On the early morning of 21 April 1999, a 55-year-old former police officer named T. Maniam was ambushed by two men who used weapons to brutally beat him to death on the road between his house and his neighbour's home in Phoenix Garden, Singapore.
Armed with blunt instruments, the two men went forward and attacked Maniam, who fell down and was brutally beaten until he died while he was lying on the road between his house and his neighbour's home in Phoenix Garden, Singapore.
[1] At the same time, from her bedroom window, Maniam’s elder stepdaughter Fairos, then aged 29, witnessed the horrifying scene of her father being beaten to death on the road outside her neighbour’s house, much to her shock.
A maid named Aurea David and her employer Geraldine Tan Poh Choo (陈惠珠; Chén Huìzhū) also saw what happened to Maniam.
Dr Teo Eng Swee, the forensic pathologist from the Health Sciences Authority, conducted an autopsy and found that the cause of Maniam’s death was due to severe head injuries.
[3] When Toh began his investigations into his mentor’s death, he heard from Fairos that she recognized one of the two assailants as 25-year-old Loganatha Venkatesan, the boyfriend of her mother and Maniam’s estranged second wife, 51-year-old Julaiha Begum.
An informant contacted the police and told them that Venkatesan was about to fly out of Singapore very soon, and he was right at the moment at his lawyer’s office to settle his affairs before he was due to board his flight.
Based on the address given, the police arrived at a Tah Ching flat occupied by an ethnic Malay family, who rented a room for both Julaiha and Venkatesan.
[6] Mani, who allegedly helped drive the truck on the day of Maniam’s death, was not caught and the police placed his name on the wanted list.
[7] Another case was a schizophrenic killer named Neo Man Lee, who murdered Judy Quek in a public bathroom on 4 September 1984.
Toh, who retired in November 2017, said to a newspaper in 2018 that he had a close relationship with his mentor and was at first shocked to hear that he was assigned to investigate Maniam's death.
Back then, Julaiha had recently divorced her first husband Abdul Kareem s/o Mohamed Shariff, with whom she had two sons and two daughters, Fairos and Sairah.
Fairos and Sairah, who were five and eleven years old respectively when they first met Maniam, remember him fondly as he brought them up well and took good care of the two of them, as well as Julaiha's second son.
[12][13] Later, sometime in 1996, during these unsettled times, 48-year-old Julaiha first met 22-year-old Loganatha Venkatesan, who was asked to come to the Maniam household to cut down a mango tree in the family's house garden.
In the early hours of the following morning, Julaiha arrived at her matrimonial home with her two male acquaintances, wanting to collect her belongings and leave the house, but a furious Maniam refused to, and the two sides engaged in a fierce quarrel.
[12][13][18] The trial of Loganatha Venkatesan, Chandran Rajagopal, and Julaiha Begum began on 6 December 1999, with Judicial Commissioner (JC) Choo Han Teck hearing the case in the High Court of Singapore.
Both of them gave their account of what happened, including the background of their mother’s relationship with Maniam and how it gradually broke down in the face of jealousy, greed and legal disputes.
Luke Lee and N K Rajarh, the two lawyers representing both Venkatesan and Chandran respectively, tried to discredit the three witnesses’ evidence as non-identical, and thus unreliable, given that all three did not give an exact number of assailants.
The bulk of the prosecution’s case against Julaiha and the two men were largely based on Ravichandran’s testimony, which was made in the middle of the trial after Fairos and Sairah.
After this failed attempt, Ravichandran testified that he had second thoughts about carrying out the plan and he secretly told himself if Venkatesan ever asked him for help in the plot again, he would cheat them of their money and escape to India.
When Venkatesan told him to get a change of clothes for the plotters, Ravichandran pretended to do so but instead of going back to his room, he secretly fled to Tekka where he had a meal before continuing on his journey to his Tuas workplace.
He avoided using his usual route of transport to work as he spotted Chandran among those waiting for Ravichandran’s employer’s hired driver and used the MRT to go to Tuas, where the same Japanese supervisor bid him farewell and gifted him $150 and a watch.
[25][26] On 14 March 2000, after a trial lasting 35 days, JC Choo Han Teck of the High Court released his final verdict on the case.
In his 18-page written verdict, JC Choo found that the three accused persons were clearly guilty of murder based on the evidence adduced in court.
Furthermore, with regard to the number of people seen at the scene, JC Choo judged that the discrepancies in the account of Fairos and both her neighbours did not affect the prosecution’s case, as taking into account of the time when the murder happened, the three witnesses were watching what was to them a horrible scene, viewed from different angles, each recalling different aspects of a quick and traumatic event.
Thirdly, referring to the pathologist Dr Teo Eng Swee’s autopsy report, it was highlighted that the wounds inflicted on Maniam would in the ordinary course of nature result in death.
JC Choo conceded that it is not the law that no one may be condemned to death solely on the testimony of a lone witness, given the risk of such a reliance and the fact that a wrongful miscarriage of justice involving an innocent person executed was not amendable or subject to any compensation.
The clear, correct description of the flat where Julaiha rented her room and the landlady’s subscribed television channel as given by Ravichandran and his brother had consolidated the former’s credibility.
On 5 February 2001, it was confirmed by her new lawyer R Palakrishnan that President S R Nathan declined her appeal for clemency, thus finalizing her death sentence and she was set to hang in a short period of time.
The producers of the show also interviewed both Maniam’s ex-wife Laxhmi and his elder stepdaughter Fairos, with their faces being concealed to protect their identities.