On Saturday, July 23, 1983, two young men forced their way into a house at 4 Andrew Road, Singapore, held the five people inside for hours, and robbed them. By the afternoon three of the five were dead: Robert Tay, an industrialist who owned the house; his wife, Annie Tay; and their maid. A 10-year-old girl, the couple's daughter, and her tutor survived. One week later a 19-year-old national serviceman named Sek Kim Wah stood in a Singapore court charged with five murders: the three at Andrew Road and two more, of people whose bodies had been found at Seletar Reservoir.
Sek admitted killing the three people at Andrew Road. His defense at trial was that he suffered from an abnormality of mind that substantially reduced his responsibility. The High Court rejected that defense and convicted him of three murders, and in July 1987 the Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in a judgment that Singapore's courts still cite on how judges should weigh psychiatric evidence.
He appears in the court record and the press as Sek Kim Wah, with Sek as the family name, in the Chinese order that Singapore sources use. The Court of Appeal judgment is reported as Sek Kim Wah v Public Prosecutor, and Malaysian law reports list the same appeal as PP; Sek Kim Wah.
The record says little about Sek before the summer of 1983. The Singapore Monitor described him at his first court appearance as a 19-year-old national serviceman. The Court of Appeal recorded that Robert Tay, the owner of 4 Andrew Road, was his former employer, and that Sek knew the house.
The defense psychiatric evidence at his trial, as summarized in a 1999 article in the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies by the legal scholar Stanley Yeo, offers one further glimpse of his background: one defense psychiatrist traced what he called Sek's abnormality of mind to retarded development caused by the lack of a stable family structure during his childhood and adolescence. Those were the defense's claims, and the trial court did not accept the conclusion drawn from them.
Robert Tay was an industrialist. A profile published by the Singapore Monitor a week after his death, written by Sit Yin Fong, traced a career that began with repairing dynamos for Royal Air Force fighter planes at the start of the Second World War and said that during the Japanese Occupation he helped keep Singapore's telecommunications running.
His wife was Annie Tay. The Monitor gave her maiden name as Annie Low.
Their maid appears in the Court of Appeal judgment as Lovita Virador in one paragraph and as Jovita in another; the first 1983 reports described her as Filipino. The reports do not say more about her life, her family or how long she had worked in Singapore.
The couple's 10-year-old daughter and her tutor were also in the house. Both survived.
The record on the other two deaths is thinner. The Singapore Monitor reported on July 26, 1983 that a man had been found murdered at Seletar Reservoir. When Sek was charged on July 30, the Monitor said the five killings had taken place in two separate incidents, one at Seletar Reservoir and one at Andrew Road. The paper named one of the Seletar victims as Annie Ong, describing her as a bargirl, and remarked on the coincidence that the two women Sek was accused of killing were both named Annie.
The reports do not give the date of the Seletar killings, the dead man's name or how either victim died.
The Court of Appeal set out the facts of the Andrew Road case as they were accepted at trial. On July 22, 1983, Sek gathered a group of friends, among them a young man named Nyu Kok Meng, and took them to a petrol kiosk in Serangoon Garden Estate, which he intended to rob. The robbery did not go ahead: his friends believed the police were following them.
Sek then planned a robbery at Marine Parade and took only Nyu with him. On the way he changed his mind. He brought Nyu to Andrew Road instead, showed him the house of his former employer, and said they would rob it the next morning.
On the morning of July 23 the two men watched the house, pretending to repair Sek's motorcycle. Nyu had a knife. Sek had a rifle. When they saw their chance, they forced their way inside.
There were five people in the house: Robert Tay, Annie Tay, their maid, their 10-year-old daughter and the girl's tutor. Sek herded all five into one room and tied their hands behind their backs with raffia string. While Nyu guarded them, Sek ransacked the house.
He was not satisfied with what he found. He made Annie Tay write him a cheque for $5,000 and left to cash it, leaving Nyu to watch the household. He came back about half an hour later, then left again, this time taking Robert Tay with him to withdraw $7,000 from Tay's Post Office Savings Bank account. The two returned to the house at about 12:45 p.m., and Sek tied Tay's hands again. The first press report, in the Singapore Monitor the next day, said the family had been held hostage in the house for more than four hours.
Sek then gagged all five captives. He led Annie Tay to the master bedroom and strangled her with raffia string. About half an hour later he took Robert Tay to the study, strangled him with raffia string and struck him on the head with a wooden stool; Tay died of a fractured skull. About 20 minutes after that, Sek took the maid to the master bedroom and strangled her. Annie Tay and the maid died of asphyxia.
How the robbery ended, and how the girl and her tutor came to survive, is only partly known. The Singapore Monitor's reports of the following week show that the tutor escaped death and that she later stopped the younger of the two robbers from taking his own life. On July 25 a front-page headline quoted a man pleading with a piano teacher to contact his mother in Johor if he died.
The Singapore Monitor reported the killings on July 24. Its reporters, K K Fong and To Chee Eng, wrote that a wealthy couple and their Filipino maid had been strangled with nylon cords after being held hostage in their home for more than four hours by armed robbers. A front-page summary described the robbers as two gunmen. The court later found that only Sek carried a firearm; Nyu had a knife.
The police moved quickly. On Monday, July 25, the Monitor reported that detectives had a positive identification of one of the two men involved.
On July 26 the paper reported a link no one had expected. Detectives searching the Andrew Road house had found a document belonging to the man found murdered at Seletar Reservoir. What the document was, and exactly where in the house it turned up, is not known.
The police were also looking for the second man. On July 27 the Monitor, translating a report from the Chinese-language Lianhe Zaobao, carried an appeal by the mother of a youth from Johor, in Malaysia, urging her son to surrender if he was involved. On July 29 it reported that Malaysian police had launched a search for a Johor-born suspect in the murder of Robert Tay, and that his photograph had been sent to police stations in several Malaysian states. That report gave his age as 17; a report two days later gave it as 19, said Johor police sources believed he was almost certainly in Kuala Lumpur, and gave his name as Nyu Koh Meng.
On July 30 the Monitor's K K Fong described the satisfaction of the director of the Criminal Investigation Department, Tan Eng Bock, at the progress of what the paper called one of the most serious murder cases in recent years. Fourteen suspects had been arrested in the week since the killings.
Sek appeared in court on July 30, 1983. Bertilla Pereira reported in the next day's Monitor that the 19-year-old national serviceman had been charged with the murder of five people in two separate incidents, at Seletar Reservoir and at Andrew Road. A photograph caption said he looked crestfallen and stayed silent throughout the short proceedings.
The exact date and place of his arrest are not known. He was in custody by the time of that hearing.
The Court of Appeal named Nyu Kok Meng as the man who went into the house with Sek, armed with a knife, and who guarded the household while Sek was away. The available text of the judgment does not say that Nyu took part in the killings. The Monitor's July 1983 reports describe him as born in Johor.
How Nyu's own case was resolved, and on what charge, is not known.
Sek was tried in the High Court of Singapore on the three Andrew Road charges. He accepted the prosecution's evidence that he had killed Robert Tay, Annie Tay and their maid, but he claimed trial on all three charges. His only defense was diminished responsibility under Exception 7 to section 300 of the Penal Code.
The case therefore turned on psychiatric evidence, and the experts disagreed sharply. Stanley Yeo's 1999 article sets out their positions. A defense psychiatrist told the court that Sek had an anti-social personality disorder that led him to kill in order to enhance his self-esteem, and traced it to retarded development caused by an unstable family life in childhood and adolescence. A second defense psychiatrist said Sek had a psychopathic personality disorder arising from both inherent and environmental causes.
The prosecution's psychiatrist found no evidence that Sek suffered from any mental illness or psychopathic personality disorder. In his opinion Sek had killed for a practical reason: to eliminate the witnesses to his robbery.
The trial judges preferred the prosecution psychiatrist's evidence. They found no abnormality of mind, rejected the defense of diminished responsibility and convicted Sek on all three charges of murder.
Sek appealed against his convictions in Criminal Appeal No 11 of 1985. The appeal was heard by the Court of Appeal: the Chief Justice, Wee Chong Jin, who gave the court's judgment, with Justice A P Rajah and Judicial Commissioner Chan Sek Keong. Loh Lin Kok appeared for Sek. Deputy Public Prosecutor Sowaran Singh appeared for the prosecution.
The court dismissed the appeal in a judgment dated July 10, 1987. It held that whether an accused had an abnormality of mind is a question of fact, to be decided on all the evidence, of which the medical opinion is only one part. Trial judges, it said, are entitled to reject or differ from the opinions of medical witnesses if there are other facts on which they can do so. In Sek's case, the court found, there had been overwhelming evidence on which the trial judges could find that there was no abnormality of mind. It saw no reason to disturb that finding, and said that in any event it did not disagree with it.
The judgment was reported in the Singapore Law Reports as [1987] SLR 107 and in the Malayan Law Journal as [1988] 1 MLJ 348, and it became a standard authority. In 1998, in Chua Hwa Soon Jimmy v Public Prosecutor, the Court of Appeal said it was following principles it had already stated in earlier cases, Sek Kim Wah among them. In 1999, in Tengku Jonaris Badlishah v Public Prosecutor, it cited Sek Kim Wah for the point that the verdict on abnormality of mind is plainly a finding of fact. In 2004, in Zailani bin Ahmad v Public Prosecutor, it noted that the decision had been cited with approval in Contemplacion v Public Prosecutor in 1994 and Zainul Abidin bin Malik v Public Prosecutor in 1996, and relied on it again for the rule that trial judges may depart from unchallenged medical opinion where other facts allow.
Stanley Yeo, writing in 1999, was more critical of how the trial court had reasoned, though not necessarily of its result. He suggested that rejecting the defense may well have been the right conclusion on all the evidence. But he argued that the judgment would have been much stronger had the judges tested the competing evidence against the definition of abnormality of mind drawn from the case of Byrne, which Singapore courts had adopted. In his view the defense psychiatrist should have been made to explain how the disorder impaired Sek's ability to understand events, to judge right from wrong or to control himself, and the prosecution psychiatrist's explanation of motive told only half the story unless he also explained that it showed Sek's capacity in those respects was intact. Yeo returned to the case in a 2004 article in INSAF, the journal of the Malaysian Bar, listing it among the Singapore decisions that had adopted the Byrne definition.
The court record confirms that Sek was convicted of three murders and that his appeal failed in July 1987. It does not set out the sentence passed on him or what happened to him after the appeal.
In 2017 the National Library Board's journal BiblioAsia, in an article by the librarian Sharon Teng on notable Singapore murder cases, listed the 1983 Andrew Road murders committed by Sek Kim Wah, who, it said, had killed five people during robbery attempts.
Proven, and final: Sek's three convictions for the murders of Robert Tay, Annie Tay and their maid at 4 Andrew Road on July 23, 1983. He admitted the killings; the dispute at trial and on appeal was only about his mental state.
Charged, with no verdict reported: the two killings at Seletar Reservoir. Sek was charged with them on July 30, 1983, and the Andrew Road house held a document belonging to the dead man. BiblioAsia attributes five killings to him. What became of those two charges, and whether they ever came to trial, is not known; they remain charges, not convictions.
Details that vary between sources: the cords used at Andrew Road (nylon cords in the first press report; raffia string in the Court of Appeal's findings); the robbers' weapons (two gunmen in an early summary; a rifle and a knife in the court's findings); the age of the second suspect in July 1983 (17 in one Monitor report, 19 in another); the maid's first name (Lovita and Jovita in different paragraphs of the same judgment); and the second man's name, which a 1983 report renders as Nyu Koh Meng.
Not established: the date of the Seletar killings and the name of the man who died there; the date and place of Sek's arrest; the dates of his trial and conviction; his sentence; Nyu Kok Meng's charge and sentence; and the account that Sek was hanged in 1988.
July 22, 1983: Sek and a group of friends, including Nyu Kok Meng, abandon a planned robbery of a petrol kiosk in Serangoon Garden Estate; Sek then shows Nyu the house at 4 Andrew Road.
Before July 26, 1983: two people are found dead at Seletar Reservoir.
July 23, 1983: Sek and Nyu rob the house at 4 Andrew Road; Sek strangles Annie Tay, Robert Tay and their maid. The Tays' 10-year-old daughter and her tutor survive.
July 24, 1983: the Singapore Monitor reports the triple killing.
July 25, 1983: police have a positive identification of one of the two men.
July 26, 1983: detectives report finding a document at Andrew Road belonging to the man found dead at Seletar Reservoir.
July 27 to 31, 1983: the mother of a Johor youth urges him to surrender; Malaysian police search for the Johor-born suspect.
July 30, 1983: 14 suspects reported arrested in the week since the killings; Sek, 19, is charged in court with five murders.
Date not confirmed: High Court trial; Sek is convicted of the three Andrew Road murders and his defense of diminished responsibility is rejected.
July 10, 1987: the Court of Appeal dismisses his appeal (Criminal Appeal No 11 of 1985).
1994, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2004: the Court of Appeal cites the decision in later diminished-responsibility cases.
1999: Stanley Yeo critiques the trial court's reasoning in the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies.
July 7, 2017: BiblioAsia lists the Andrew Road murders among Singapore's notable murder cases.