While Chua Leong Aik drove the vehicle, Chia and Febri electrocuted and grievously assaulted the victim until he died.

Chia demanded that Goh end the affair, which she first started with Dexmon Chua in July 2011 after the latter began to regularly send her back home from work.

In February 2013, Chia discovered a Chinese New Year greeting mistakenly sent to his wife by Dexmon Chua over WhatsApp, which enraged him.

The next day, after leading the police to where he disposed of the victim's body, Chia was charged with murder and placed under remand pending his trial.

Nearly two years later, on 8 January 2016, Chua Leong Aik pleaded guilty to helping both Chia and Febri abduct and assault the victim.

During mitigation, Chua Leong Aik's defence lawyer, James Ow Yong, asked for a jail term of four years, arguing that his client, who had two children aged seven and two in Indonesia after he remarried, was mostly a law-abiding citizen.

He also noted that Chua Leong Aik had nothing to gain and was trying to help a friend, and thus played a minimal role in the entire incident.

Deputy Public Prosecutor, Tan Wen Hsien, who pressed for a five-year sentence, rebutted that Chua Leong Aik had knowledge that a possibly vicious attack on a stranger would be conducted, given his awareness of the weapons that were used, so dismissed his supposed minimal role in the crime.

In his judgement, Senior Judge Kan Ting Chiu admonished Chua Leong Aik for his lack of remorse and not stopping the assault.

Justice Kan ordered Chua Leong Aik to serve five years in prison, which was the sentence sought by the prosecution.

They stated that Chia had told police in his account of how he used the hammer to hit Dexmon Chua and he had clearly participated in the assault, with the inference from the unwashed blood patterns that the forensic experts discovered inside the van.

[26][27][28] The prosecution, led by DPP Tan Wen Hsien, sought the death penalty, due to the brutal and bloody nature of Dexmon Chua's murder and the cruel, savage, and callous execution of Chia's fatal assault on the victim.

The Court of Appeal, in sentencing Chia to death, citing the guiding principles set by the 2015 landmark appeal of the Kho Jabing case, stated that the unremorseful Chia had "exhibited such viciousness and such a blatant disregard for the life of the deceased, and are so grievous an affront to humanity and so abhorrent that the death penalty is the appropriate, indeed the only adequate sentence", given that he masterminded the abduction out of revenge for his wife's adultery, and had shown a high degree of premeditation and planning.

They also dismissed his psychiatric report of diminished responsibility, since there was no contributory link between the offence and the alleged major depressive disorder; it also lacked reason and only contained ambiguity.

Before his arrest, Chia even calmly went for a holiday trip to Malaysia with his wife and two daughters while helping Febri to flee the country.

Dexmon Chua's mother had earlier begged for the prosecution to argue for the death penalty in their appeal against Chia's life term.

In 2023, a Singaporean Tamil-language crime show titled Theerpugal, which meant "The Verdict" in Tamil, re-enacted the murder of Dexmon Chua, and it aired a total of two episodes covering the case.