Toa Payoh ritual murders
Although the case name suggested ritualistic murders,[1][2] the defendants said they did not conduct prayers, burning of joss sticks, ringing of bells, or any other rituals during the killings.
[5] On 7 February, the body of ten-year-old Ghazali bin Marzuki, a student from Henry Park Primary School,[6] was found under a tree between Blocks 10 and 11.
Stepping into the common corridor from the stairwell, Inspector Pereira noticed an eclectic mix of religious symbols (a cross, a mirror, and a knife-blade) on the entrance of the first flat (unit number 467F).
The owner of the flat, Adrian Lim, approached the inspector and introduced himself, informing Pereira that he was living there with his wife, Tan Mui Choo, and a girlfriend, Hoe Kah Hong.
[8] After the police found slips of paper written with the dead children's personal details, Lim tried to allay suspicions by claiming that Ghazali had come to his flat seeking treatment for a bleeding nose.
He made up an array of bewildering lies, claiming: she was an illegitimate child; her family were immoral people who practised infidelity; her husband Loh would force her into prostitution.
[44] In late 1980 he was arrested and charged with raping Lucy Lau Kok Huang, a door-to-door cosmetic salesgirl, who had met Lim when she was promoting beauty products to Tan.
Lim pretended to be possessed by Kali, and told Tan and Hoe that the goddess wanted them to kill children to wreak vengeance on Lau.
To prove that there was a case against the accused, Deputy Public Prosecutor Glenn Knight called on 58 witnesses and arrayed 184 pieces of evidence before the magistrate.
Other evidence — the blood samples, religious objects, drugs, and the notes with Ng and Ghazali's names — conclusively proved the defendants' involvement.
Private medical practitioners Dr. Yeo Peng Ngee and Dr. Ang Yiau Hua admitted that they were Lim's sources for drugs, and had provided the trio sleeping pills and sedatives without question on each consultation.
[68] There were many contradictions among these statements and the confessions made in court by the accused, but Judge Sinnathuray declared that despite the conflicting evidence, "the essential facts of this case are not in dispute".
[79] In 2021, Justice Choo Han Teck, who was Cashin's associate during the case, said that in the 1980s, "People on the Government side (the Woodbridge) saw it as an almost defensive mechanism to disagree everything with the private psychiatrists".
Her depression worsened with the horrific physical, mental and sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Lim over the years, including him forcing her to become a prostitute and a stripper so that he could use her earnings.
Dr Chee did not link this with how Lim's perverse demands for Tan to look youthful, even forcing her into depraved acts such as copulating with her own younger brother.
On the other hand, since the Woodbridge doctors thought she appeared well during her follow-up checks (16 July 1980 – 31 January 1981), Dr Chee evaluated she was well at the time of the killings.
[86] Dr Chee Kuan Tsee[87] said that Lim was "purposeful in his pursuits, patient in his planning and persuasive in his performance for personal power and pleasure".
Lastly, Lim had consulted doctors and freely taken sedatives to alleviate his insomnia, a condition which, according to Dr Chee, sufferers from manic depression fail to recognise.
[88] Cashin declared that Lim was a normal man until his initiation into the occult, and that he was clearly divorced from reality when he entered the "unreasonable world of atrociousness", acting on his delusions to kill children in Kali's name.
It would lend credence to the shroud of mystery and magic he has conjured up his practices and by which he managed to frighten, intimidate and persuade the superstitious, the weak and the gullible into participating in the most lewd and obscene acts.
[93] Viewing her interviews with the expert witnesses as admissions of guilt,[94] Sinnathuray and Chua decided that Tan was an "artful and wicked person", and a "willing [party] to [Lim's] loathsome and nefarious acts".
[100] The lawyers asked the appeal court to reconsider the mental states of their clients during the murders, charging that the trial judges in their deliberations had failed to consider this point.
[109] 21 years after the trio were executed, Nathan Isaac, the former lawyer of Hoe Kah Hong, died on 10 January 2009, 14 days short of his 72nd birthday.
[110] In 2021, Justice Choo Han Teck, who was Cashin's associate during the case, said that in the 1980s, "People on the Government side (the Woodbridge) saw it as an almost defensive mechanism to disagree everything with the private psychiatrists".
Throngs of people constantly packed the grounds of the courts, hoping to catch a glimpse of Adrian Lim and to hear the revelations first-hand.
Canon Frank Lomax, Vicar of St. Andrew's Anglican Church, complained to The Straits Times that the gory and sexually explicit reports of Lim's crimes could have a corrupting effect on the young.
Journalists deemed it the most sensational trial of the 80s, being "the talk of a horrified city as gruesome accounts of sexual perversion, the drinking of human blood, spirit possession, exorcism and indiscriminate cruelty unfolded during the 41-day hearing".
[118] Its 16-day run brought in $130,000 (US$75,145),[119][fn 5] and a reporter called it "more bizarre than the tales of unnatural sex and occult practices associated with the Adrian Lim story".
The neighbourhood area originally resided by Lim itself was also redeveloped over the years and while the flat remained there, its neighbouring infrastructure were replaced with newer, taller buildings.
The mother of three also told the paper that when she received news of Ghazali being killed, she was so full of grief that she had to be sedated, and often, for the next 34 years until 2014, she suffered from frequent fainting spells.
