profession for 23 years. He became a High Court judge in 1957. The Chief Justice, Mr Wee Chong Jin, described Justice Buttrose’s retirement at the age of 65 as a ‘great loss, especially in that he was a judge with immense experience and knowledge, not only of the country’s laws, but also of the people’.
The Perfect Murder
Sunny Ang thought he had planned the perfect murder. He considered his execution an injustice because he had been found guilty for the wrong reasons. “I did not kill her that way. I killed her another way,” he told a visitor just before the end. “But I suppose it’s poetic justice,” he added with a grim smile, “that I should die.”
What he boasted he did was to give Jenny instructions, which if carried out properly, would inevitably have resulted in her death. He had told her, just before she descended, to take a deep breath, to fill her lungs completely, as she was about to surface. She was to hold that breath all the way up. The air in Jenny’s lungs would have distended with increased pressure thereby forcing air bubbles directly into her blood stream and eventually leading to obstructions in the blood vessels in her brain. Death would have been instantaneous.
Ang was a great reader. He had a passion for detective stories, a deep interest in psychology and law. He had a collection of law books. He also had many books on flying, and several Teach Yourself books, including books on chicken rearing, tomato planting and scuba-diving. In one book on scuba-diving the corner of a page had been turned down. There was a warning on this page against divers holding their breath when surfacing. The author warned that death had occurred this way.
This manner of death was set out in detail in Harrison’s Principle of Internal Medicine, 1963, which Sunny Ang had also read: This stated that, If a diver breathing compressed air holds his breath during ascent to the surface, the intrapulmonic (inside the lung) pressure becomes relatively higher than the hydrostatic (liquid or blood stream) pressure. A difference in pressure in excess of about 80 mm of mercury may overdistend the lungs so that gas is forced or aspirated (sucked) into the blood stream (traumatic air embolism). Gas emboli (bubbles) transported to the left ventricle (i.e. the heart) are disseminated to the central nervous system (i.e. the brain) to produce the most serious injury in diving. Fatal accidents have occurred during ascents from only 13 feet to the surface.
Ang intended that Jenny’s body should be recovered (so he said), for, he argued, a post-mortem could have shown only accidental death. No one could ever have accused him of being in any way responsible for this highly technical accident. He maintained that he had, in fact, made an earlier attempt, two days before, in the same boat, hoping, with many others around, to have the benefit of witnesses to testify to his innocence. Unfortunately that attempt failed (probably Jenny did not obey his instructions fully), though she complained of pains in her chest. On the fateful Tuesday he tried again hoping that her damaged lung condition would favour his plans. This time he succeeded. Jenny was never seen again.
Ang was completely callous. That Jenny had to die was a misfortune on her part: her death was no more than a mere incident in his own life. All that he regretted, he said shortly before he was hanged, was that he did not give her a decent last meal. He also regretted that he had failed to insure her for a higher figure. Curiously enough, he had decided that, with part of the money he hoped to get from the insurance companies, he would provide for Jenny’s two children during their childhood.
His callousness was evident immediately after her death. When he informed the police and the insurance companies of the tragedy, he did so calmly, and with such lack of compassion that suspicions were aroused. Noted K. B. Ong, a police officer in his report, ‘The general conduct of Sunny Ang after the disappearance, and during interrogation-he does not appear in the least worried or depressed.’
Ang was confident he could never be incriminated for Jenny’s death. Why should he worry? Life, until his arrest 16 months later, went on as usual-chicken farming and girl-chasing. He sat for the Higher School Certificate in 1964. Throughout his trial his confidence actually increased and he made little effort to conceal his disdain for, and contempt of, the legal machinery. He insisted upon directing counsel for the defence, supremely confident his guilt could never be proved. Against the advice of Mr Coomaraswamy he insisted on entering the witness-box entirely for the immediate emotional satisfaction of crossing swords, matching wits, with Mr Francis Seow, the state prosecutor, whom he hated as the representative of society and law and order.
He continued to be confident after sentence, while in prison. He read books in German, French, Chinese and English. He continued to give advice to his brothers in Singapore and in England, on how to improve their studies. The only time he was known to have shown emotion was when his father went to the prison in November 1966 (for the first time since Ang’s arrest in December, 1964) to tell him that the Privy Council had rejected his appeal. Ang burst into tears. But he soon recovered and quickly regained his confidence that, somehow, his concept of justice would eventually emerge triumphant: after all ‘they’ had not found out how exactly he had caused Jenny’s death, so ‘they’ were not entitled to claim the supreme forfeit.
In his last speech from the Singapore Bench in 1968, Justice Buttrose stressed the importance of maintaining and administering justice. He was mindful that ‘justice, like lightning, should ever appear to few men’s ruin but all men’s fear’.
He considered himself privileged to have offered the greater part of his working life, some 23 years, to the cause of justice according to law, the rule of law, the cornerstone of human rights and human freedom.
Justice Buttrose said, “It is more than ever essential in this present day and age that the rule of law should be preserved inviolate: that those who respect and obey it shall live in freedom and security under it; that those who flout it and seek to set it at nought shall be brought to book and punished.”
He said that the interpretation of the law was a different matter and each court also had a different atmosphere-with each judge bringing to his court the aura of his own personality.
“I must admit I have in my time been the author and at times the beleaguered recipient of some animated controversial opinions regarding the interpretation of laws.” Justice Buttrose added, “It is perhaps inevitable that our human nature gives birth on such occasions to passing feelings of disagreement and criticism, or irritability and impatience.
Pulau Senang-The Experiment that Failed
Introduction
This is the true story of an idealistic belief, translated into actuality for a short while in the early 1960s, that violent, lawless men could find their own way back to decent society were they given a proper chance to work and create. The argument was that these men had drifted into crime because they’d never had an opportunity to know disciplined creative work.
Hundreds of them in Singapore were given this chance in 1960. Inside a few months, hitherto work-shy gangsters (hardened criminals most of them, unproven murderers, extortioners, callous robbers, psychopaths, rapists), transformed a deserted tropical island into an attractive, busy settlement with roads and water supply, huts, workshops, canteen, dormitories, laundry, community hall. Practically all the criminals were members of secret societies. Having built a comfortable settlement with their own hands, within forty minutes one sunny afternoon, they deliberately destroyed it and murdered the man largely responsible for making the scheme possible. With him died three of his assistants.
The island was called Pulau Senang. In the Malay language this means ‘the island of ease’. As a rehabilitation settlement, it was a noble experiment that failed. Why? Why did the gangsters destroy it, having toiled and sweated in the tropical sun to build it? No completely satisfactory explanation has been forthcoming. One belief is that the leading secret society chief on the island ordered the destruction of the settlement to prove that he was more powerful than the government. During the trial of this man, Tan Kheng Ann, alias Robert, alias Robert Black alias Ang Chuar (and 58 others), witnesses said that the decision to kill the man in charge, 39-year-old Prison Officer Daniel Stanley Dutton, was because Dutton had tormented them beyond endurance. Breaking point had been
