On 14 January 2006, at Sungai Petani in Kedah, Malaysia, 24-year-old Chee Gaik Yap (朱玉叶 Zhū Yùyè), a Chinese Malaysian who was last seen jogging with her sister, went missing and she was found dead nine hours later with multiple stab wounds all over her body.

Evidence showed that Chee had been abducted, raped, sodomized and in the end, murdered by her attacker, who was not caught until six years later, when the suspect was arrested at Kuala Lumpur International Airport after arriving from Perth.

Chee graduated from Universiti Utara Malaysia and was working as a marketing executive for only four months before she was killed, and she had plans for job training in Germany before she met her untimely end.

[10] Despite the lack of progress, Chee's family and their supporters (including prominent political figures from Malaysia) continually called for the authorities to not give up investigating the murder.

Aside from the Chee Gaik Yap case, the police also appealed for new information to crack an unsolved double murder at Alor Setar, where two women - Teoh Mooi Peng (钟美萍 Zhōng Měipíng) and Leong Mooi Leng (梁美玲 Liáng Měilíng) - were kidnapped and brutally murdered by unknown assailants in 2001, a case which shook the whole of Malaysia back in 2001.

[11] In 2009, a major breakthrough was made in the investigation process, and the police once again scoured through a list of suspects, all of whom they brought in for questioning and to undergo DNA tests.

The suspect was identified as 28-year-old Shahril Jaafar, who was a Malaysian citizen and car dealer living in Sungei Petani, which happened to be nearby the murder scene.

[12] Three years after he fled Malaysia, on 17 January 2012, three days after Chee's sixth death anniversary, 31-year-old Shahril Jaafar returned from Perth, Australia to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport for unknown reasons.

On 2 February 2012, Shahril appeared at the Sungai Petani Magistrate's Court, where he was officially charged with murdering 24-year-old Chee Gaik Yap six years after the crime.

State Criminal Investigation Department chief assistant commissioner Zakaria Ahmad told the Malaysian press that the police had been working tirelessly to trace Shahril's whereabouts and also cooperated with their international counterparts to bring him to justice.

[15] The prosecution's case was that Shahril had abducted Chee while she was jogging, and had raped and sodomized her inside the forest outskirts of Sungei Petani before he knifed her to death.

[16] On 25 June 2013, the Alor Setar High Court ruled that the prosecution failed to prove a prima facie case against the accused and therefore acquitted 31-year-old Shahril Jaafar of killing Chee without calling for his defence.

[18][19] Subsequently, the Chee family wished to have the case reviewed and her father wanted to engage prominent lawyer and politician Karpal Singh to seek justice for his daughter.

Penang Chief Minister and DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng later confirmed to the press that Karpal agreed to conduct a watching brief for the Chee family.

[17] Ong Kok Fooi, a Malaysian politician who constantly keep in touch with the Chee family to inquire their welfare, was similarly disappointed with the verdict.

[21] Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Awang Amardajaya Awang Mahmud, who argued before the Court of Appeal, stated that it was not disputed that the first four swabs of seminal fluid and blood taken from Chee's private part had 100 per cent matched Shahril's DNA, while the fifth swab also collected a foreign substance which could be caused by contamination due to the body being found in the forest, and DPP Awang also pointed out that Shahril's decision to jump bail and flee Malaysia soon after undergoing DNA tests also strongly suggested that Shahril was trying to abscond from something and that he had a guilty mind.

He also argued that Shahril's reasons to leave the country was not a testament to him escaping the law but was due to underlying immigration problems that were raised beforehand and therefore necessitated his need for departure.

The prosecution also urged the court to impeach the evidence of Shahril's father due to the multiple discrepancies in his statements and testimony, and added that right after doing the DNA test, Shahril immediately booked a flight to Australia and left Malaysia on that same day, which showed that he was trying to flee Malaysia to avoid capture, and therefore urged the court to convict him of murder.

[34][35][36] Chee's father reportedly expressed that he was relieved at the judgement, but he would not lay his heart to rest for this moment since he wanted to see to it that Shahril's execution was carried out for murdering his daughter.

This was rebutted by the prosecution, led by Hamdan Hamzah, who argued that the defence given by Shahril were an afterthought he made up in order to escape the murder charge.

Chee's father was relieved and glad to hear that the apex court affirmed Shahril's murder conviction and death penalty, and stated that justice was served for his daughter.

He stated that he waited desperately for justice to be served over the past 12 years and his chances of closure was shattered with the possibility that Shahril would evade the hangman's noose and come out of prison one day.

Rosli also pointed out that the case itself was not the worst or rarest out of the murders heard in court, given that even former death row inmate Teh Kim Hong, who was the mastermind of 2008 high-profile abduction-murder of Lai Ying Xin (赖映兴 Lài Yìngxīng) in Kulai, was given 40 years in jail earlier this month despite the prosecution's urgings for the death penalty.

Justice Harmindar, who pronounced the judgement in court, stated that the case had taken place in broad daylight and it greatly shocked the public conscience given the ruthless and gruesome nature of Chee's death.

[64][65] Reiterating that the court's decision was not bound by public opinion, Justice Harmindar state that the bench was constrained to find that based on the various factors behind the case, the only appropriate sentence for Shahril in relation to Chee's murder was the death penalty, and that his application was ought to be dismissed.

[78] Throughout the years, Chee's father suffered from poor health, and on 15 February 2017, he was diagnosed with second-stage lymphoma cancer, and he accepted treatment and gradually recovered.

[81] Two days after Shahril lost his re-sentencing application, a Malaysian lawyer named Ng Kian Nam contributed an opinion piece to the local Chinese newspaper Sin Chew Daily on 31 May 2024.

Ng questioned and stated that the revised capital punishment laws in Malaysia should not be made retroactive as the review of all the death row cases, precisely about 1,000 or higher, would lead to the courts channelling resources into such proceedings when these resources should have been put to better use like protection of vulnerable people from crimes, helping disadvantaged groups in society and addressing societal ills, and these reviews were equivalent to reopening the wounds of the families of murder victims who desperately wanted justice to be served.