McCrea was assisted by his girlfriend Audrey Ong Pei Ling (Wáng Peìlíng 王佩玲) in disposing of the bodies before they both fled Singapore to Australia, where they were caught.

[2][3][4] On 8 January 2002, a security guard named Mohammed Yaacob responded to a report relating to a silver Daewoo Chairman parked on the seventh floor of the Orchard Towers carpark, where it appeared abandoned given that it was sighted at the same spot for the past four days.

The police then forced open the car and made a gruesome discovery of two decomposing corpses inside the vehicle.

[8] Lin said that before his wife was murdered, he often received weekly calls from Lan while she stayed in Singapore and the last time he heard her voice was on 29 December 2001, three days before her death.

He stated she did not turn up at their family home in Fujian for Chinese New Year as she promised and he could not contact her for three months before he received the Singapore Police Force's notification that his wife possibly was the female deceased victim they found at Orchard Towers.

In fact, the police could not establish Lan's identity immediately after they discovered her body and it took ten months before they finally identified her through her belongings and DNA samples provided by Lin.

[9][10][11] Police investigations yielded the last address of both Kho and Lan, which was located in an apartment at Balmoral Park, owned by a British expatriate and financial adviser named Michael McCrea, who hired Kho as his personal driver after being impressed by the latter's driving skills as a taxi driver.

In both cases, Ramsbottom and Cheo received word from McCrea that he did not mean to kill Kho and Lan, as it was due to a fight that ended fatally.

[12][13][14] As such, both Michael McCrea and Audrey Ong were placed on the police's wanted list for their alleged involvement in the deaths of Kho and Lan, which were classified as murder.

[15] Interpol also received and approved Singapore's request to set out an international fugitive notice for both McCrea and Ong.

Five months later, the two were arrested by the local authorities in Melbourne, Australia, where they sought refuge from the home of McCrea's then estranged pregnant wife after spending some time hiding in London.

McCrea went to South East Asia in the 1990s, and worked as a financial adviser in Singapore, the same country where he first met and married his Australian wife Brunetta Stocco, with whom he had four children, including a son named Callum (aged two in 2003).

[17] Under the alias Mike Townsend, McCrea wrote and published a book titled Expat Survival Kit, which gave advice to his expatriate clients about financial strategies in business.

[19] The following account below was what happened to Kho Nai Guan and Lan Ya Ming, according to Michael McCrea and Audrey Ong after their arrests and trials.

During the fight, McCrea used too much strength and it led to fractures in the bones around the throat, leading to 46-year-old Kho Nai Guan to die from strangulation.

Despite Ong's lawyer Jeffrey Soh's plea for leniency on account of his client's voluntary surrender and willingness to testify against McCrea,[27] District Judge Richard Magnus did not buy Ong's mitigation plea as he found her demonstrating an utter lack of remorse and having made no attempt to contact the authorities after the murders occurred.

"[42] On 25 June 2006, nine months after he was extradited back to Singapore, 48-year-old Michael McCrea was brought to trial in the High Court for killing Kho Nai Guan and Lan Ya Ming.

[46] In his mitigation, Michael McCrea pleaded for a lenient sentence, as he was psychologically haunted by his own conscience and felt remorse for his reprehensible actions.

In rebuttal, the prosecution, led by Deputy Public Prosecutors (DPP) Christopher Ong and Wong Kok Weng, asked the court to take into consideration the aggravating factors of the case.

Also, they pointed out that rather than admitting to his crimes and contacting the authorities, McCrea only cared about covering up his acts and looking for the bonus he paid Kho prior to his death, and even fled the country to escape punishment.

For this, the prosecution urged the court to mete out a stiff penalty for McCrea for the Orchard Towers double killings.

[47] Four days later, on 29 June 2006, High Court judge Choo Han Teck sentenced McCrea to a total of 24 years' imprisonment.

[51] When responding to the defence's request to backdate McCrea's 24-year sentence to the date of his arrest in Australia four years earlier (or at least to the date of his first day of remand in Singapore after his extradition), Justice Choo stated that he, as a judge, should be taking into consideration the facts of the case before he can exercise his powers of discretion to backdate the jail term.

Since there were no significant mitigating factors other than his lack of criminal records for violent offences, Justice Choo said there was no reason for him to backdate McCrea's sentence to any of the dates requested by Lim.

[52] Some members of the public, including one who wrote a letter to The Straits Times (a national daily newspaper in Singapore), felt that McCrea's punishment was too light for him.

When Lim argued for a concurrent ten-year sentence during the appeal hearing (which will possibly allow McCrea to serve 14 years' jail), one of the judges - Justice Andrew Phang - issued strong words against him for asking for two concurrent jail terms when the case involved two lives being lost.

Roach had fled to Thailand after committing the crime in July 2016, and he spent 14 months in a Thai prison for violation of currency regulations and money laundering before he was caught in London upon Singapore's request for his capture.

17 years after the deaths of Kho Nai Guan and Lan Ya Ming, in July 2019, a 31-year-old chemist named Satheesh Noel Gobidass was killed during a fight.