On January 6, 1979, my phone rang in the newsroom. I was a crime journalist then, and the police were on the line about a murder at Geylang Bahru. I grabbed five colleagues and we rushed over, expecting the usual scene. What we found was anything but usual.
Police cars, ambulances, even anti-riot vehicles surrounded Block 58. The whole area was cordoned off. It was a Saturday, just a month before Lunar New Year. No one knew who had been killed or why.
Everyone was talking about it. I was Simon Suppiah, an investigator with the Criminal Investigation Department. I’d been with the Singapore Police Force since 1965, rising to Assistant Superintendent. When I got word that four children had been hacked to death, I knew this was unlike anything I’d seen in my career.
The person who did this was heartless. We had to find them at all costs. At the scene, we tried to keep the public back so we could work. The atmosphere on the fifth floor was eerie, heavy.
I waited about two hours before the police spokesperson told us the victims were the four children of Mr. and Mrs. Tan. The parents, Tan Kheng Chai and Lee May Ying, had been at work.
We asked to see the scene, but the police refused. They said the children had died in such a gruesome way that reporters weren’t allowed in. After a long wait, they let one reporter from each newspaper inside. We sent in a new colleague, someone who had joined a few months earlier, hoping to build his courage.
He came back pale and nauseous. He told me the four bodies were piled on top of each other in the toilet. The little girl was on top. They were all brutally hacked.
One child’s hand was nearly severed, dangling by a small piece of flesh. The Tan siblings were 10-year-old Kok Peng, 8-year-old Kok Hin, 6-year-old Kok Soon, and 5-year-old Chee Nee. Their parents were working at the time. Today, we have CCTV in every lift, but back then, there wasn’t a single camera.
I often wondered how no one heard anything. The flats were so close together. Every time I wrote about this case for my book, I felt terrible. There were moments I wanted to leave it out, but something kept telling me to write it down.
The police held a press conference at the void deck of the block, something they only did for the most serious crimes. The journalists there felt sick after hearing what happened. Some were tearing up. The victims were innocent children, killed in an atrocious way.
From the start, the police knew there were no signs of forced entry. The house wasn’t ransacked. They suspected the culprit was no stranger. This was the beginning of a mystery that would haunt Singapore for decades.
In those days, the police held press conferences every morning. We chased leads daily, desperate for information on motive or suspects. One newspaper covered rumors for 12 straight days. What were people saying?
Whom had the Tan parents offended? How could this tragedy have unfolded? A few weeks ago, I paid my respects at the children’s graves. There were fresh offerings and toys on their tombstones.
It moved me to see that so many people still care about this case. The case kept Singapore on edge. In the late 1970s, violent crime was more common, but this was different. Four children killed in one go.
People living in the area were terrified, especially those with young kids. They feared a serial killer was on the loose. It was about a decade since Singapore’s independence. The economy was changing fast, and many middle-class or lower-income families rented government flats.
Parents worked long hours and often left their children with neighbors or alone at home. It was a different time, but no less dangerous. In 1981, a survey showed that 51% of people feared becoming a victim of crime. Today, 97% of residents feel safe walking alone at night.
The contrast is stark. Back then, parents thought leaving their children at home was the safest option. Tan Kheng Chai drove a minibus, and his wife, Lee May Ying, was a ticket inspector. On that fateful day, they left for work at about 6:35 a.
m. , checking on their kids as usual. The boys were all at Bendemeer Primary School. Chee Nee had just turned five and started kindergarten.
Every morning, they were left alone for a brief period. At 7:10 a. m. , Lee May Ying called home to wake them up, like she always did.
No one answered. She tried the neighbor, who thought the children were just sleeping in. According to the death investigation report, the time of death could have been after 6:00 or 7:00 a. m.
, but the neighbors heard nothing. Not a single sound. It was past 10:00 when the Tans returned home. The police spokesperson, ASP Daniel Tan, had seen the bodies.
He called it the most horrifying homicide he’d witnessed in his 12-year career. The parents lost all four of their children. Lee May Ying had undergone sterilization procedures. No one could handle a blow like this.
That day, their mother fainted several times. The next day, a colleague who went to the morgue told me he saw the grandmother wailing and cursing the murderer. The family hoped the children would appear in their dreams and somehow bring the killer to justice. More than 40 years have passed since Block 58 was rebuilt, and the case remains unsolved.
Recently, the children’s father passed away without ever learning the truth. I’m Joanna, a volunteer with Crime Library Singapore, a local non-profit that helps families of murder victims. We conduct street interviews at Geylang Bahru, hoping to encourage those with information to step forward. We’ve been making appeals on the family’s behalf, trying to reach neighbors or former residents who might have heard or seen something.
People may have kept quiet 40 years ago, but they might be ready to speak now. Back then, the crime caused a furore, but despite police appeals, nobody stepped forward. The rumors could not be verified, and the case remained shrouded in mystery. It was most unusual that no one witnessed anything.
There was no forced entry, no ransacking. We ruled out housebreaking or robbery. The killer was likely someone who could gain access to the house. There were many rumors.
One claimed that a relative of the mother had been arrested. The parents even held a press conference to clarify, but by the time I arrived, they weren’t keen on speaking. The police investigated a rumor about money issues, that Lee May Ying ran a tontine scheme and was in conflict with another member. Two women were called in for questioning.
There was also a rumor that she had pocketed someone’s lottery prize, sparking a vicious revenge. But the police found no evidence. Eight days after the murders, things took a turn. A taxi driver notified the police that he had picked up a young man near the crime scene, near Block 61.
There were blood stains on the young man’s clothes, and a knife handle was visible above his waistband. The driver asked about the blood, and the young man said someone had beaten him up. Today, we have DNA and advanced technology. Back then, we had nothing.
The young man was rumored to be the Tan family’s neighbor, someone who frequently went over to use their phone. But the police let him go due to a lack of evidence. Not long after, he moved away from Geylang Bahru. On the third and seventh days, there were rumors that someone had turned himself in.
Others said the police had already found the culprit. They denied all of it. There was another explanation from the father. He said that a few months before the murders, his family was almost robbed.
One of the children had discovered it. I conducted my own investigation. One neighbor, Miss Tan, said a suspicious man had mistakenly knocked on her door five days before the murders. Another neighbor, Woo, said Lee May Ying had lost her keys about a month before, but the family didn’t change the locks.
Wouldn’t that mean the killer could have entered freely? The police interrogated over 100 people, including friends, relatives, and neighbors. We chased every lead, but the issue was that none of it was witnessed. Everything was hearsay.
The murderer came and went without a trace. There was an old lady who always sat in the corridor, but that day she was home washing her hair and didn’t see anyone leave. Deep down, I believe it could only have been someone known to the parents. A stranger wouldn’t just walk in, hack one child after another, and pile them up in the toilet.
An article published in 1979 mentioned that police wondered if the Tans were hiding something out of fear of offending someone. The neighbors saw them as a guiltless couple. Were they actually hiding something? The four Tan siblings are buried at the Choa Chu Kang Chinese Cemetery.
On the anniversary of their deaths, the family always appeals for witnesses. As a mother, I understand their heartbreak. I hope this never happens to anyone else’s children. As a volunteer at Crime Library, I put in 200% of my effort.
I hope my contributions bring the family some comfort. Last year, an old neighbor of the Tan family approached us to chat. She even helped us reach out to more former neighbors. Her name was Maria, and she was only three when the murders happened.
She lived with her parents and older brothers in the same block, on the same floor. A stairwell separated the two families. Maria remembered the Tan family a little. She recalled the small girl, Chee Nee, who looked like a little Japanese doll with short hair.
Once, Maria gave her a bit of asam pedas, a little spicy. The girl ate it, her face turning red, but she kept saying, “I want, I want. ” Maria gave her some two or three times. On the morning of January 6, 1979, Maria’s whole family was at her grandparents’ home in Bedok.
She and her brothers had been crying unusually the night before, so their parents decided to bring them to the grandmother’s house. Maria said, “We were actually crying the day before it happened. I think we children might sense something. ”
The Tan siblings suffered over 80 slashes and two stab wounds.
The main murder weapon was a chopper. Why didn’t the neighbors hear anything? Had the children been drugged? The authorities ran a toxicology test, but the results were never revealed.
There were rumors that the eldest, Kok Peng, fought back, one of his arms almost severed, strands of hair in his hand. The police said the hair was his own. All inferences had to be based on actual clues. The police disclosed nothing, and we weren’t detectives.
It was difficult to deduce the kind of person the killer was. I’m Majid, chief psychologist at the Ministry of Home Affairs. I helped pioneer the criminal behavior analysis program within the police force. There are several reasons why criminals kill children.
One is that the children saw something, and the killer wanted to silence them. Another is mercy killing, where the killer believes the children shouldn’t live in a harsh world. A third is murder by proxy, a form of revenge killing to get at someone else. A fourth is sexually motivated.
When it comes to families coping with the loss of a child, the answer is straightforward: it destroys their whole world. Killing children is one of the most difficult crimes to witness, even for very experienced police officers. After the loss, the Tans lived with a relative for a while. They stopped the bus business and worked at a factory, but continued living in the same unit.
Maria said she never saw the wife again. She only saw the husband preparing food. She told her children, “Don’t disturb that uncle. Play outside quietly.
Don’t go inside their house. ”
If the Geylang Bahru murders had happened today, how would modern forensic science and criminal psychology have revealed the murderer? At the crime scene, apart from the blood-covered toilet and some blood stains in the kitchen sink, investigators found no usable fingerprints. The strands of hair in Kok Peng’s grip were determined to be his own.
The SPF’s crime scene forensics team was established in 1977, but it wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now. I’m Associate Professor Stella Tan, Director of the Forensic Science program at the National University of Singapore. Forensic science exists to provide objective evidence to the court. We know there were strands of hair in the child’s grip, but whose hair was it?
We can extract nuclear DNA from hair roots. If it’s the murderer’s hair, we can easily determine the culprit. If it’s the child’s hair, why did he pull out his own? Did someone pull the child’s hair out while he was struggling and then place it in his hand?
If we don’t have hair roots, we can still extract mitochondrial DNA from other parts of the hair. There’s a saying that you can’t escape the long arm of the law. If we can use today’s technology to assess the crime scene and reconstruct it, we can confirm the identity of the culprit. Let’s reconstruct the scene.
The flat was small, a one-room apartment. The parents observed no signs of forced entry when they returned. As the mother moved towards the back of the house through the kitchen, she passed by the sink. On the sink, there was a single drop of blood.
Just one solitary drop. This suggested the culprit was cleaning himself off there. It shows a lot of precautionary behavior. He was being careful.
When people see blood, they think it can identify the suspect. But in this case, the blood wasn’t of much use back then, except for basic blood typing. This brings up an important point: the absence of evidence does not indicate the evidence of absence. One recent technique police use is a chemical called luminol, which helps visualize invisible blood stains.
Luminol can reveal traces of blood that we can’t see with the naked eye. We can extract DNA from blood stains for comparison. The rest of the place was untouched, except for one item: a missing chopper from the house. As the mother moved through the kitchen and entered the toilet, she had the shock of her life.
She saw four of her children stacked in a pile, her youngest girl on top. One common question is the order of death. If the toilet was the original scene of the crime, then the boy murdered first was at the bottom of the pile, with the girl being the last. To kill a child is heinous.
To kill four young children is even worse. If you look at the number of wounds, it’s overkill. Far more wounds than needed. This suggests a lot of anger, fury, rage, frustration.
It also suggests it was personal. Another hypothesis is that it was done by someone with psychopathic qualities. Standing at a crime scene places us in the shoes of the victims. Imagine the fear they felt, witnessing the death of their own siblings.
It brings a step to our hearts and shows us why we are here. For every contact leaves a trace. We should let the evidence speak for itself. It’s been more than 40 years.
The father, Tan Kheng Chai, has passed away. The mother, Lee May Ying, is in her 70s and still waiting for the murders to be solved. The injustice and pain are still quietly borne by those who care. My heart is heavy.
The pictures on their tombstones were their kindergarten graduation photos. If they were alive, they could be someone else’s father, enjoying a child’s graduation or celebrating happy moments. It’s a somber feeling. I’m Joanna from Crime Library, here at Choa Chu Kang Cemetery.
I hope to use social media to appeal to those with information to step forward so that Mrs. Tan has some closure. The eldest, Kok Peng, followed by Kok Hin, Kok Soon, and the little girl, Chee Nee. They are buried in peace together.
If you want to pay your respects, please put a condolence in the chat box. We hope our continuous appeals will get new information and assist the police in solving this case. The police revisit cold cases regularly. As long as there are new leads or tip-offs, they will restart investigations.
Advances in latent fingerprint and DNA technology have improved dramatically. When techniques improve, evidence can be reviewed. Compared to the ’70s and ’80s, crime prevention in Singapore has improved by leaps and bounds. People look out for one another.
With the abundance of CCTVs, a solid foundation for crime prevention has been laid. Singapore is probably one of the safest places in the world. Children walk safely in the streets. Families walk with their young ones without fear.
It was not entirely a safe place many years ago. We’ve made it a lot safer. Since getting in touch with other residents of the former Block 58, Joanna and the other volunteers have recorded interviews, which they upload onto social media. They contacted them one by one.
The list is long. As a mother, I really hope to find the murderer soon. Who did this to the children? Many people think this is a lost cause because it happened so many years ago.
The murderer might not be around anymore. So why are we still looking? Why are we still bringing this up? Regardless if it’s a cold case that happened 30, 40, or even 50 years ago, we have to keep it alive.
If I could turn back the clock, I hope I would be there to do something for the four young children. Always remember Locard’s principle: every contact leaves a trace. Everything you touch leaves traces. If your right hand touches your left hand, whatever is on your right will leave traces on your left.
You can’t escape the long arm of the law. I hope there will be a resolution to this cold case from 1979. I firmly believe that as long as we don’t let the fire in our hearts die, cold cases can be cracked one day.
