On 15 September 1973, 24-year-old vegetable seller Tan Eng Kim (Chinese: 陈荣林; pinyin: Chén Rónglín) was attacked and stabbed to death by another man at a coffee shop in Bras Basah, Singapore.

Tan sustained a total of four stab wounds to his stomach and he collapsed outside the boys' toilet after staggering for a distance in the shop.

Several witnesses, including the employees of the shop and patrons, were interviewed, and the police searched for any traces of murder weapons at the scene, but none were recovered.

[3] Professor Chao Tzee Cheng, a senior forensic pathologist, conducted an autopsy on the victim, and he found that out of the four stab wounds to Tan's corpse, one of them penetrated the heart and was sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death.

[7][8] On that same day, the same suspect, identified as 25-year-old seaman Pehn Kwan Jin, was charged with murder, an offence that mandated the death penalty under Section 302 of the Penal Code.

The trial court was told that on the date of the murder, the deceased victim Tan Eng Kim was drinking together with his friend Chong Hwang Kee at the coffeeshop in Bras Basah.

Justice Kulasekaram, who pronounced the judgement in court, stated that there were three main contentions which both the judges arrived at when reaching the verdict.

Due to these contentions, Justice Kulasekaram pronounced on behalf of the judges that Pehn's claim of self-defence should be dismissed, and given that Pehn had intentionally inflicted the knife wounds, such that one of the injuries was sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death, there were sufficient grounds for the trial court to return a verdict of murder.

On the same day, the Privy Council also rejected the appeals of both K. Vijayan Krishnan and Jorge Belardo Belleza against their death sentences.

[33][34] Vijayan, a labourer from Malaysia, was found guilty of murdering a crane driver, Ahora Murthi Krishnasamy, in 1973, while Belleza, a Filipino-born mechanic, was convicted of killing his lover, Alice Ong, in 1974.

[36] In February 1976, it was reported that Pehn and two other prisoners on death row appealed for clemency from the President of Singapore as a final recourse.

[37] According to a Singaporean Chinese newspaper Sin Chew Jit Poh, 27-year-old Pehn Kwan Jin was hanged in Changi Prison on the Friday morning of 16 April 1976.