake up her neighbour and seek help.Police found no signs of a forced entry or no signs of anything missing from the flat. An autopsy by forensic pathologist Dr Clarence Tan later showed that the cause of Tan's death was asphyxia by strangulation; he died sometime between 8 pm to 10 pm the night before on 24 October 1984. The rope was uniformly tied around Tan's neck six times. From the manner of Tan's injuries, Dr Clarence Tan believed that there were at least two people involved in the murder of Tan, who was then a vice-president and regional treasurer of American Express.
Lee Chee Poh's confession and the accomplices' capture
The case was classified as murder. The case was assigned to Inspector Teo Cheow Beng of the Criminal Investigation Department, who headed the police investigations. The murdered victim's wife, Lee Chee Poh, was brought in for questioning and confessed that she was a part of a plot to murder her husband, and implicated her 41-year-old brother-in-law Vasavan Sathiadew in the plot. Vasavan, who was the adoptive elder brother of Frankie Tan, was soon arrested at the Ang Mo Kio flat of Mdm Sim, the birth mother of Tan, and also Vasavan's adoptive mother. Vasavan, who grew up in a Chinese family since 1959 after his father drove him out and thus adopted both a Chinese name, Tan Kim Siah, and an English name, Augustine, told police that he had hired and paid three Thai men to go with him to assault and murder his foster brother due to Tan having an affair with Amnoi, Vasavan's Thai wife, with whom Vasavan had a son and daughter. According to news reports, Vasavan shared the closest bond to Tan among all of his adoptive three brothers, before the deterioration of their relationship due to the alleged affair between Tan and Vasavan's wife.With Vasavan's statements, the police officers went to a construction site where Vasavan worked as a foreman, and arrested a Thai construction worker, 42-year-old Phan Khenapim, who came from Northern Thailand and worked in Singapore since 1981. Phan was said to be one of the Thai accomplices who murdered Tan. Another Thai worker from another construction site, 21-year-old Wan Phatong, was also arrested for his alleged involvement in the murder. A third Thai accomplice, Buakkan Vajjarin, more commonly referred to as Ah Poo, was never caught. All four arrested were charged with murder.
Trial of Lee Chee Poh
Lee Chee Poh's story
Relationship with Frankie Tan
On 17 October 1988, Lee Chee Poh stood trial alone for her abetment of her husband's murder, represented by lawyer Loh Lin Kok. By then, the prosecution agreed to, on account of Lee's full cooperation with the police and remorse over her husband's death, reduce Lee's charge to one of abetment of culpable homicide not amounting to murder. Lee pleaded guilty and was convicted of the reduced charge. At the trial, it was then a story of how a budding romance ended in tragedy was told in the High Court.Lee Chee Poh, who came from Malacca, Malaysia to Singapore for a better life, first met Frankie Tan sometime in the early or mid-1960s at a cabaret where she had been working for the past 10 years. Despite their 11-year age difference, Lee became romantically involved with Tan, and in 1966, she forked out her earnings to allow Tan to go to night school, where he graduated and completed his secondary school education. The couple were married in 1969, and they resided in Tan's mother's kampong house in Potong Pasir.
The next year, the couple moved into a two-room Housing and Development Board flat in Jalan Toa Payoh; by then, Tan was employed in the Amex bank. At some point in the early 1970s, Tan was embroiled in stock market difficulties, and in order to help her husband, Lee raised $20,000 out of her jewellery and savings. The couple later moved to their current home in a flat in Laguna Park in 1975. They had no children.
Discovery of Tan's infidelity and later abuse
In early 1981, Lee Chee Poh picked up a call from a distressed Vasavan Sathiadew, who informed her of a shocking event that he discovered from his wife Amnoi. Lee was full of disbelief when she heard Vasavan telling her that Amnoi had confessed to him earlier on that she, in fact, had been sleeping with Lee's husband for 11 years since their 1969 marriage. After cutting the call, Lee questioned her husband if it was true; Tan said yes, but defensively said that Amnoi seduced him first. It also came to light that Tan was philandering for other women during their years of marriage, and in addition to his adoptive brother Vasavan's wife, he had also had illicit affairs with the wives of his two other unnamed brothers, and his secretary.As a result of this incident, Tan began to grow more unfaithful to his wife and more abusive towards her. Two years before his violent death, Tan brought home a 25-year-old divorcee named Thereisa Lee and let her live with them. After bringing the mistress back home every night, Tan told Lee to sleep in another bedroom while he shared their bedroom with Thereisa Lee. By this time, he had attained a high-ranking position in the bank. He also later brought both Lee and his mistress overseas to Japan and the United States to allow Lee to get to know the mistress better and accept her as part of the family. During that period, he began to introduce Thereisa Lee to people as his wife, and he fathered a son with her. Lee had long resigned herself to her husband's philandering even before the appearance of Thereisa Lee, and despite the frequent abuses which Tan brought upon her, Lee still loved him and hoped that he could stop ill-treating her.
Finally, one day in 1984, Tan told Lee, his wife of 15 years, that he wanted a divorce. Despite consenting to it, Lee asked the ownership of their Laguna Park flat be given to her should the divorce be granted and finalized. Tan rejected. At the same time, Vasavan, who thirsted for revenge on Tan, who he fell out with, for the earlier adulterous affair between him and Amnoi, had been persuading Lee to have her husband killed since it was for certain that Tan would never make amends with her. Although she schemed with Vasavan to use black magic to kill Tan for his repeated infidelity and abuse, Lee maintained her love for her husband and never wanted him to die; in her heart, she still held on to the hope of her husband going back to her.
Two days before the fateful night on 24 October 1984, when Lee Chee Poh went to the airport to fetch her husband, Tan once again abused and ill-treated her. Lee's endurance finally snapped and she consented to Vasavan's plot to murder her husband. Lee Chee Poh gave Vasavan the spare keys to their flat and $4,500 as payment to those whom Vasavan would hire to murder Tan. Vasavan assured her that her husband's death would look natural with black magic. Still, despite so, Lee had never wanted her husband to die all along and she would have called off the murder had Tan treated her nicely; she also wanted to dissuade Vasavan from killing Tan on the day of the murder itself but could not reach him by phone.
Lee Chee Poh's sentence
On 17 October 1988, the same date of her conviction by the High Court, High Court Judge Punch Coomaraswamy sentenced 54-year-old Lee Chee Poh to seven years' imprisonment. Additionally, the seven-year sentence was backdated to 26 October 1984, the date of Lee's remand; with one-third remission for good behaviour, Lee would effectively only need to serve four years and eight months. Since she served with good behaviour, and the sentence being backdated to four years earlier, Lee would be released eight months later in June 1989.During sentencing, Justice Coomaraswamy took into consideration the tragic life which Lee had gone through with her abusive marriage and her remorse over the incident. He expressed his sympathy to Lee for her plight. In his own words while delivering the judgement, Justice Coomaraswamy said to Lee, "That he treated you cruelly in bringing a mistress home from time to time and making you sleep in another bedroom proves him to be an extremely callous person. I think you had put up with a lot." Lee reportedly broke down as she received the sentence.
However, the murder charges against Lee's brother-in-law Vasavan Sathiadew, and the two of Vasavan's three Thai accomplices Phan Khenapim and Wan Phatong remained. As the crime of murder under Singapore law carries the mandatory death penalty, should they be found guilty, all three men would be sentenced to death. Lee Chee Poh later became the prosecution's key witness against the three men, who all stood trial a month after her release.