Alex Josey - Cold blooded murders

Justice Chua said, “Taking a novice to dangerous waters. Is that not an act within the meaning of the law?” Mr Kirpal Singh replied it was not.

“If he had told her to dive in?” asked “the Acting Chief Justice.

“Yes, an act would have been clear,” said Mr Kirpal Singh.

On the fifth day of the appeal, the defence submitted that Justice Buttrose had treated some of the evidence for the defence with scepticism and scorn. Defence counsel also alleged that some of the judge’s remarks were an outright direction to the jury to disbelieve. While surveying the defence, the judge had presented the case for the prosecution over again.

Mr Coomaraswamy referred to the two pairs of gloves which had been left at the police station by Ang. In the course of his evidence Ang had been shown two pairs of gloves and asked if he agreed that they were very new. He said they smelt new. Counsel said that 21 months after the gloves were supposed to have been surrendered to the police they still smelt new. He submitted that the judge should have commented on this.

The Acting Chief Justice, “The idea is that they might not have been the very gloves? The police might have substituted new gloves?”

“That is so,” said Mr Coomaraswamy.

Counsel said there was no evidence to show that the books on scuba-diving seized from Ang in December 1964 had been in his possession before 27 August 1963. The judge, he said, had repeatedly referred to these books, and ‘very much play made’, he said, of a passage in the book which warned that a little nick in the flipper might lead to an incident with disastrous results.

As for the green flipper that Jenny wore, Mr Coomaraswamy said it was his submission that the jury should not have been deprived of the opportunity to find, if they wanted to, that the flipper was, in fact, tampered with after Henderson found it.

Counsel described Justice Buttrose’s summing up as ‘extremely partial’ and ‘grossly unfair to the accused’. In fact, ‘he did not put his defence to the jury’.

Mr Francis Seow began his reply on the sixth day of the appeal. He submitted that Sunny Ang had a lust for money and tried through an ‘accidental death’ to gain $400,000.

Dealing with the road accident involving Ang and his passenger Jenny, Mr Seow quoted from a manual on evidence, ‘Previous attempt to commit a crime is akin to preparation. It is also closely allied to the preparation for the commission of an offence.”

Counsel argued that Sunny Ang himself had closed the door to a defence open to him at his trial. He had excluded from his defence the question of fraud and conspiracy between him and Jenny against the insurance companies. Ang, Mr Seow said, could not now be heard on his counsel’s argument that there might have been a possibility that Ang did not intend the death of Jenny, but had conspired with her to share in the insurance money he could collect after she had gone into hiding. Mr Francis Seow said, “This was not a defence raised by counsel though it was a defence open to him at the trial. It was, in fact, not explored, nor developed.” He said Ang had tried to get $900,000 worth of insurance on Jenny, and at the time of her disappearance she was carrying accident coverage of $450,000.

Continuing his arguments on the eighth day of the appeal, Mr Seow described the defence suggestion of an alternative or lesser verdict as ‘grotesque’.

Referring to the two pairs of gloves found in Ang’s bag, crown counsel submitted that at no stage did Ang deny they were his gloves. Mr Coomaraswamy’s suggestion that they could have been substituted by the police was monstrous.

Mr Seow said the essence of the case was that the victim must die and the victim must die by accident. “If she dies a natural death, Ang or his mother cannot possibly stand to gain anything. So she must die by accident whether under the guise of a road accident, or accident at sea, or an accident in the air. I submit that the facts which we have adduced show that Ang directed his mind to the accomplishment of that aim. It was cunningly contrived, and carried out with consummate coolness. In achieving that objective he must kill.” Crown counsel argued that the judge’s summing up was favourable to Ang.

Making his final address on the last day of the appeal, Mr Coomaraswamy pointed out that the Court of Appeal could order a re-trial. He said that although he had made complaints about the trial judge’s conduct, he was not for a moment saying that it was intended. “Those of us who know the judge know that he does things in a certain way, but the accused does not know, neither do the members of the jury.” Counsel said that he felt it unlikely that Ang would get a fair trial in a re-trial before a jury. The three stages of publicity, he said, to which the present case had been subject, would not give him a fair trial. He urged the Court of Appeal to give Ang a re-trial under Section 304, culpable homicide. This would be without a jury, but by a judge alone.

Dismissing the appeal on 19 November 1965, Justice Tan said, “It is true that the learned trial judge expressed himself with great emphasis and in strong terms on various matters. But the jury were left in no doubt that they were the sole judges of the facts in the case.”

Justice Tan dismissed as ‘quite trivial’ a good number of the grounds of so-called bias on the part of the trial judge. “In one instance, however, it is clear that the learned trial judge was in error, when he stated in his summing up that both the appellant and the witness Henderson used an improvised washer during demonstrations in court. In fact, it was Henderson who used an improvised washer, while the appellant used a new Healthway washer in the course of another demonstration. In our view this was a slip of no great consequence made in the course of a long trial, and is no indication of bias on the part of the learned trial judge.”

The Acting Chief Justice said, “The appellant’s real intention was to murder Jenny, and in pursuance of that intention he assisted Jenny in putting on the diving equipment, which had been brought in the sampan and allowed her, a novice, to go down alone wearing a flipper, which had previously been cut, into waters which he knew were dangerous and hazardous, with the result that she met her death.”

Sunny Ang was driven back to Changi Jail. He was still confident he would not hang.

Appeal To Privy Council

More than a year was to elapse before Ang’s application for special leave to appeal to the Juridical Committee of the Privy Council could be heard. On 5 October 1966, Mr Ralph Millner Q.C. appeared before the Committee on his behalf.

Sunny Ang’s legal advisers decided to base their application principally on the ground that Justice Buttrose wrongfully allowed the prosecution to tender evidence of the road accident in which Ang, driving the car with Jenny as the passenger, was involved. Such evidence was ‘evidence of the res gestas, and also evidence of similar acts by the accused to rebut the defence of accident or mistake’.

The prosecution, they said, appeared to rely upon this evidence as showing a previous attempt by Sunny Ang to kill Jenny, although this suggestion was never put to him in terms in cross-examination, ‘and does not appear in terms anywhere in the learned trial judge’s summing up to the jury’.

Sunny Ang’s legal advisers argued that this car accident was not connected with, and was removed in time from, the matters which formed the subject matter of the charge against Ang, and could not be said to be part of the res gestas (or the alleged intention of Ang to kill Jenny).

They held that the alleged acts of Ang on the day of the road accident were not ‘similar acts’ to those that the prosecution alleged he did in the commission of the offence with which he was charged. The evidence relating to the motor car accident, they said, would not have been sufficient to sustain a charge of attempted murder: at its highest it could only have given rise to some suspicion against Sunny Ang.