Authors: Alex Josey
FEW MURDERS, ESPECIALLY PREMEDITATED
MURDERS, are ever witnessed. Most murderers are convicted by circumstantial
evidence.
A Singapore judge once told a jury there
were two things he must tell them about circumstantial evidence. The first is
that it is the cumulative effect of all the evidence that is important, not one
isolated link in the chain of circumstantial evidence. The cumulative effect of
every one of the links must be considered together not individually. You must
consider circumstantial evidence in its totality, the Judge told the jury. The
second thing I must draw your attention to, he continued, is that the question
in this case (The Trial of Sunny Ang), depending as it does on circumstantial
evidence, is whether the cumulative of all the evidence leads to the
irresistible conclusion that it was the accused who committed this crime
(murdered Jenny, a barmaid). Or is there some reasonably possible explanation
such as, for example: was it an accident? The emphatic answer was ‘No’. This
was no accident. It was premeditated murder. Sunny Ang murdered her. He was
sentenced to death and was hanged.
No one concerned with the violent death of
the beauty queen, school teacher, Jean Sinnappa, could doubt for one moment
that she had been brutally murdered. The question was who had plunged the knife
deep and savagely into her breast. The prosecution gathered circumstantial
evidence in an attempt to prove that the guilty person was Jean’s
brother-in-law, S. Karthigesu. By a five to two majority the jury found him
guilty. The judge concurred with the verdict and sentenced Karthigesu to death.
He appealed, and it was during this appeal that one of the 48 witnesses
confessed that his evidence was untrue. His sworn testimony were lies. The
perjurer had destroyed the chain of circumstantial evidence.
The three appeal judges deliberated for more
than an hour. In allowing Karthigesu’s appeal against conviction and sentence
Justice Wan Suleiman said the Court was satisfied that some inadmissible
evidence was admitted and placed before the jury. He added that no reasonable
jury properly directed would have found Karthigesu guilty. The Judge said that
in considering the appeal the Court considered not only the additional evidence
(that there had been perjury), but also the other grounds put forward by the
appellant.
Vivacious,
passionate and rich,
beautiful 33-year-old Jean
Sinnappa had been a beauty queen. Jean, a schoolteacher, was a widow with three
children. Her husband had died in a road accident on New Year’s Day 1978,
leaving her half a million dollars.
Late one night in April 1979, Jean was
murdered. Her body was found in a car parked on the under-pass on the
Klang-Subang Airport road, not far from where her husband had been killed. Jean
had been stabbed to death. She had been attacked from behind. Police found her
slumped in the blood-soaked front passenger’s seat. Her safety belt was still
fastened, her body tilted towards the left door; her hair was crumpled. Did the
assassin grab her hair with one hand while trying to slit her throat with a
knife or dagger held in the other? Her right palm was over her left palm on her
lap. One of the stabs had been so powerful that the weapon plunged through her
breast right to the spinal cord.
Jean’s brother-in-law, S. Karthigesu,
wearing white trousers and white shoes was found lying, either unconscious or
pretending to be, on the road at the rear of the car. He told the police that
when he got out of the car to urinate, he had been attacked by four men. He
said they forced him to watch Jean being stabbed to death.
Then they felled him with a blow to the
head. Not a drop of blood was found on Karthigesu’s white trousers or white
shoes. He was taken to the hospital. Two doctors failed to find any sign of a
head injury. Karthigesu’s dentures had fallen out of his mouth. They were found
on the road by a policeman. One of the doctors said he could not find even a
scratch on Karthigesu. A post-mortem revealed that Jean was intoxicated at the
time of her death.
No-one witnessed the murder. The weapon was
never found. Karthigesu was the last person to see Jean alive. In due course,
after investigations, the police arrested 37-year-old Karthigesu and charged
him with murdering Jean. At the trial, the Deputy Public Prosecutor, Mr T.D.
Sambanthamurthi, said the murder of Jean Sinnappa was a crime of passion
triggered by intense jealousy (chiefly due to her intimate association with a
Sri Lankan doctor), and greed to get her wealth. The doctor and Jean exchanged
lurid love letters, and the prosecution said that Karthigesu’s discovery of
these love-letters in Jean’s handbag sent him raving mad with jealousy.
Karthigesu denied he had seen the letters before Jean’s murder. The prosecution
described Karthigesu’s account of four men stabbing Jean, ‘a highly improbable
story’. The Deputy Public Prosecutor said that Karthigesu had found out that
Jean had stayed with her doctor lover at the Apollo Hotel. Karthigesu’s love
for Jean had turned to hatred. He decided to kill her. But why in April 1979?
The DPP said Karthigesu was obsessed by the
thought that Jean was going to meet Dr Narada Warnasurya in Sri Lanka or in
Singapore. “By this time Karthigesu was already raving mad, but, being a
psychologist he continued to pretend being good to Jean. He continued to allow
Jean to live with him in Klang, and because he loved Jean’s three children, he
had to close one eye over the matter.”
The DPP said that the case against
Karthigesu, a lecturer in psychology at a specialist teacher’s training
institute in Cheras, was entirely circumstantial. He would adduce evidence to
show that the killing was brutal and premeditated and that Karthigesu was the
last person seen in her company.
According to the DPP, Karthigesu washed
himself at a pond nearby after killing Jean. Then the accused went back to the
road and waited for passing vehicles. As soon as he saw one he lay down on the
ground hoping to be seen and taken to the hospital ‘where he could pull a
yarn’. Did anyone see Karthigesu at the pond? No, but the DPP said this theory,
or deduction, could be supported in the evidence by police dog-handler Corporal
K. Ramakrishnan, who told the Court that his dog Keris traced the scent to the
pool and back to the road. Added the DPP: “That Karthigesu had lain down on the
ground each time he saw a vehicle, was supported in the evidence of witnesses
who said they saw his stomach heaving up and down.” Counsel said this would not
have happened if he had been knocked unconscious, as Karthigesu claimed he was.
A bundle of letters, mostly love letters
between Jean and her Sri Lankan lover, aroused a great deal of interest. The
prosecution urged the jury to read a particular portion of a letter he had
marked when they were free in the afternoon. ASP Ramli did not want to read
that bit in open Court. “It is obscene, my Lord,” he explained.
Judge: What is obscene? We are all
adults.
He advised the jury to read all the letters.
Counsel for the defence, Mr Ponnudurai, read
out parts of an anonymous letter found among Jean’s possessions. It accused
Jean of carrying on a ‘malicious and vindictive love game’ with her Sri Lankan
lover. The letter read: “You showered him with gifts, shirts etc. You took him
out to the cinema, Lake Gardens, Templer Park etc. You visited him in his room
against his wish, you led him on and gave yourself freely to him ... ” The
letter addressed Jean as ‘Our dear Miss Jean,’ and it began: ‘We are very close
and good friends of Dr Narada, a victim of your malicious and vindictive
love-game. He was a very happy man, but he was fated to meet the devil—you.’
The letter was signed ‘Men of Fair Play and
Justice’. It ended: “Now a friendly warning. Dr Narada will not take you. He is
happy with his family. So don’t make a play for him again. He has had enough
both in the form of pleasure and pain. Pleasure is what he got from you in his
room, and pain is for trusting you. We will not let you rest in peace. We will
meet your brother-in-law and tell him all we know. We will be only happy when
we see you fall and be disgraced.”
Few murders are ever witnessed. Often the
murder weapon is never found. Sometimes the motive is unclear. Othertimes the
victim’s body is missing. A murderer in Britain dissolved the bodies of the
persons he murdered in a bath full of acid. Then he pulled out the plug and the
bodies vanished down the drain. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence.
In Singapore, Sunny Ang murdered his lover
so as to collect the insurance money. Ang insured Jenny, a cabaret girl, for
nearly a million dollars. Then he took her scuba-diving in dangerous waters.
Nobody saw her murdered. Sunny Ang knew Jenny would never surface.
Ang was in a boat with the boatman. He never
got his feet wet. He knew that Jenny’s body would be swept out to sea.
Judge Buttrose, presiding at Ang’s trial,
explained to the jury the meaning of circumstantial evidence. “If,” he said,
“you take a novice scuba-diver to waters you know to be inherently dangerous
with the intention that this scuba-diver shall dive into those waters, and you
intend that by so doing she will never come up again, that she would be killed;
if that is your intention, that this novice diver should go down into those
waters and you intend she should be killed then that is equally murder as if
you had accompanied that novice diver down to the bottom of the seabed and
strangled her with your own hands.”
Judge Buttrose said the jury must remember
that it is the cumulative effect of all the evidence that is important, not one
isolated link in the chain of circumstantial evidence ... you must consider
circumstantial evidence in its totality. The cumulative effect of every one of
those links must be considered together, not individually.
There were sixteen links in the chain of
circumstantial evidence which sent Sunny Ang to the gallows. The prosecution in
the case of the murder of Jean, the Malaysian beauty queen, did not list the
links in the chain of evidence which caused the jury to find Karthigesu Guilty
of Murder.
On appeal it was discovered that one of the
links was perjured evidence. Other evidence, the appeal judges said, should not
have been presented. Accordingly the appeal was allowed. S. Karthigesu was set
free. The man who gave perjured evidence at the trial was sentenced by another
Judge to 10 years’ jail.
“YOU MUST NOT SPECULATE OR GUESS at
any conclusion which is not supported by evidence,” Judge Azmi told the jury.
He reminded the all-male jury of seven of their oaths to give a true, just and
honest verdict. They should also not allow anything other than the evidence
adduced in Court, to influence them in any way.
In his summing up, which took one hour and
45 minutes, Justice Azmi said: “You are the sole judges of facts. This means
that you have to form your own opinions based on the evidence. In the course of
my summing up I am entitled to express my views on the facts and to comment on
the witnesses, but you need not follow me if you disagree with me—these being
questions of fact. But I am the sole judge of law and you must accept my
direction to you on questions of law.”
Justice Azmi said Karthigesu was not obliged
to prove his innocence. It was the duty of the prosecution to prove its case
beyond reasonable doubt.
The jury, he said, had to start on the
assumption that Karthigesu was innocent and then consider the evidence produced
by the prosecution. The prosecution must prove its case beyond all reasonable
doubt. “Reasonable doubt is not a flicker of doubt. It is not any fanciful or
imaginary doubt of the sort which arises in the mind of a person who shrinks
from arriving at a decision, nor does it mean any doubt that you may be able to
conjure up for the purpose of avoiding the making of an unpleasant decision.
Reasonable doubt means a real, genuine doubt
of the sort which will make you hesitate in making a decision in any important
private affairs of your own.”
The jury should consider the defence only
after it was satisfied that the prosecution had proved its case beyond
reasonable doubt.
Explaining what constituted murder, the
judge said a killing became a murder only when it was committed with certain
intentions. “While we cannot see or feel what is going on in the mind of any
human being, it is possible to adduce a person’s intention from his conduct and
all the surrounding circumstances.” Justice Azmi said these circumstances
included a person’s actions, what he did, what he said, the injury or injuries
inflicted on the victim and the type of weapon used, among other things.
Justice Azmi told the jury there was no
direct evidence implicating Karthigesu of the murder except for the evidence of
prosecution witness Bandhulananda Jayatilake which, if believed, would
constitute an extra-judicial confession.
Under the law a person can be found guilty
on circumstantial evidence, but the circumstantial evidence must be such that
if it is believed, there is no reasonable alternative to the guilt of the
accused. Added the Judge: “If there is anything less, there is no case at all
and the accused is entitled to an acquittal.”