The ATM footage was the beginning of the end. Surveillance cameras in the Geylang district captured a slim, bespectacled man in his fifties withdrawing cash from a young woman’s account over two days. But the woman, Liu Hong Mei, was not there to see it. She was already dead.
Liu Hong Mei had come to Singapore in November 2002 on a work permit. She was a production operator at a circuit board company in Serangoon North, working the overnight shift from 7 p. m. to 7 a.
m. She sent money home to her parents in Changchun every three months. She took English classes for a year and a half, and the day before she died, she met with a consultant about an international diploma in travel and tourism. She told the matchmaking agency she had registered with that she liked Singapore and hoped to settle down there with a husband.
She was looking forward to being a bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding in September. Her supervisor, Leong Soo Chor, was 50 years old when he joined the company. He was married with three children, a slim, bespectacled man slightly balding. In January 2004, he was transferred to her team as her direct supervisor.
By June, on his recommendation, she was promoted with a pay raise. Soon after, they began an affair. A colleague walked in on them kissing in his office. An anonymous complaint was sent to management.
Both received a verbal warning. Liu Hong Mei acknowledged it in writing. Leong Soo Chor refused to sign, denying the allegation in a letter. Her former supervisor, Foo Ru Cheng, noticed it early.
One morning, both came in for their night shift wearing the same clothes they had on the day before, meaning they never went home. Liu Hong Mei knew the relationship was going nowhere. Leong Soo Chor was married and 28 years older than her. Someone at the factory told Foo Ru Cheng that she had been making plans to break away, that she envied her sister’s life and wanted a husband she could build a future with.
And that Leong Soo Chor had found out about those plans and felt betrayed. On the morning of June 13th, Leong Soo Chor and Liu Hong Mei checked into Hotel 81 Gold in Geylang around 10:30 a. m. While she was in the shower, he went through her bag looking for a comb.
He found her ATM card instead. He knew her PIN and took it without telling her. They checked out at 3 p. m.
Over the next two days, he drained over two thousand Singapore dollars from her account. It was most of what she had. When she discovered the missing card and the unauthorized withdrawals, she went to the police. She was told to contact her bank since the ATM footage might show who made the withdrawals.
That evening, she called Leong Soo Chor and told him about the report. He didn’t tell her he was the one who had taken the card. On the morning of June 15th, Leong Soo Chor asked her to come to his ninth-floor flat in Geylang. He told her he would accompany her to the bank.
His wife and eldest daughter were in Thailand. His son was staying at a hostel. His youngest child wouldn’t be home until after 6 p. m.
Liu Hong Mei had never been to his home before. She arrived between 9:30 and 10 a. m. They went to the master bedroom and sat on the bed.
They talked and were intimate for about 20 minutes. Then he strangled her with a bath towel. He looped it around her neck, crossed the ends, and pulled. He held on for between 10 and 20 minutes until his hands grew tired.
Her face turned blue with blood coming from her nostrils. When he let go, she fell back onto the bed. Already, he was thinking about what to do with her body. He pulled her by the legs into the kitchen.
He undressed her just outside the bathroom, then took a meat cleaver. He began with her feet since they were the smallest part to cut through. When he couldn’t get through the bones, he used a rubber mallet to hammer the cleaver through. He wrapped her severed feet in newspaper and bagged them.
He repeated the process on her legs. He tried cutting upward from her pelvis, then abandoned that and cut straight across her waist. He flushed some of her innards down the toilet. He went to his son’s room for more plastic bags, masking tape, and cardboard boxes that had held computer parts.
Her lower torso went into one box, taped shut. Her severed head, wrapped in newspaper, went into its own bag. He rinsed the blood from her upper torso, wrapped it, and packed it into a second box. The process ran until past noon.
He cleaned the toilet, washed his hands and legs, and gathered her clothing and shoes. He took his bike out, dropping her clothes into a garbage bin. Further along, he left her shoes in another bin. He left her bagged feet at a bus shelter.
He caught a taxi to Clarke Quay and dropped her lower legs into the Singapore River. From a second taxi, he got out near Boat Quay, carried the bag holding her head down to the water, and let it go as well. The torso boxes were too heavy to carry by hand, so he went back to his bike. One trip took him to the Kallang River by Beach Road, where he put the box with her lower torso into the water.
He pedaled home for the second box, crossed to the far bank, and dumped it. By around 5 p. m. , he was back at his flat.
He scrubbed the toilet again with a brush and a green scouring pad. He put the sheets and pillowcase into the washing machine. He bagged her handbag, left behind on the bedroom floor. He changed and left for his regular 7 p.
m. shift. He got off at Ang Mo Kio to switch to a bus, dropping the handbag into a trash bin outside the station. He clocked in at 6:45 p.
m. On the morning of June 16th, clean-up worker Murugan Kaniapan was doing his usual rounds along the Kallang River. A cardboard box caught his eye, tape shut, soaked through with water. He went to move it out of the way, but the bottom gave out as he lifted it.
A green plastic bag dropped out. “That was when I saw the lower half of a woman’s body,” he later told reporters. “There was no blood and no smell. I could see the bone at the knee was very white.
” Officers searched the area. About 200 to 300 meters away on the opposite bank, they found another cardboard box containing her upper torso, arms and hands still attached but her head missing. Forensic experts pulled fingerprints from the upper torso and matched them against the records for foreign work permit holders. The match came back.
Liu Hong Mei. By then, her colleagues had already filed a missing person’s report. Police went to her workplace that evening. Inspector Roy Lim sat Leong Soo Chor down for questioning.
He claimed he barely knew her, stumbled over his words, his hands shaking. The inspector noticed small cuts across his fingers. Leong Soo Chor said he picked them up fixing a leaky pipe. Officers searched his flat.
They found a blue bicycle and green plastic bags, but nothing out of place. Then Inspector Lim thought to check beneath the toilet bowl, a detail from an old case file he had once read about killer John Martin Scripps. There he found a faint reddish mark. Lab testing confirmed it was Liu Hong Mei’s blood.
At 4:40 a. m. on June 17th, Leong Soo Chor began his first statement. He told officers that Liu Hong Mei had suggested they die together.
She would go first to show her sincerity, and he had strangled her at her own request before losing the nerve to follow through himself. He was placed under arrest at 5:55 a. m. Police launched a search for the rest of her body.
The Singapore River’s trash is collected every few days and transported to the Tuas South Incineration Plant. A team sifted through the garbage for ten hours. They found a decomposed head wrapped in newspaper in a yellow plastic bag. They found a pair of severed lower limbs nearby.
The head was unrecognizable. Forensic pathologist Dr. Cuthbert Teo confirmed it was hers by matching a malformed tooth visible in her photographs to the one found on her body. Her feet were never found.
There was a complication. Leong Soo Chor had an identical twin also living in Singapore. Identical twins carry matching DNA, so any genetic evidence linking him to the scene would also link his brother. Police traced the twins’ movements across the entire week.
Every hour was accounted for, and nothing connected the brother to Liu Hong Mei at all. Whoever the cameras caught making those withdrawals, it had to be Leong Soo Chor. He was charged with murder, which at the time made the death sentence mandatory. The trial opened on May 3rd, 2006, before Justice Tay Yong Kwang.
The defense argued that Liu Hong Mei had consented to her death as part of a pact. Under a specific provision of the penal code, that would reduce the charge from murder to culpable homicide. Before the trial could begin, there was a procedural fight over one of his statements. In it, he had acknowledged that Liu Hong Mei didn’t know he intended only for her to die, and that his real reason for killing her was fear of being identified as the ATM thief.
He claimed Inspector Lim had persuaded him into giving it by promising a lesser charge and supplying herbal tea. Inspector Lim denied it, producing his field diary showing the tea was purchased more than a week later. The judge found his account not credible, and the statement was admitted. At trial, more than 280 photographs of her dismembered body were shown.
At one point, Leong Soo Chor was asked to demonstrate how he had strangled her. He stood and used his own lawyer as a stand-in, looping a towel around his neck to show the position. Straits Times reporter Selina Lum noticed that as he demonstrated, he had a strange smile on his face. She said it chilled her to the bone.
Leong Soo Chor testified in his own defense, reverting to the death pact story. He said he had been confused, emotionally overcome, that she had brought up dying together and he had complied. He intended to strangle himself afterwards but couldn’t when he saw her face. Justice Tay did not believe him.
He described Liu Hong Mei as a lively young woman in the vernal stage of her life. He walked through the evidence of who she had been in the days before her death, the family day with her sister, the English classes, the tourism diploma consultations, the matchmaking agency, the wedding she was to stand in. He said the story of a spontaneous death pact was not consistent with the woman the evidence described. He addressed the real motive directly.
Leong Soo Chor had feared she would identify him from the ATM footage, exposing his theft and destroying his reputation with his family. He decided to silence her permanently rather than face those consequences. The judge said he “stole the deceased’s heart and pilfered her card and hard-earned savings and finally robbed her of her life. He butchered her after her death and took her apart.
” He closed his judgement with a poem he wrote himself: “This truly is a sad riddle. How could one savagely strangle and so unfeelingly mangle the woman one had just cuddled? ”
On May 19th, 2006, Leong Soo Chor was sentenced to death by hanging. He appealed.
A three-judge panel unanimously dismissed it. Justice V. K. Rajah said, “If he could not bear to leave his family, why would he want to take his life away?
” Justice Choo Han Teck added, “Which man who claims to love a woman so much that he follows her to her death would steal her ATM card and money? ” He filed another motion, which was turned down. With every legal avenue closed, the only option left was a plea for clemency to the President. It was rejected.
On November 30th, 2007, Leong Soo Chor was hanged at Changi Prison at dawn. He was 52 years old. News of the arrest spread to China, where Liu Hong Mei had grown up. Relatives in Changchun kept the truth from her parents as best they could.
In Singapore, strangers started showing up at the ninth-floor flat. People lit incense outside the front door, hoping a connection to a death might hand them lucky lottery numbers. Others threw things in. Eventually, the family moved out for good.
The flat got a name, a “death flat,” and nobody wanted to buy it for years. Her body wasn’t released for burial until the forensic work was complete. Her wake came nearly a month after she died. About 150 people showed up.
Some came to mourn; others were curious, hoping to walk away with lucky lottery numbers. Undertaker Roland Tay handled the funeral with his wife Sally Hoe, charging the family nothing. Preparing her body took seven hours of stitching the recovered pieces back together. Since her feet were never found, Tay’s team made a pair out of wax so she could be laid out whole.
Her coffin was filled with her favorite toys, books, and clothes. Her elder sister could not bear to attend. She was cremated that day at Mandai Crematorium. Donations collected amounted to more than 20,000 Singapore dollars, all passed on to her sister.
Roland Tay was entrusted with carrying her ashes home to her family in Changchun, returning her finally to the place she left. In 2018, Foo Ru Cheng broke 13 years of silence in an interview. He had briefly been considered a suspect himself, mainly because he was the youngest of her three supervisors and closest in age to her. He said, “Some employees mistakenly thought I was the murderer and pointed fingers at me.
” He had to endure that silence without being able to clear his name while the investigation was ongoing. He remembered Leong Soo Chor coming in for his shift the day after the murder still holding a Chinese newspaper, scanning it for any report of a body being discovered. Liu Hong Mei was 22 years old, the third of four children. She told the matchmaking agency’s director how much she liked Singapore.
It was clean, easy to settle into, the kind of place she pictured a future in. Today she would be in her forties, maybe with a career, a husband, children. Instead, her life ended in a Geylang flat, taken by a man who put his own reputation above the value of her life.
