Sunny Ang

Sunny Ang Soo Suan was born in 1939, one of the children of 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 had always been among the top 10 in school.[2] He also had a hobby of reading books.[3] Ang completed his secondary school education at Victoria School in 1955, and he obtained his Senior Cambridge (today's GCE O-levels) 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.[4]

However, Ang ran afoul with 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. The second time was in 1962, when 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 spending on driving racing cars and girls.[3]

Due to his hobby to drive racing cars, Ang had once resorted to stealing his father's money, which amounted to $7,000, and fabricated it so that someone else was responsible. Later, when the truth was exposed, Ang's enraged 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 to escape the theft charge.[3]

In May 1963, at Odeon Bar and Restaurant at North Bridge Road, Sunny Ang, then 24, first met Jenny Cheok Cheng Kid (石清菊; shí qīngjǘ), 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 little, 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 attended only 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 the charming nature of Ang, who was more educated and intelligent than her, 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 be married to Ang, a wish that Ang shared. He sometimes gave her swimming and scuba-diving lessons.[1]

Jenny Cheok Cheng Kid
Born	Cheok Cheng Kid c. 1941 Singapore, Straits Settlements
Died	27 August 1963(1963-08-27) (aged 21–22) Sisters' Islands, Singapore
Cause of death	Unknown, but confirmed to be murdered
Resting place	Between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. (body never found)
Nationality	Malaysian
Other names	Jenny Cheok
Education	Primary Three (drop-out)
Occupation	Bar waitress
Known for	Murder victim
Spouse	Yui Chin Chuan (m. 1957; divorced)
Children	A son and daughter

On 27 August 1963, Sunny 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 flippers, two knives, a small axe, aqualung equipment, and a transistor radio for this diving trip. 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, with Ang having tied a rope around her to guide her. According to Yusuf, who had once brought the couple to another diving trip, he observed that Cheok was not skillful when he 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 in by herself again. This time, Ang also 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 when Ang and Yusuf were repairing the air tank, Cheok was still underwater.

It was only then when 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 was proved futile. According to Yusuf, he or Ang did not go overboard to find Cheok at first before seeking help. Similarly, 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.[5]

Nevertheless, police were later contacted and on the sixth day since Cheok's disappearance, several frogmen from the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force 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 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 thus got swirled away and drowned in the strong ocean currents present around the islands.[1]

After he was sentenced to death, Sunny Ang filed an appeal to the Federal Court of Malaysia against his sentence. In the appeal, Ang cited a miscarriage of justice in his case among the 18 grounds of appeal. These allegations were mostly directed at the trial judge Murray Buttrose, whom he alleged had prejudiced his case in a way that denied him a fair trial. However, on 19 November 1965, the Federal Court decided that the evidence, including Ang's true motive behind the murder of Jenny Cheok, was overpowering enough to prove Ang guilty and thus dismissed his appeal.[13]

On 5 October 1966, Ang's appeal to the Privy Council in London was also rejected.[21] Ang, who was then detained on death row in Changi Prison, made one final attempt to escape the gallows by appealing to President of Singapore Yusof Ishak for clemency. Ang's 3,000 family members, friends and sympathisers also sent another clemency petition to Yusof to plead for mercy. If successful, Ang's death sentence would be commuted to life imprisonment.[22][23] However, on 31 January 1967, Yusof refused to grant Ang clemency and rejected both his petitions. Yusof later authorized the execution to be carried out on the Monday morning of 6 February 1967.[24]

During his time on death row, Ang was initially remorseless over the murder of his girlfriend, and he was certain that he would not be hanged even after the High Court passed its judgement on him. It was only when he received news that the Privy Council rejected his appeal, Ang slowly began to resign to his imminent fate. He even broke down in front of his estranged father, whom he by then felt guilt for his misguided youth, during a prison visit in late 1966. Three days before his execution, Ang, who was an atheist, converted to Christianity and began to seek forgiveness from God for his crime. He also expressed his regret to his family in his will made before his hanging.[3]

A few days later, on 6 February 1967, 28-year-old Sunny Ang Soo Suan was hanged at dawn. His sister, Juliet Ang, who was called to the Bar not long ago, waited outside Changi Prison to claim her brother's body, which was later buried in the Bidadari Cemetery.[25]

Ang's father died in 1986. Ang's case was one of the famous cases prosecuted by Francis Seow, who died in 2016[9]

As of today, the corpse of Jenny Cheok was never found. It was presumably lost at sea.

For decades since its occurrence, Ang's case remained as a landmark in both Singapore and Malaysia as he was the first murderer to be convicted and sentenced to death solely based on circumstantial evidence and the first to be convicted of murder without a body. Due to its significance, Ang's case was recalled 54 years later when another murderer named Leslie Khoo Kwee Hock was convicted of his lover Cui Yajie's murder without her body on 12 July 2019, making it the second case of a murder conviction without a body after Ang. Khoo was said to have started the affair with Cui in 2015 despite having a wife and son, and he also lied to Cui that he was divorced. It was due to Cui having argued with Khoo over personal issues before Khoo strangled her in the heat of the moment. The only difference was, while Ang was executed in 1967 for Cheok's murder, Khoo was sentenced to life imprisonment by the High Court on 19 August 2019, as he was found to have no intention to cause her death and did not display viciousness or a blatant disregard for human life, and having burnt her body into ashes after killing her during an argument near Gardens by the Bay, the fatal injuries sustained by the victim and their nature could not be ascertained to enable the court to determine if the death penalty was more appropriate in Khoo's case. Currently, Khoo is incarcerated at Changi Prison, where he is serving his life sentence since 2016.[26][27][28][29]

Another case that recalled the trial of Ang was the alleged murder of Ayakannu Marithamuthu, which was reported as the “curry murder” case in 1987. Ayakannu was said to have gone missing since 12 December 1984, but in March 1987, following a tip-off, the police arrested at least four suspects (including the missing Ayakannu's wife), and charged them with murder. One of the suspects allegedly confessed that Ayakannu, who often got violent when drunk and abused his wife, was murdered and had his body chopped up before they were cooked in curry and rice. The suspects had allegedly packed them in plastic bags and disposed of them in the roadside dustbins all over Singapore, which made headlines in Singapore, as well as making it one of the most notorious murders without a body. However, on the first day of the trial, the prosecutors admitted that the evidence was insufficient and the judge in charge of the case released the suspects after granting them a discharge not amounting to an acquittal. The case remains unsolved.[30][31]

Ang's case was not going to be the only murder case where a person would be convicted based on circumstantial evidence in both Singapore and Malaysia. Ang's case was recalled in another alleged murder case from Singapore in 1989. In this case, a school bus driver named Oh Laye Koh was charged with the murder of Liang Shan Shan, a 17-year-old student from Mayflower Secondary School. Liang, a Malaysian from Sabah, was said to be missing since 2 October 1989, and her highly decomposed body was found around two weeks later in Yishun Industrial Park by National Servicemen who were training nearby that area. Forensic pathologist Chao Tzee Cheng could not ascertain the cause of death; he could not tell whether it was a suicide, murder or accident due to the state of decomposition, some body parts were missing and the injuries he found on the skull and ribs were not sufficient to cause death. Later police investigations revealed that Liang was last seen boarding Oh's school bus at around 1 pm by her classmate, and Oh was later charged with murder. Oh was initially acquitted in 1992, but he was brought back to court in 1994 for a re-trial after the prosecution appealed against the acquittal. When he was told to enter his defence, Oh chose to remain silent. From his decision to remain silent and also his failure to submit additional evidence in his favour, as well as the circumstantial evidence pointing to Oh's possible guilt, the High Court made an inference that Oh had indeed killed Liang and her death was not suicidal or accidental, and thus sentenced Oh to death after finding him guilty of murder. Oh Laye Koh was executed together with two drug traffickers on 19 May 1995. Oh's lawyer Peter Fernando also stated that Oh Laye Koh did not show remorse for his actions and continued to deny his crime till the end.[32][33][34][35][36][37][38]

In Malaysia, lawyer N. Pathmanabhan and his two farm hands – T. Thilaiyalagan and R. Kathavarayan – were accused of murdering a millionaire Datuk Sosilawati Lawiya and her three companions - bank officer Noohisham Mohamed, lawyer Ahmad Kamil Abdul Karim, and her driver Kamaruddin Shamsuddin – in 2010, purely based on circumstantial evidence and without the bodies of the victims. All three accused, who burnt the bodies before their arrests, were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, and their death sentences were finalized and upheld by the Federal Court of Malaysia in March 2017. Ang's case was recalled in news reports covering the millionaire's murder.[39][40]

• Less than ten years after the murder of Jenny Cheok at Sisters' Islands, British journalist Alex Josey wrote a book about the case of Sunny Ang, titled The "Perfect" Murder: The Trial of Sunny Ang. It was first published in 1973.[41]
• In July 2015, nearly 52 years after the murder of Jenny Cheok, Singapore's national daily newspaper The Straits Times published a e-book titled Guilty As Charged: 25 Crimes That Have Shaken Singapore Since 1965, which included the case of Ang as one of the top 25 crimes that shocked the nation since its independence in 1965. The book was borne out of collaboration between the Singapore Police Force and the newspaper itself. The e-book was edited by ST News Associate editor Abdul Hafiz bin Abdul Samad. The paperback edition of the book was published and first hit bookshelves in June 2017. The paperback edition first entered the ST bestseller list on 8 August 2017, a month after publication.[42][43][1]
• The murder case of Jenny Cheok was re-enacted in Singaporean crime show True Files. It first aired as the seventh episode of the show's first season on 6 June 2002, nearly 39 years after the murder. It is currently viewable via meWATCH since 5 February 2016.[2]
• In 1979, Taiwanese film production company Harvesters Film Distribution and Production revealed their plans to adapt the case of Ang into a film, and the names of those involved would be omitted.[44]
• Another Singaporean crime show in 2022, titled Inside Crime Scene, had also re-adapted the Sunny Ang murder trial and aired the on-screen adaptation as its fourth and penultimate episode.[29]

• Capital punishment in Singapore
• Capital punishment in Malaysia
• List of major crimes in Singapore
• Murder conviction without a body
• List of murder convictions without a body

• Abdul Samad, Abdul Hafiz (2017). Guilty as Charged: 25 Crimes that Have Shaken Singapore Since 1965. Straits Times Press Pte Ltd. ISBN 978-9814642996.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)