The Andrew Road house sat quiet in the early morning light, the kind of peace that made you forget the city was nearby. Inside, the owner, his wife, their domestic helper, and a tutor were going about their morning. The couple’s ten-year-old daughter was there too. Before anyone could react, two young men with a stolen rifle forced their way in.
They bound the adults, covered their heads, and took control. It was a robbery that had gone wrong in the most brutal way possible. By the time police surrounded the bungalow hours later, three people were dead: the owner, his wife, and the helper. I was a journalist covering crime back then.
We stood a hundred meters away, watching the standoff unfold. Sixteen star snipers were positioned around the house. The tension was suffocating. When police finally stormed in, they found the victims with their hands tied behind their backs, shorts pulled over their heads.
The scene was gruesome, amateurish. Whoever did this was not a professional. The mastermind was a nineteen-year-old national serviceman named Sek Kim Wah. His accomplice was a secret society member from Malaysia, Yu Kok Ming.
They had escaped before the police arrived. Six days later, Sek Kim Wah was arrested. But by then, the story had already grown darker. Word reached me that he had killed two more people days after the triple murders.
Suddenly, this nineteen-year-old had taken five lives in under a month. When I saw him for the first time, I was confused. I expected a vicious, brutal killer. Instead, he seemed polite, cooperative, and completely unremarkable.
It was difficult to reconcile the boy sitting in front of me with the bodies I had seen. The court hearings revealed his mind. Sek Kim Wah told police he wanted to be like Rambo, the movie hero who killed police and bombed stations. He also idolized Lim Ban Lim, one of Singapore’s most wanted fugitives in the 1970s.
The media nicknamed him “Young Rambo. ” Everyone wanted to know what had twisted him into a killer. His family history offered some answers. His father had deserted them, and his mother worked long hours.
He was left without guidance. His father had even taught him how to steal. As a boy, he was sent to a boys’ home for theft, and there, he claimed, someone had strangled him until he passed out. He told his lawyer that the sensation felt thrilling.
In court, he smiled throughout the proceedings. He showed no remorse. He had told a bar hostess named Lily that he had killed people, and she testified that he seemed proud of it. He drove around in the victim’s car, bought jewelry, and partied as if nothing had happened.
He put two bodies in a car boot. His childhood trauma might have scarred him, but it did not excuse what he did. Psychologists described him as displaying traits of psychopathy: lack of guilt, impulsivity, a craving for stimulation. He even admitted that strangling victims gave him a thrill.
But his accomplice stopped before the point of no return. Yu Kok Ming had let the tutor and the ten-year-old girl go. He had turned himself in on the third day after the murders and became the key witness. He was wracked with guilt and even wanted to die.
But the tutor he spared convinced him to live. The prosecution argued that Sek Kim Wah’s claim of being strangled was a figment of imagination, but our defense used it anyway. The psychiatric experts pointed to his dysfunctional family, his father’s bad influence, and his emotional instability. His IQ was 113, above average, which made his actions even more chilling.
In the end, Sek Kim Wah’s defense had no strong case against the murder charges. There was no remorse, no doubt about his guilt. He was sentenced to death. I thought about his case for years.
I wondered if anyone could have reached him when he was young, before he crossed the line. Most people who end up in prison do so because society rejects them. They give up and accept that identity. But Sek Kim Wah seemed to value nothing, not even life itself.
He was hanged, but the memory never faded. I have thought about him often, wondering what would have changed if his father had been a better man, if anyone had truly guided him. Yet even knowing his history, I could not muster much sympathy. He did not have to kill.
He chose to.
