On 17 May 2004, 39-year-old Chitrabathy Narayanasamy was murdered by her 43-year-old husband G. Krishnasamy Naidu, a taxi driver who was then released on bail for an earlier incident of stabbing his wife twice the month before her death.
It was further revealed that Krishnasamy was suffering from morbid jealousy, a delusional disorder that caused him to behave irrationally based on unfounded suspicions regarding his wife's infidelity and thus impaired his mental faculties at the time of the offence.
Although Krishnasamy was sentenced to the mandatory death penalty after the High Court found him guilty of murder, the Court of Appeal unanimously allowed Krishnasamy's appeal and hence reduced his murder conviction to one of manslaughter, and commuted his death sentence to life in prison.
On 17 May 2004, 39-year-old Chitrabathy Narayanasamy, a worker of a Sony factory at Tuas, was hacked to death by her 42-year-old husband G Krishnasamy Naidu, who approached her on the pretext of signing divorce papers, but ambushed her with a chopper and killed her right in front of her colleagues outside her workplace.
It was reported that he had taunted his in-laws through a phone call that he murdered his wife and asked them to bury her, which brought shock to her kin, who all tried their best to protect Chitrabathy for the past ten days for fear of Krishnasamy coming after her while he was out on bail.
Chong Kah Wei and Ng Cheng Thiam were both appointed as the trial prosecutors and Peter Keith Fernando represented Krishnasamy as his defence lawyer.
They said that during the few months before the murder of their mother, their father had been conducting so-called family meetings on a regular basis, in which he had been violent and keep forcibly interrogating his wife for having an affair with another man, whose name was known to be Ashok.
[18] Upon Krishnasamy's further questioning, Chitrabathy admitted she was having an affair with a man called Vel Murugan Perumal, a Malaysian colleague of her workplace at Pelmac.
Subsequently, in the afternoon, when Chitrabathy returned home, Krishnasamy angrily told her that their son was sick and he tried calling her to no avail, and asked where she had been.
After returning home, Chitrabathy was told by Krishnasamy to strip her clothes, as he wanted to check if his wife had sexual intercourse with other people.
[13] Subsequently, for the next few days until 8 April 2004, Krishnasamy would interrogate his wife on a few "family meetings" and asked if she had once again cheated on her, and he did so in the presence of his children.
For this, he went to a hardware shop at Telok Blangah to buy a parang, but in the end, he bought a chopper for $25, claiming he needed it to slaughter goats at a temple.
Krishnasamy also read up a law book belonging to one of his nephews, in which he found out that the offence of murder warranted the death penalty in Singapore, and he remembered it.
Even so, Krishnasamy was able to enter and approach Chitrabathy with the pretense of wanting to sign divorce papers (a reason he used to persuade the security guard to let him in), and he managed to kill her after she turned her back on him.
Dr Fernandez testified that from his assessment of Krishnasamy, he found that the former taxi driver suffered from morbid jealousy, a delusional disorder that made a person harbour rigid and irrational suspicions about his/her spouse's sexual unfaithfulness based on unfounded proof, and also explore socially unacceptable behavior under the influence of these delusions.
Like Dr Fernandez before him, Dr Phang diagnosed Krishnasamy to be suffering from morbid jealousy, and he also emphasized that despite him able to calmly and coherently planning his wife's murder and execute the plot, Krishnasamy's actions were a result of him giving in to his delusional beliefs about his wife's infidelity and acting under an abnormal mind, and he stated that an abnormal person suffering from certain psychiatric disorders could still retain the capability to make and carry out elaborate plans.
[30] On 26 April 2006, nearly two years after the murder of Chitrabathy Narayanasamy, the trial judge Woo Bih Li delivered his verdict.
Specifically, Justice Woo made use of the three-limb test to make an analysis of whether Krishnasamy was indeed suffering from diminished responsibility, mainly on whether there was a substantial impairment of his mental faculties at the time he killed Chitrabathy.
The three-judge panel, consisting of three High Court judges Tay Yong Kwang, V. K. Rajah and Choo Han Teck, found that on the totality of evidence, Krishnasamy's defence of diminished responsibility should be accepted because his mental responsibility at the time of the murder was substantially impaired by morbid jealousy.
The judge read that although the three-limb test was essential to determine an accused person's psychiatric condition and whether it led to a substantial abnormality of the mind, its application in Krishnasamy's case was a serious incongruity and erred in the sense that Krishnasamy's actions were a result of an abnormal mind and his delusional beliefs that his wife cheated on him, as cited by the medical reports of the defence's two psychiatric experts.
The three judges also stated that Justice Woo's decision amounted to an arbitrary distinction between Krishnasamy's case and the normal instance of a schizophrenic person with an abnormal mind who made plans to go to a hospital and retrieve and pay for their prescribed medication.
Fernando also expressed his relief at the appellate court's reprieve and stated, "Words can't describe my feelings that the rope of death has been removed from around my client’s neck.
[43] However, Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Lau Wing Yum, who represented the prosecution in the appeal hearing, argued that Krishnasamy still posed a danger to any other individuals who were, "in one way or another", involved in the matter of his wife's infidelity, citing Krishnasamy's supposed threat to murder Chitrabathy's sister after killing his own wife.
DPP Lau also argued that Krishnasamy deserved to be jailed for as long as it was permissible by law so as to keep him monitored in a controlled environment and under high security to ensure he regularly adhere to his medication and check-ups for his psychiatric condition.
Justice Choo, who delivered the ruling on behalf of the panel, stated that by a unanimous decision, the Court of Appeal decided to sentence 45-year-old G Krishnasamy Naidu to the maximum penalty of life imprisonment, after they accepted the prosecution's arguments and rejected the mitigation plea of Fernando for a ten-year term of imprisonment.
Although Krishnasamy would spend the rest of his life in jail, he is still entitled to be released on parole after serving at least twenty years out of his sentence.
[48] Another source revealed that some members of the public felt Krishnasamy's punishment of lifelong imprisonment was too lenient due to the brutality of the murder.
[50] A 2021 article from The Smart Local named the murder of Chitrabathy Narayanasamy as one of the nine most terrible crimes that brought shock to Singapore in the 2000s.