[1] On 9 May 1974, 53-year-old Quek Lee Eng, the head of a tontine group and wife of a wealthy local textile merchant Sim Keng Soy (aged 54 in 1974), was last seen leaving for her sister-in-law's house, and she did not return to her Pheng Geck home in Sennett Estate even till nighttime.

Professor Chao Tzee Cheng, a senior forensic pathologist, was called to the scene and after inspecting the body parts, he confirmed that the severed legs belonged to a woman, and they were possibly being chopped off less than 24 hours before.

The police suspected that these legs were possibly connected to the disappearance of Quek Lee Eng, who had been missing for two days at the time of the horrific discovery.

[7][8] The day the legs were discovered, Sim Joo Keow called her husband Quek Huang Phoew (郭方标 Guō Fāngbiāo) and asked him to go home.

The police also searched the house and an upper torso, wrapped in plastic bags from then-popular department store Yaohan, was discovered inside an earthen jar on the ground floor.

Similarly, a lower torso was discovered hidden in another earthen jar located on the second floor, but the head and arms of the victim were not found inside the house.

[11] After her arrest, Sim reportedly wanted to come clean and told the police that she actually killed Quek,[12] and she led the officers to the various locations where she claimed to have disposed of the remaining body parts.

[27][28] After a two-day preliminary inquiry, Sim was committed to stand trial on a later date for murder on 31 July 1974, and over 170 exhibits of evidence were reportedly presented during the hearing.

[31] After completing the dismemberment, Sim wrapped up the lower and upper torsos with plastic bags and hid them inside the earthenware jars at her house.

As a result, 44-year-old Sim Joo Keow was to serve ten years in prison for the killing and dismemberment of Quek Lee Eng.

Quek's son, a lawyer, agreed to be interviewed in 2005, 31 years after the case, and he told the press that whenever the date of his mother's death anniversary arrived, he and his kin would talk about her but cried whenever they mentioned her.

[2] The killing of Quek Lee Eng and subsequent dismemberment greatly shocked the nation during Singapore's first decade as an independent country since 1965, and sparked a mass amount of attention in society when the incident first came into light.

[52] Despite the numerous decades that passed since the occurrence of the Tontine killing as of today, the case remains as one of Singapore's most horrific murders ever committed to date.

[53][54] In 1987, Nicky Moey, a horror fiction writer, wrote a book titled 999: True Cases from the CID, which detailed 11 high-profile crimes that happened in Singapore and made the headlines between 1960 and 1984.

The killing and dismemberment of Quek Lee Eng was recorded in the book, and it was reported that the names of some offenders (possibly including Sim) were changed in spite of the cases being true crimes that happened in the past.