On 4 September 2008, at a hotel in Geylang, Singapore's red-light district, the naked body of a 21-year-old Sri Lankan prostitute was found under the bed of one of its rooms.
[1][2] The victim, identified as Radika Devi Thayagarajah, was later found to be seven months' pregnant with a baby boy, and the child died as a result of his mother's death.
[5][6][7] According to a forensic pathologist Dr George Paul, who performed an autopsy on the victim, he found that the cause of death was manual strangulation.
Among these items were a black handbag, a Sri Lankan passport, stub of a prepaid SIM card, a pair of jeans, a woman's blouse and female underwear.
Background information revealed that Devi had two more sons aged two and six at the time of the murder, and she was working as a sex worker in Geylang prior to her death.
The number was later traced to an Indian national named Madhuri Jaya Chandra Reddy, and he resembled the man captured wearing the beige cap by the hotel's CCTV cameras.
[6] At around 5am the next day on 5 September 2008, ASP Ang and his team of officers went to a dormitory in Ama Keng Road (located at Lim Chu Kang), where Reddy was staying.
[18][19] The following was the official account of the murder of Radika Devi Thayagarajah, based on the confession of Madhuri Jaya Chandra Reddy and the evidence pieced together by the police.
Reddy wandered around the area before he returned his Ama Keng Road dormitory at daybreak to go to bed, and he would use Devi's phone to call his home at Andhra Pradesh.
[27] On 11 January 2010, about a year and four months after his arrest, 21-year-old Madhuri Jaya Chandra Reddy stood trial at the High Court for the killing of Radika Devi Thayagarajah.
DPP Koh also directed the court's attention to the post-killing actions of Reddy, who took meticulous and systematic steps to cover up his tracks by stealing the valuables of Devi.
hiding or disposing of her remaining belongings and even engaged the services of another prostitute, with whom he had sex in the same room where Devi was killed, and this reinforced the prosecution's claim of Reddy's "utter lack of contrition" behind the murder.
Judicial Commissioner Chong also admonished Reddy for his utter lack of remorse, stating that it was demonstrated through his acts of misappropriating the items of the deceased and having sexual intercourse with another sex worker on the same bed he shared with Devi before he killed her just hours before engaging the services of the other prostitute.
[37] Additionally, in 2011, when a similar case of a dead woman's body was found in a hotel occurred in Geylang, the 2008 killing of Devi once again gained attention.
[38] The move to drop the murder charge and convict Reddy of manslaughter was controversial to a certain extent, as some members of the public felt that it was not an appropriate legal outcome due to the heinous nature of the crime.
An opinion piece, titled “The uneven nature of Singapore's justice system”, was published by the Asian Correspondent a day after Reddy's sentencing and the writer Ben Bland expressed his concern over the uneven nature of Singapore's justice system, given that Reddy was responsible for the cold-blooded and ruthless murder of a pregnant woman but ultimately sentenced to 17 years in prison with caning after the prosecution stopped pushing for a murder charge, and escaped the gallows in contrast to Yong Vui Kong, a Malaysian youth who was given the death penalty for trafficking 47g of diamorphine.
[40][41] In March 2011, Singaporean crime show Crimewatch re-enacted the murder of Radika Devi Thayagarajah, and it depicted the investigations that led to the arrest and conviction of Madhuri Jaya Chandra Reddy.