Adrian Lim was a former radio-cable worker and bill collector who, in the 1970s, turned a flat in Toa Payoh, Singapore, into the consulting room of a self-styled spirit medium. Over several years he used feigned trances, conjuring tricks, sedative pills and electric shocks to take money and sex from women who came to him for help, and he bound two of them to him as his wife and his "holy" wife. In January and February 1981 he and those two women, Catherine Tan Mui Choo and Hoe Kah Hong, killed two children in the flat: Agnes Ng Siew Heok, a schoolgirl from Toa Payoh, and Ghazali bin Marzuki, a schoolboy from Clementi.
The case came to be known in Singapore as the Toa Payoh ritual murders. A trail of blood led police to the flat on the morning the second child was found. The trial, two years later, ran for 41 days, at the time the second-longest murder trial in the country's history, and drew crowds that packed the courtroom and the street outside. All three were sentenced to death in May 1983 and were hanged together at Changi Prison in November 1988.
Lim was born on January 6, 1942, the eldest of three children, according to the National Library Board's Singapore Infopedia. The library's journal BiblioAsia describes his family as middle class. He attended the Anglo-Chinese School but left after Secondary One. For a short time he worked as an informer for the Internal Security Department.
He then spent 14 years with Rediffusion, a broadcasting company. The Court of Appeal later set out his career there: three years as a wireman, which it said was probably where he picked up the knowledge of electricity he would go on to misuse, followed by eleven years as a bill collector. He married, and he had two children with his first wife.
Lim had been interested in the occult since his teens and read widely in Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity, BiblioAsia records. At his trial he claimed to have learned his methods from a man he called Uncle Willie, who he said had "special powers." From 1973, the Court of Appeal found, he was working as a medium with a woman associate, and from the start his clients included dance hostesses and prostitutes, whom he exploited for money and for sex.
His practice had a recognizable pattern. He went into what appeared to be trances, spoke in different voices and languages, and performed tricks. He told clients he could cure their ailments and drive evil spirits out of them, and he sold them charmed objects. He gave some of them pills he said would help them, which were in fact sedatives, and he gave "treatments" with electric current to "drive out the devil." He persuaded a number of women that sleeping with him was part of the cure, a way of cleansing them of evil, or used their fears to the same end.
In 1974 Lim met Catherine Tan Mui Choo, then 18 and working as a bar girl at the Champagne Bar on Anson Road; she had first come to him to have her fortune read. From 1975, the Court of Appeal found, she supported him with money she earned as a prostitute, which he had urged her to become, and he gave up his job. His relationship with her ended his marriage; his first wife divorced him. From 1976 to 1978 Lim and Tan performed striptease acts together in Singapore and in Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh and Penang. They married on June 11, 1977.
The marriage did not change the way Lim lived. He kept taking other women as "holy wives." He beat Tan often and gave her electric shocks. He also persuaded her that he needed sex with younger girls to rejuvenate himself, and the Court of Appeal found that she helped him in this, and in his deceptions generally, and shared the money they brought in. Infopedia describes her as generally depressive in nature and records that she stayed with Lim despite the mistreatment and his infidelity.
Hoe Kah Hong came from a poor family. Her father died when she was about eight, and she was sent to live with an aunt in Penang, returning to Singapore at 15. An elder sister had long suffered from schizophrenia. Hoe worked for years as a seamstress, factory hand and production operator; at the time of her arrest she was working at the Hewlett-Packard factory. She registered her marriage to Loh Ngak Hua in May 1978.
In 1979 her mother brought Hoe's sister to Lim for help. Lim gave the sister electric shocks and sexually exploited her over the course of a month. Hoe herself then came to him for treatment. Lim judged her, in the Court of Appeal's words, to be simple-minded and superstitious. He feigned a trance, told her that spirits wanted her as his "holy" wife, and in time she moved into the flat with him and Tan.
Lim set about winning the trust of Hoe's husband as well, and gave him electric-shock treatment too. On January 7, 1980, during one of these sessions at Lim's flat, Loh Ngak Hua died. Lim told Hoe that her "stronger spirit" had left her and entered her husband, and he told her what to say to the police: that Loh had been electrocuted by a faulty electric fan. She kept to that account, and the death was recorded as an accident.
Hoe became depressed afterward, heard voices and tried to kill herself. She was admitted to Woodbridge Hospital on May 26, 1980, where she said nothing about how her husband had died or about her life with Lim. Doctors first diagnosed a psychotic depression arising from grief, and later changed the diagnosis to schizophrenia. She recovered quickly and was discharged in early July. As an outpatient from July 1980 to January 1981 she was seen as well, though, the Court of Appeal noted, she had stopped taking her prescribed medicine about two months after she left the hospital. Lim and Tan assaulted her during this period, including with electric shocks.
In September 1980 Tan met a young beautician who sold cosmetics, and the couple befriended her and her family. Lim read her fortune and presented himself as a medium with occult powers. Playing on her grief for her late grandmother, he persuaded her that she had to sleep with him so that her grandmother's spirit could live in her. He gave her a drink of what he called holy water, laced with sedative pills, and sexually assaulted her when she became drowsy, and did so again afterward. Her family found out, confronted Lim and went to the police. She survived and is not named here.
Lim was arrested on a rape complaint in November 1980 and released on bail, on condition that he report to Toa Payoh Police Station every two weeks. He was angry with the police. He told Tan and Hoe that he would make trouble for them by killing children, and he told Hoe to lure children to the flat. Investigators and the courts would later describe the purpose in terms of revenge: to get back at the police and to confuse them. Lim himself told the trial court he had killed "to get even with the world," according to a Straits Times headline from his evidence. The trial court treated the revenge motive as a flimsy excuse.
Agnes Ng Siew Heok was nine years old, the youngest of nine children in her family, and a Primary Three pupil at Holy Innocents' Chinese Girls' School. She was last seen at the Church of the Risen Christ in Toa Payoh.
On the afternoon of Saturday, January 24, 1981, at about three o'clock, Hoe lured Agnes away from a playground near the church and brought her to the flat in Block 12, Toa Payoh Lorong 7. There she was given sedative pills, the drug the Court of Appeal identified as Roche tablets. Lim sexually abused her. All three adults took part in a ritual involving her blood, and all three took part in killing her. Around midnight they put her body in a travel bag and left it on the ground-floor lift landing of Block 11, the next block. She was found in the early hours of January 25. The post-mortem examination found that she had been sexually assaulted, and the National Library Board's accounts say she had been suffocated; the Court of Appeal, summarizing the facts that were not disputed at trial, says she was drowned.
Ghazali bin Marzuki was ten, the eldest of three children, and a Primary Four pupil at Henry Park Primary School. He lived in Clementi, on the other side of the island from Toa Payoh.
On the afternoon of Friday, February 6, 1981, at about two o'clock, Ghazali was playing with his cousins at a playground in Clementi when a woman came up to them and asked for help. The woman was Hoe. She took Ghazali by taxi to the flat in Toa Payoh. There he was drugged, gagged and tied. Lim performed a blood ritual on him, and the two women took part. The Court of Appeal noted that, according to the prison nursing records, Hoe later said she had felt pity for the boy when Lim applied electric current to his body. Ghazali was drowned at about eight o'clock that night. At about one o'clock the next morning the three left his body under a tree on open ground between Blocks 10 and 11, a short distance from their own block. The autopsy found that he had drowned, with signs of asphyxia, and recorded three burn marks on his back and a puncture wound on his arm.
Ghazali was found on the morning of February 7. Near his body police saw drops of blood, and they followed them to Block 12 and up to a flat on the seventh floor. The officer concerned later told the court, according to the Straits Times report of his evidence, that he had "stumbled onto" the flat.
Inside, officers found a bloodstain on the kitchen floor, and more blood elsewhere in the flat that tests confirmed was human. There was an altar with pictures of Jesus Christ and a collection of Hindu and Chinese idols, some smeared with blood. Investigators also found a piece of paper with the names and telephone numbers of both children, strands of hair, books on witchcraft and newspaper clippings about human sacrifice. Blood on Lim's shorts and on his handkerchief matched Ghazali's blood group.
Lim, Tan and Hoe were arrested at the flat on February 7, 1981, the day Ghazali was found, and taken to the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Department. Tan confessed first, then Lim, then Hoe. Within 24 hours all three were charged in court with the murders of the two children. Murder charges were also brought over the death of Loh Ngak Hua the year before.
At the end of February the three accused were sent to hospital for a month of psychiatric observation. Prison nursing notes from February and March 1981, later quoted by the Court of Appeal, recorded no sign that Hoe was hearing voices or suffering hallucinations or delusions, and recorded a remark in which she told Tan she would pretend to be mad in order to get a lighter sentence.
A preliminary inquiry, the hearing that then decided whether a case went to trial in the High Court, opened in September 1981. Crowds came to watch from the first day. A Straits Times report of September 17, 1981, was headlined with Lim saying he was guilty of the Toa Payoh murders.
The trial opened in the High Court in late March 1983, before two judges, Justice T. S. Sinnathuray and Justice F. A. Chua. Glenn Knight, the deputy public prosecutor, led the case for the state. Lim was defended by Howard Cashin with Choo Han Teck, who later sat as a judge of the Supreme Court; Choo recalled that it was probably the first time the Supreme Court had assigned two lawyers to one accused in a capital case. J. B. Jeyaretnam represented Tan, and Nathan Isaac represented Hoe.
Public interest was intense. The court issued numbered entry tickets, and those who attended in the morning could not come back in the afternoon. Cashin received threatening telephone calls, and he and the defense psychiatrist were given police protection during the trial. The Singapore Academy of Law, drawing on oral history interviews with the lawyers, records that one witness wore a large number of amulets and would not look at Lim while giving evidence.
The prosecution evidence covered Lim's years as a medium, his treatment of the women around him and the two killings. Former clients testified. One, a dance hostess from Malaysia, had sent Lim more than 100,000 Singapore dollars, and she gave evidence about how the accused had behaved around the time of the killings. Tan gave evidence that she had been completely under Lim's influence. Lim, in his own evidence, described how he had preyed on the superstitions of the people who came to him.
The facts of the killings were not seriously in dispute. None of the accused denied causing the children's deaths. Each relied instead on diminished responsibility, the partial defense under Exception 7 to section 300 of the Penal Code, which reduces murder to culpable homicide when an abnormality of mind substantially impairs the accused's mental responsibility. If it had succeeded, the sentence would have been life imprisonment or a term of up to ten years, not death. Hoe also pleaded insanity under section 84.
The trial turned on the psychiatrists. For Lim, the defense called Dr. Wong Yip Chong, who was for many years the only private psychiatrist who regularly gave evidence in criminal trials and who took the case for a token fee of 100 dollars a day. He found Lim grandiose from their first meeting and concluded that he was manic. More than a decade later, in an interview for the National Archives, he said he still believed it.
For the two women the defense called Dr. R. Nagulendran, a psychiatrist in private practice. He found that Tan suffered from a reactive depressive psychosis, kept going by drugs, electric shocks and Lim's threats, and that she had acted under compulsion and a delusion tied to her worship of the Hindu goddess Kali. He found that Hoe had schizophrenia that predated her meeting with Lim, that she had relapsed after leaving the hospital, and that she had developed a secondary delusion that killing was good and approved by Kali.
The prosecution answered with Dr. Chee Kuan Tsee of Woodbridge Hospital. He found no evidence of a depressive psychosis in Tan. He noted the scars Lim's abuse had left on her, but pointed to hospital notes showing that she had been content with Lim, who gave her gifts, that she had visited beauticians twice a week, and that she had told police in a statement she later retracted that Lim was a fake who cheated people. On Hoe, he said that even if she had schizophrenia she was in remission at the relevant time: she had held down her job, taken an active part in the crimes and shown no signs of illness after her arrest. Two doctors who had treated her as an outpatient, Dr. Kok Lee Peng and Dr. Kua Ee Heok, had both found her in remission in the months before the killings.
On May 25, 1983, Justice Sinnathuray delivered the court's verdict. It took about 15 minutes. All three were found guilty of both murders, and all three were sentenced to death. The judges rejected diminished responsibility for each of them. Sinnathuray later said the court had had no difficulty with the decision and had written a short judgment, with Justice Chua's agreement.
The judges found that Tan was not suffering from a reactive depressive psychosis at the time of the killings, though she had at times been depressed while living with Lim, and that even if she had some abnormality of mind it had not substantially impaired her responsibility. Having watched her give evidence, they called her "an artful and wicked person." They described Hoe as a simple person who could easily be influenced, accepted that there was schizophrenia in her family and that the doctors disagreed about her diagnosis, but found that she had been in remission since leaving the hospital about six months before the killings. Of Lim they said they were revulsed by his "abominable and depraved conduct."
The crowd outside the Supreme Court was large enough that police cordoned off the area, and cheers went up when the verdict became known. Sinnathuray later said that the trial had run longer than it needed to and that the case had received publicity it did not deserve. Choo Han Teck, looking back, said the defense had been disappointed, that public opinion had been firmly against Lim, and that he believed a psychiatric defense would have had a much better chance in later years. He also said that the more he worked with Lim, the more convinced he became that the man was not normal.
Lim did not appeal. Tan and Hoe did, arguing that the trial judges should have accepted Dr. Nagulendran's evidence and returned verdicts of culpable homicide. Tan was now represented by Francis Seow and Hoe again by Nathan Isaac. Hoe's counsel did not pursue the insanity plea.
On August 4, 1986, the Court of Appeal, made up of Chief Justice Wee Chong Jin, Justice L. P. Thean and Justice Lai Kew Chai, dismissed both appeals in Tan Mui Choo and Another v Public Prosecutor. It held that trial judges, like a jury, could weigh the medical evidence against everything else in the case, including the nature of the killings and the accused's conduct before, during and after them. It noted the evidence that Tan had agreed to Agnes's killing and suggested where her body should be left, and that Hoe had lured and drugged the children, understood throughout what was happening and helped carry the bodies away. The killings, the court said, were planned. On that evidence the trial judges had been entitled to find that neither woman had proved diminished responsibility.
A further appeal to the Privy Council in London, then Singapore's final court of appeal, also failed, and President Wee Kim Wee refused clemency.
Lim spent five and a half years on death row. According to the lawyers' oral history accounts, he asked to see his lawyers and Dr. Wong, became a Christian, and seemed somewhat more sober than before, though Wong found him as grandiose as ever: Lim told him he wanted to donate his eyes, his ears and his mouth. He turned away most visitors. In his last week his first wife came to see him. He asked for a priest, made his confession, and received Communion with his son, who was then doing National Service. When Choo Han Teck visited, Lim asked him, as he was leaving, to write a book about his life. Sister Gerard Fernandez, a Catholic nun, prayed with Lim and visited Tan and Hoe every week for seven years.
Adrian Lim, Catherine Tan Mui Choo and Hoe Kah Hong were hanged together at dawn on Friday, November 25, 1988, at Changi Prison. Lim was 46. After a funeral service at the Church of the Holy Family in Katong, their bodies were cremated at Mount Vernon Crematorium.
The case left a long mark on Singapore. Books followed quickly: within two months of the hangings there were two, Alan John's Unholy Trinity, by a journalist who had been a copy editor at The Straits Times when the children died, and N. G. Kutty's Adrian Lim's Beastly Killings. Sit Yin Fong wrote I Confess and a sequel, Was Adrian Lim Mad? Unholy Trinity was reissued in 2016. The case also appears in later collections of Singapore crime, among them Yeo Suan Futt's Murder Most Foul (2013).
Two films drew on it. Medium Rare, directed by Arthur Smith and loosely based on the case, premiered on November 28, 1991; BiblioAsia describes it as Singapore's first full-length English-language feature and records that it was a commercial failure with harsh reviews. Hugo Ng's God or Dog premiered at the Singapore International Film Festival in 1997 and was criticized for its gratuitous sex and nudity. In a 2021 study in the journal Asian Cinema, the researcher Benson Pang argued that the first film treats Lim as a threat to be removed from a modern, rational city, while the second presents his madness as a by-product of Singapore's rapid modernization.
Among the lawyers, the question of Lim's sanity never quite closed. Dr. Wong held to his diagnosis of mania, and Choo Han Teck remained convinced that Lim was not normal, while the trial judges and the Court of Appeal found the killings planned and the defense of diminished responsibility unproven for all three accused.
Proven at trial and final: the murders of Agnes Ng Siew Heok and Ghazali bin Marzuki by Lim, Tan and Hoe acting together. The defenses of diminished responsibility (and, for Hoe, insanity) were rejected by the High Court, and the women's appeals were dismissed.
Charged but never tried: the death of Loh Ngak Hua on January 7, 1980. The Court of Appeal records that Lim's electric-shock treatment proved fatal and that Lim had Hoe tell the police it was an accident with a fan; BiblioAsia says Lim lured Loh to the flat and electrocuted him. A murder charge was brought but stood down after the convictions for the children's deaths, so no court ever decided whether it was murder. It is not counted here as one of his murders.
The motive: the courts accepted that the killings were planned as revenge on the police and to confuse them, and Lim said he had killed to get even with the world. Talk of human sacrifice and of the goddess Kali ran through the evidence, but the trial court treated the revenge story as a flimsy excuse, and the Court of Appeal found that Hoe's conduct pointed to other motives as well. The "ritual" label is the press's name for the case, not a legal finding.
Details that vary between sources: the children's ages (9 and 10 in the National Library Board accounts and the Singapore Academy of Law; 8 and 11 in the 1986 judgment); how Agnes died (suffocation in the National Library Board accounts, drowning in the 1986 judgment); the spelling of her name (Siew Heok in most sources, Siew Hock in the judgment); the length of the trial (41 days in most sources, 42 in one photo caption, "about two months" in Infopedia); the date it opened (BiblioAsia gives March 27, 1983, a Sunday; the first Straits Times reports are dated March 29); and the ages of the two women (Infopedia gives 26 and 25 at the trial; BiblioAsia gives 32 and 33, apparently their ages in 1988).
January 6, 1942: Adrian Lim is born in Singapore, the eldest of three children.
Before 1973: attends the Anglo-Chinese School, leaving after Secondary One; briefly an informer for the Internal Security Department; then 14 years with Rediffusion as a wireman and bill collector.
1973: begins working as a medium.
1974: meets Catherine Tan Mui Choo, then 18.
1975: Tan begins supporting him; he leaves his job. His first marriage ends in divorce.
1976 to 1978: Lim and Tan perform striptease acts in Singapore and Malaysia.
June 11, 1977: Lim marries Tan.
1979: Hoe Kah Hong comes to Lim's flat with her mother and sister; she later moves in as his "holy" wife.
January 7, 1980: Hoe's husband, Loh Ngak Hua, dies during an electric-shock session in the flat; recorded as an accident.
May 26 to early July 1980: Hoe is treated at Woodbridge Hospital.
September to November 1980: Lim sexually assaults a young beautician; her family complains, and he is arrested and bailed.
January 24, 1981: Agnes Ng Siew Heok, 9, is lured from near the Church of the Risen Christ and killed in the flat.
January 25, 1981: Agnes is found in a bag at the lift landing of Block 11, Toa Payoh Lorong 7.
February 6, 1981: Ghazali bin Marzuki, 10, is taken from a Clementi playground and killed in the flat.
February 7, 1981: Ghazali is found between Blocks 10 and 11; police follow blood drops to Block 12 and arrest Lim, Tan and Hoe. All three confess and are charged within 24 hours.
Late February 1981: the accused are sent for a month of psychiatric observation.
September 1981: preliminary inquiry.
Late March 1983: trial opens in the High Court before Justices T. S. Sinnathuray and F. A. Chua.
May 25, 1983: all three are found guilty of both murders and sentenced to death. Lim does not appeal.
August 4, 1986: the Court of Appeal dismisses the appeals of Tan and Hoe.
1986 to 1988: Privy Council appeal fails; President Wee Kim Wee refuses clemency.
November 25, 1988: Lim, Tan and Hoe are hanged at Changi Prison.
Late 1988 to early 1989: Unholy Trinity and Adrian Lim's Beastly Killings are published.
November 28, 1991: Medium Rare premieres.
1997: God or Dog premieres at the Singapore International Film Festival.
2016: Unholy Trinity is reissued.