4th and not the 3rd of September. “Mr Coomaraswamy has told you that this is an unsatisfactory matter and must influence your minds in considering the whole question of the flipper. Is it unsatisfactory, members of the jury? A mistake in the date, by an inspector starting an investigation into one of the most difficult cases it has ever been my experience to try?” The judge indicated his own view by adding that he would not waste any more time with that aspect of the case. Inspector Lui handed the green nipper to the chemist on 25 September, though the chemist did see it a week or two before, perhaps three weeks earlier; but it was only a cursory glance because the inspector wanted to get his views on the flipper before he took it back to continue with his investigation. There was, therefore, no substance in the comment that the chemist only saw it really for the first time on 25 September 1963. On 21 December 1964, the inspector arrested the accused at Sennett Road. The judge reminded the jury that it was Inspector Lui who found the improvised washer in Ang’s swimming bag which he left at the police station on the night of the tragedy.
Justice Buttrose concluded his review of the case for the prosecution bv summarizing briefly, “the links in this chain of circumstantial evidence which the prosecution says binds the accused tight in its coils.” He listed 16. 1. The first was motive, which the judge described as ‘powerful and compelling’. Ang was a bankrupt, in need of large sums of money to carry out his ambitious plans for the future. ‘That is the motive for this crime.’ 2. On the very day Jenny disappeared Ang had made sure that a policy which had lapsed the day before was renewed ‘to the tune of $150 000 by the girl but he did not renew his own’. That was the second link. 3. The third link was the opportunity to commit the crime. He picked a weekday. On Tuesday no other boats were likely to be in the vicinity of the Sisters Islands. 4. Fourth link was the dangerous, hazardous waters. There could be no dispute about that, or that the accused knew they were dangerous, hazardous waters. This was not the place to swim, let alone scuba-dive. 5. Fifth link: Jenny was a novice, barely able to swim and Sunny Ang knew this. 6. Sixth link: he sent Jenny down alone when he knew scuba-diving should not be done alone ‘let alone when you are a novice and in these dangerous waters’. 7. Seventh link: Ang did not go down himself and had no intention whatever of going down ‘or, as it was put to you, even wetting his feet that day’. 8. Eighth link: on Jenny surfacing he sent her down again, because, he said, his equipment was not ready. 9. The ninth link, the judge continued, was that the prosecution said that the accused contrived to render the remaining two tanks in the sampan useless so that they could not be used, or at least to the eyes of the unsuspecting boatman, who knows nothing about scuba-diving or its equipment. 10. The 10th link was that Sunny Ang made no attempt himself to use Jenny’s first tank, ‘which we know’ must have been more than a quarter full of air. “He did not make any attempt to use the tank before he, according to the prosecution, ruined the washer by prising and hacking it out with a knife.” 11. The vital green flipper was the 11th link in the circumstantial chain. It was found within six days after ‘the accident, or the tragedy’. The heel-strap had been severed, cut by a knife or other sharp instrument-‘and I don’t see how you can escape this conclusion’-and it had been identified conclusively as one of the flippers which Jenny was wearing that day. But, once more, the judge reminded the jury that this was entirely a matter for them to decide. 12. Twelfth link was the attitude and demeanour of Sunny Ang at, and after, the disappearance of the girl. Apparently utterly calm and unmoved, ‘as he has been throughout this trial, not, as I suggest you might expect, in a state of utter grief and despair at the loss of this girl whom he loved and intended to marry’. The judge drew the jury’s attention to the fact that while the pawangs were diving, looking for Jenny’s body, Ang was calmly discussing with Jaffar and the boatman the sinkability or floatability of the tank. 13. Less than 24 hours after this tragedy, with what has been described as somewhat ‘indecent haste’, he made formal claims on the three insurance companies. “You may think these letters show a somewhat casual and coldblooded approach to the matter.” That was the 13th link in the chain. 14. The 14th was Ang’s ‘hot pursuit’ of the insurance money. There was the compromise plan to stifle the probate proceedings which the insurance companies were going to contest: this compromise plan would have given him half the insured money for a quick pay-off. There was the telephone call to one company about a mis-description of Jenny in the policy. There were the series of letters to the coroner exhorting him to hurry to complete his inquiry. There was the fact that Ang had been round to a number of solicitors to enlist their aid. 15. Fifteenth link was the prosecution’s statement that the accused did not dive in at all because he wanted to remain in sight of the boatman. The boatman was his alibi, ‘and so it could never be said, gentlemen of the jury, that he went into the water himself after Jenny and killed her under the water. By remaining on the sampan throughout the whole incident, it was always open, he hoped, for him to say that it was an accident in which he was in no way concerned’. 16. Finally, the 16th link, the washer, one of the washers improvised in the sampan by the boatman and Sunny Ang: “It was tested here before our very eyes, gentlemen of the jury, both by David Henderson and by the accused himself. The washer worked perfectly on this very tank and never leaked at all.”
Justice Buttrose reminded the jury again about circumstantial evidence: one of its points was its cumulative effect. “The question for you is: where does the totality of them, the total effect of these links, lead you to? Adding them together, considering them, not merely each one in itself, but altogether, does it, or does it not, lead you to the irresistible inference and conclusion that the accused committed this crime? Or is there some other reasonably possible explanation of those facts? The prosecution case is that the effect of all this evidence drives you inevitably and inexorably to the one conclusion, and one conclusion only: that it was Sunny Ang, the accused, who intentionally caused the death of this young girl.”
Justice Buttrose went on to examine the defence. He said that Ang’s evidence on oath from the witness-box was, the gist of it, that this was an accident. “He cannot tell us what sort of an accident it was because, of course, he did not see it. He said she might have got tired of waiting for him and, I use his own words, ‘she may have wandered off on her own on the sea-bed and got swept away by the tide or current’.”
Ang completely excluded the possibility of Jenny swimming underwater to one or other of the Sisters Islands, ‘because he said that he and Yusuf examined them from the sampan for any sign of life or for footprints. There was no vestige of either. He did not however discard or discount the possibility of sharks. He, at any rate, is quite certain that she is dead and was of that same opinion right from the start’. The judge reminded the jury of the three letters to the insurance companies.
Ang denied that he cut the strap of the flipper which he admitted looked like the one that Jennv wore on the fateful day. The judge told the jury he could not see how on the evidence they could escape the conclusion that it was. Ang denied in any way tampering with her equipment so that she would drown.
Ang’s evidence, the judge said, was that he met Jenny when she was a bar girl at the Odeon Bar. She showed an interest in his poultry farm, and expressed a desire to own the farm herself. Eventually it was agreed he would sell it to her for $10,000 payable over a period of time. At the date of her disappearance, according to Ang, she had paid him $2,000 on account. “How this bar waitress, earning $90 a month and some $10 a day in tips when she worked, was going to find the money to pay $2,000, let alone the remaining $8,000, is a matter which I find difficult to understand or appreciate, particularly when you bear in mind her sister Eileen’s evidence that Jenny was always short of money.” Furthermore, on the accused’s own admission, Jenny knew nothing about, and had had no experience whatever, in chicken farming. “Again, what do you think the accused mother’s views on this transaction would have been? You must ask yourself whether or not you can accept this evidence. Ang was not going to help this girl. He was going to use the money to go to the United Kingdom to further his studies. Ang said that it was Jenny who paid the insurance premiums. He had said that Jenny wanted to make him the beneficiary and he had suggested his mother’s name instead. All his other property was in his mother’s name. This was because he was a bankrupt.”
Justice Buttrose referred to Ang’s car trip to the Federation with Jenny and remarked, “I am bound to say I find that a most remarkable tale, but,” he told the jury, “it is your views, not mine, that count.”
The judge continued, “Quite glibly, the accused told us of some incidents on the way up, of a few narrow shaves. He said he overtook cars quite recklessly and skidded once, but managed to recover. Why should he want to overtake cars quite recklessly, I cannot conceive. Or, gentlemen of the jury, was it to prepare, so to speak, for the inevitable accident that subsequently happened on the way back?” They originally planned, so Ang said, to go to the Cameron Highlands for a holiday. But what did they do? The next morning Ang took out a travel accident insurance policy for himself for $30,000, and a $100,000 policy for Jenny for 14 days. Ang had said in the witness- box that Jenny was quite fearful of driving back with him. She told him, he said, they would have an accident on the way back and she insisted on him taking out an insurance policy to cover medical and other expenses should they get involved in a serious accident. “Does that ring true?” asked the judge. “I find it myself wholly extraordinary. What do you, the jury, think? Did the accused take Jenny to Kuala Lumpur for their holiday to the Cameron Highlands, or was it merely to obtain further insurance on her because Singapore was getting a bit hot for him? That the news might be getting round the Singapore insurance companies that here was a young man and a young
