On 2 November 1984, 19-year-old interior designer Lim Hwee Huang (Chinese: 林桂芳; pinyin: Lín Guìfāng)[a] was thrown off a tenth storey HDB flat at Kallang Bahru, after she was raped by 27-year-old Eurasian Singaporean Hensley Anthony Neville, who fled to the neighbouring country Malaysia.

Despite facing a capital murder charge and the death penalty, Neville refused to be assigned a lawyer in his case and elected to represent himself in court.

Six years after he first committed the crime, Neville was found guilty of the murder of Lim Hwee Huang, and he was sentenced to death by the High Court on 22 November 1990, and he was hanged on 28 August 1992 after he lost his appeal.

Neville was later extradited from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore by flight on 18 March 1987, and he was charged with murder for the death of Lim Hwee Huang, two years and four months after she died.

[12][13] The Singapore Police Force also thanked the Malaysian authorities for helping to track down and arrest Neville, who was one of the twelve suspects extradited to Singapore with the Malaysian police's assistance between January and June 1987; among the list of suspects extradited also included Tan Cheow Bock, a Singaporean labourer later sentenced to death in September 1990 for the 1980 high-profile killing of a babysitter Chia Chun Fong.

The case was heard by High Court judge Lai Kew Chai and Judicial Commissioner (JC) Tan Teow Yeow, and the trial prosecutor was Lee Sing Lit.

[22] Nizammuddean bin Rasul, a 22-year-old Malay Singaporean and cleaning supervisor, stated that six years ago, he was going out at night after leaving his friend's flat from nearby, and that was when he saw Neville holding a huge object looking like a pillow, and it later recognized it as the half-naked body of a woman, which Neville violently threw outside the flat window and leave the woman fall to her death.

However, they came back again during the few months before Neville's trial, and Nizammuddean finally decided to, out of conscience and remorse, tell the truth to the police, which allowed him to be summoned to court as a new witness.

[30][31] Even at the eleventh hour before sentencing, Neville again refused to engage a lawyer to help him in his closing submissions for the upcoming verdict.

As such, both Justice Lai and the other trial judge Tan Teow Yeow found 33-year-old Hensley Anthony Neville guilty of murder, and sentenced him to death by hanging.

Lim's second-eldest brother also said that his youngest sister was very cheerful and optimistic, which made them disbelieve the possibility of suicide when they heard of her death.

[38] While he was incarcerated on death row, Neville engaged a defence lawyer named Peter Fernando to represent him in his appeal against the sentence.

[39][40][41] On 28 August 1992, nine months after failing to overturn his death sentence by appeal, 35-year-old Hensley Anthony Neville was hanged at Changi Prison.

It was only in 2007 when notorious gunman Tan Chor Jin, who shot and killed a nightclub owner named Lim Hock Soon, became the second person to represent himself without a lawyer during his trial for the fatal shooting.