Affair With Boss Leads To Her Body Scattered Around Singapore_vmdt

Affair With Boss Leads To Her Body Scattered Around Singapore_vmdt

A gruesome discovery of body parts at Kallang Riverside Park. The upper and lower torso are believed to belong to a woman. Police are still searching for the missing head and legs. >> Liu Hong Mei was born on September 14th, 1982 in Changchun, located in northeastern China. She was the third of four children.
What we know about her comes from the people who knew her in Singapore. What they paint is a picture of someone who worked hard, kept her head down, and had a very specific idea of where her life was going. Liu Hong Mei came to Singapore in November of 2002 on a work permit to take a job as a production operator at a Gear Systems Singapore, a circuit board company in Serangoon North.
Her elder sister was also in Singapore. They’d meet at least twice a week, and she confided in her sister whenever she had problems. Her sister was due to get married in September of 2005, and she had been looking forward to being her bridesmaid. At her job, she worked the overnight shift, 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.
Supervisor Foo Ru Cheng called her a model employee, and he even arranged for her to work overtime so that she could earn extra money to send home to her family during Lunar New Year. Liu Hong Mei received a monthly perfect attendance allowance every month from January through May of 2005 because she hadn’t missed a single shift.
That month, she took home just over 1,400 Singapore dollars. She sent around 2,000 Singapore dollars back to her parents in Changchun every 3 months. Liu Hong Mei had been taking English language classes for a year and a half. On June 14th, 2005, the day before the events of today’s story, she went to a private school in Chinatown to meet with a consultant to ask about an international diploma in travel and tourism.
She felt confident about the English language exams that she had just taken. She asked about the cost and the duration of the program and said she’d think it over and get back to him. She didn’t mention working overseas. She was talking about a future in Singapore. She had also registered with a matchmaking agency the year prior.
Its director remembered her as someone who was polite and cheerful. She told him that she liked Singapore and hoped to settle down there with a husband. She went on five introduction sessions. After the last one, she asked the agency to hold off on setting up more meetings for a while, saying she wanted to see how her current relationships were developing first.
What she meant by that, she didn’t say. On Sunday, June 12th, 2005, Liu Hong Mei spent the day at Agilent Technologies family day together with her sister and her sister’s fiance. By every account, she had a wonderful time. That was 3 days before she died. >> Leong Soo Chor was born on April 19th, 1955 in Singapore.
He was of Chinese descent and had an identical twin brother. Both of them grew up in Singapore and lived there all their lives. He completed his education, served his 2 years of military national service, then joined a telecommunications company that would eventually become SingTel. He worked there for 20 years starting in 1976.
Along the way, he enrolled in a part-time course at Singapore Polytechnic and earned a diploma in electronics and communication engineering in 1983. He married and had three children. His neighbors described him as a loving family man. Reporters who covered the case described him as slim, bespectacled, and slightly balding.
In February of 1996, he left SingTel to start his own business, which ended up being a failure. In April of 1997, at 50 years old, he joined Lucent Technologies Microelectronics as a production supervisor, later renamed Gear Systems Singapore. He worked the overnight shift from 7:00 p.m.
to 7:00 a.m. in the Serangoon North factory. January of 2004, Liang Xu Zchou was transferred to Liu Hong Mei’s team, making him her direct supervisor. In June, on his recommendation, she was promoted and given greater supervisory duties and a pay raise. Soon after, the two of them began an affair. They apparently weren’t very subtle about it as a fellow employee walked in on them kissing in his office.
Anonymous complaint was sent to management and both of them received a verbal warning. Liu Hong Mei acknowledged it in writing. Liang Xu Zchou refused to sign the acknowledgement. Instead, he wrote a letter denying the allegation and asked management to investigate further. Management was convinced that something had happened, but once the public displays of affection between them stopped, they let it go.
Her former supervisor, Fu Ru Chang, noticed the relationship early. He recalled one particular morning, both of them came in for their night shift wearing the same clothes they had on the day before. They never actually had gone home. Liu Hong Mei knew this relationship wasn’t headed anywhere conventional. Liang Xu Zchou was married and was 28 years older than her.
It’s been said that she had real feelings for him, but was also realistic on what the ceiling was for this relationship. She started going to the matchmaking agency we mentioned earlier while still having her affair. Fu Ru Chang later told reporters that someone at the factory had told him Liu Hong Mei had been making plans to break away from Liang Xu Zchou, that she envied her sister’s life and wanted a husband she could actually build a future with, and that Liang Xu Zchou had found out about those plans and felt
betrayed. >> On the morning of June 13th, Liang Xu Zchou and Liu Hong Mei checked into Hotel 81 Gold in Geylang around 10:30 a.m. to resume their affair. While she was in the shower, Leong Su Chor went through her bag looking for a comb and found her ATM card instead. He knew her PIN and took the card without telling her.
They later checked out at 3:00 p.m. Over the next 2 days, Leong Su Chor drained over 2,000 Singapore dollars from Lou Hong May’s account between ATM cash withdrawals and one electronic purchase. It was, by all accounts, most of what she had. That afternoon, Lou Hong May discovered her ATM card was missing and she noticed the unauthorized withdrawals.
That evening, she went to the police to make a report. She was told to contact her bank since surveillance footage from the ATMs might show who made the withdrawals. Later that evening, she called Leong and told him about the report. He didn’t tell her he was the one who had taken her card. >> On the morning of June 15th, Leong Su Chor asked her to come to his ninth-floor flat in the Geylang neighborhood.
He told her he would accompany her to the bank. His wife and eldest daughter were in Thailand and his son was staying at a hostel. His youngest child wouldn’t be home until past 6:00 p.m. Lou Hong May had never been to his home before. She arrived between 9:30 and 10:00 in the morning. They went to the master bedroom and sat on the bed.
They talked and were intimate for about 20 minutes. There, he strangled her with a bath towel. He looped the towel around her neck, crossed the ends, and pulled. According to him, he held on for between 10 and 20 minutes until his hands were tired. Lou Hong May’s face turned black and blue with blood coming from her nostrils.
When he let go, she fell backwards onto the bed. He later said that when he saw her face, he was already thinking about what to do with her body. What we know about what happened next comes from a mix of his own account and forensic evidence obtained later. He pulled Lou Hong May by the legs out of the master bedroom and into the kitchen.
Just outside of the bathroom, he undressed her before moving her body inside. He took a meat cleaver from the kitchen and began with her feet since they were the smallest part to cut through. He couldn’t get through the bones, so he picked up a rubber mallet to hammer the cleaver through. He wrapped her severed feet in newspaper and bagged them, then repeated the process on her legs above the knee.
Then he tried cutting upward from her pelvis, then abandoned that and cut straight across her waist instead. He apparently flushed some of her innards down the toilet. He went to his son’s room for more plastic bags, masking tape, and a couple of cardboard boxes that had originally held computer parts. Her lower torso went into one box, which he taped shut.
Her severed head, wrapped in newspaper, went into its own plastic bag. He rinsed the blood from her upper torso, wrapped it in the same way, and packed it into the second box. The whole process ran until past noon before he finished. He cleaned the toilet, washed his hands and legs, and gathered her clothing and shoes.
Took his bike out towards Ubi Road, dropping her clothes into a garbage bin at an intersection. Further along, he threw her shoes into a bin near a bus shelter, then continued to the following bus shelter and left her bagged feet in the bin there before turning back. Caught a taxi in front of his apartment building to Clarke Quay and dropped her lower legs into the Singapore River.
From a second taxi, he got out near Boat Quay, carried the bag holding her head down to the water, and let it go in the same river. The two torso boxes were too heavy for him to carry by hand, so he went back to his bike. One trip took him to a stretch of the Kallang River by Beach Road, where he put the box with her lower torso into the water.
Then he pedaled home for the second box, crossed to the far bank of that same stretch, and dumped it in the river as well. By around 5:00 p.m. he was back at his flat. This time he scrubbed the toilet again, working a brush and a green scouring pad over every surface. The sheets and the pillowcase went into the washing machine.
Then he noticed Liu Hong Mei’s handbag left behind on the master bedroom floor and bagged it along with everything else. He changed and left for his regular 7:00 p.m. shift. His commute took him through Kallang Station on the MRT, which is Singapore’s subway system. He got off at Ang Mo Kio to switch to a bus, dropping the handbag into a trash bin outside the station before he continued on.
He clocked in at 6:45 p.m. and ran through attendance like any other night. Operator Chen Jianhua noticed that Liu Hong Mei wasn’t there and mentioned it to him. It wasn’t until close to midnight that he told the operator to try calling her the next morning to see what was keeping her. >> On the morning of June 16th, 27-year-old Murugan Kaniapan was doing his usual cleaning rounds along the Kallang River.
A cardboard box caught his eye on the bank, tape shut, soaked through with water. He went to move it out of the way, but the cardboard had taken on too much water, and as he lifted it, the bottom gave out. A green plastic bag dropped out. He later told reporters, and I quote, “That was when I saw the lower half of a woman’s body.
” He said the flesh looked very fresh, like she was not dead. The body had been severed cleanly at the pelvis and knee joints. He said, “There was no blood and no smell. I could see the bone at the knee was very white.” Officers searched the surrounding area. About 2 to 300 m away on the opposite bank, they found a red and white cardboard box.
Inside they found another green plastic bag containing the upper torso of the same body. Her arms and hands were still attached, but her head was missing. Forensic experts pulled fingerprints from the upper torso and checked them against the records kept on foreign work permit holders. The match came back. Luo Hong Mei.
By then, her colleagues at AGI Systems had already filed a missing person’s report after she hadn’t shown up for her Wednesday night shift. >> Police went to her workplace that evening, after Liang Su Chor had started his shift. Inspector Roy Lim sat him down for questioning. Liang Su Chor claimed he barely knew her, stumbled over his words, and his hands shook as he spoke.
Inspector Lim spotted a few small cuts across his fingers. Liang Su Chor later said that he had picked them up fixing a leaky pipe in his kitchen. Officers took him back to his flat to search it. Inside, officers came across a blue bicycle along with green plastic bags and a set of buckets. They found nothing that immediately looked out of place.
Inspector Lim then thought to check beneath the toilet bowl itself, a detail he credited to an old case file he had once read involving British killer John Martin Scripps, who had left a single blood stain under a sink despite scrubbing a crime scene clean everywhere else. There, Inspector Lim turned up a faint reddish mark. Lab testing confirmed it was Luo Hong Mei’s blood.
4:40 a.m. on June 17th, Liang Su Chor began giving his first statement. In it, he told officers that Luo Hong Mei had suggested they die together. She would go first to show her sincerity, and he had strangled her at her own request before losing the nerve to follow through himself. He was placed under arrest at 5:55 a.m.
that same morning. >> Police launched a search for the rest of Luo Hong Mei’s body. They discovered that the Singapore River’s trash is collected every few days and transported to the Tuas South Incineration Plant and the timing lines up with when Liang Soo Shoon had dumped the other parts. A team went to the plant and sifted through the garbage for 10 hours.
They found a decomposed head wrapped in newspaper in a yellow plastic bag labeled “Art Friend”. They found a pair of severed lower limbs nearby. The head had decomposed beyond recognition. Forensic pathologist Dr. Cuthbert Teo confirmed it was Liu Hong Mei’s by matching a malformed tooth visible in her personal photographs to the one found on her body.
Her feet were never found. There was one complication investigators had to rule out. Liang Soo Shoon had an identical twin also living in Singapore. And identical twins carry matching DNA. Any genetic evidence tying Liang Soo Shoon to the scene would, in theory, [music] tie his brother to it as well. So, police traced the twins’ movements across the entire week surrounding the murder.
Every hour was accounted for and nothing connected the brother to Liu Hong Mei at all. Whoever the camera caught making those ATM withdrawals, it had to be Liang Soo Shoon. >> Liang Soo Shoon was charged with murder under Section 302 of the Penal Code, which at the time made death the mandatory sentence for a conviction.
He spent the months that followed moving between Changi and Queenstown prisons, held there as police built their case and a psychiatrist worked through his evaluation. His family and his lawyers weren’t allowed to see him for the first 19 days after his arrest. The family brought in Subhas Anandan, a defense lawyer with a reputation in Singapore for taking on the country’s highest profile criminal cases.
He’d recently brought in his nephew Sunil Sudisan, fresh out of law school, on board to assist him and the two worked on the case together. The trial opened on May 3rd, 2006 before Justice Tay Yong Kwang. The prosecution was led by Deputy Public Prosecutor Lau Wing Yum. The defense hadn’t disputed that he killed her at all.
What his attorney argued was that Lu Hong Mei had consented to her death as part of a pact. Under a specific provision of the penal code, that would reduce the charge from murder to culpable homicide and carry a different sentence. Before the trial could actually begin, there was a procedural fight over one of Liang Shu Chor’s statements.
He’d given multiple over the weeks after his arrest, and most of these were not disputed. One statement was challenged, and that was the one from June 26, 2005, in which he had acknowledged that Lu Hong Mei didn’t know he intended only for her to die, and that his real reason for killing her was fear of being identified as the ATM thief.
He claimed Inspector Lim had persuaded him into giving it by promising a lesser charge and supplying him with herbal tea. Inspector Lim denied this allegation. He produced his own field diary showing the herbal tea was purchased on an entirely different date more than a week later. Justice Tay found Liang Shu Chor’s account not credible, and the statement was admitted into evidence.
At trial, more than 280 photographs of Lu Hong Mei’s dismembered body were shown in court. Liang Shu Chor was asked at one point to demonstrate how he had strangled her. He stood and used his own lawyer as a stand-in, looping a towel around his neck to show the position that he used. Reporter Selina Lum of The Straits Times, who covered the trial, recalled later that as Liang Shu Chor demonstrated the strangulation, she noticed he had a strange smile on his face.
She said that it chilled her to the bone. Liang Shu Chor testified in his own defense and reverted to the death pact story. He said he had been confused and emotionally overcome. Said Liu Hong Mei had brought up dying together and that he had complied with her wishes. He said he intended to strangle himself afterwards but couldn’t bring himself to do it when he saw her face.
Justice Tay did not believe him. In his judgement, he described Liu Hong Mei as a lively young woman in the vernal stage of her life. He walked through the evidence of who she had been in the days before her death. At her workplace family day with her sister and her soon-to-be brother-in-law, enrolled in English classes, being with an education consultant about a tourism diploma, registered with a matchmaking agency hoping to settle down in Singapore, looking forward to being in her sister’s wedding in September.
Justice Tay said the story of a spontaneous death pact simply was not consistent with the woman the evidence described. He then addressed the real motive directly. Leong Soo Chor had feared Liu Hong Mei would identify him from the ATM surveillance footage, which would expose his theft and his career and destroy his reputation with his family.
He had decided to silence her permanently rather than face those consequences. None of that, the judge found, looked like a man in the throes of a mutual death pact. Justice Tay said the accused stole the deceased’s heart and pilfered her card and hard-earned savings and finally robbed her of her life. He butchered her after her death and took her apart.
The deceased’s demise in the Geylang flat in 15 June 2005 was not of her own wishes. It was a horrific homicide. It was a most disgusting and despicable murder. Liu Hong Mei died a very cruel, heartbreaking death. He closed his judgement with a poem that he wrote himself for the court, which read, “This truly is a sad riddle.
How could one savagely strangle and so unfeelingly mangle the woman one had just cuddled?” May 19th, 2006, Justice Tay sentenced Leong Soo Chor to death by hanging. He appealed. September 28th, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeal unanimously dismissed the appeal. Justice VK Rajah said, “If he could not bear to leave his family, why would he want to take his life away?” Justice Choo Han Teck added, “Which man who claims to love a woman so much that he follows her to her death would steal her ATM card and money?”
In August 2007, Leong Soo Chor tried a different route, filing a motion to have his first appeal reopened on the grounds that the judges had considered police statements never admitted as trial evidence. A fresh three-judge panel heard the motion and turned it down almost as soon as the hearing began, ruling the original decision held up on its own merits, independent of those statements.
With every legal avenue closed, the only option left was to ask for President S. R. Nathan for clemency. November 28th, 2007, the Straits Times reported that the president rejected the plea. Death warrant followed the same day, scheduling the execution for 2 days later. November 30th, 2007, Leong Soo Chor was hanged at Changi Prison at dawn.
He was 52 years old. >> News of Leong Soo Chor’s arrest had made headlines across Singapore, and the story didn’t stay local. Coverage spread into China, too, where Liu Hong Mei had grown up. Word of what had really happened to her was kept from her parents by relatives back in Changchun as best as anyone could manage it.
Once the story broke, strangers started showing up at the ninth floor flat in Geylang. People lit incense outside the front door, hoping a connection to a death might hand them lucky lottery numbers. Others just wanted to throw something inside. Eventually, the family couldn’t take it anymore, and they moved out for good.
In In a home where someone died unnaturally gets a name, a death flat. And the stigma is hard to shake as nobody wanted to buy this one for years. >> In 2018, Foo Rui Cheng broke a 13-year silence in a newspaper interview. As we mentioned prior, he had supervised Lou Hong May before Leong Su Chor did, and in the days right after her death, he had briefly been considered a suspect himself, mainly because he was the youngest of her three supervisors and closest in age to her.
He said he had stayed quiet partly out of respect for the investigation and partly on instruction from his superiors. He remembered Leong Su Chor coming in for his shift the evening of the day after the murder still holding a Chinese newspaper. He believed that he was scanning it for any report of a body being discovered.
After Lou Hong May was killed, Foo Rui Cheng said police summoned him along with several supervisors and colleagues who had more contact with her for questioning. He said, “Some employees mistakenly thought I was the murderer and pointed fingers at me.” He said he had to endure that silence with no ability to appeal for justice without interfering with the investigation.
Thankfully, he was able to speak up after justice had been served. >> Lou Hong May’s body wasn’t released for burial until the forensic work was complete. Her wake, held on July 11th, 2005, came nearly a month after she died. Around 150 people showed up. Some there to genuinely mourn her, others were just curious.
One 8-year-old retiree put it to a reporter this way, “Some of those here look as if they were here to see a show.” According to several Chinese-language papers covering the wake, a number of attendees were really there hoping to walk away with lucky lottery numbers. Undertaker Roland Tay handled the funeral himself alongside his wife Sally Hoe and neither charged the family a cent for it.
Getting Liu Hong Mei ready to be seen took 7 hours of work stitching the recovered pieces of her back together. Since her feet were never recovered, Tay’s team made a pair out of wax so that she could be laid out whole. Her coffin was filled with her favorite toys, books, and clothes. Liu Hong Mei’s elder sister could not bear to attend because she was dealing with her own difficulties in the aftermath.
Liu Hong Mei was cremated that same day at Mandai Crematorium. Donations collected amount to more than 20,000 Singapore dollars, all of which Roland Tay passed on to her sister. He was also entrusted with carrying her ashes home to her family in Changchun, returning her finally to the place she left. She told the matchmaking agency’s director how much she liked Singapore.
It was clean, easy to settle into, and the kind of place she pictured a future in. She’d been planning to enroll in that tourism diploma program. She’d been looking forward to standing beside her sister in September. She was 22 years old, the third of four children, someone who had sent money home to her parents in Changchun every 3 months.
She’d come to Singapore in November of 2002 to build something for herself and for a little while she was doing exactly that. Today, Liu Hong Mei would be 43 years old. She likely would have fulfilled her dream of advancing in her career, finding a husband and settling down in Singapore, maybe having kids one day.
We will never know the answers to those questions as the opportunity was cruelly stolen from her. Stolen by a man who put his own reputation above the value of her life and future.