“I killed her. I strangled her in my car, and then I burned her body for three days. ” Those words, calmly spoken by a 54-year-old former bank vice president, would end up defining one of Singapore’s most chilling murder trials. Leslie Khoo had a double life.
On one side, he was a family man, a husband, a father. On the other, he was a manipulative conman with previous convictions for fraud, charming women into falling for him while hiding the fact that he was married. Cui Yajie, a 31-year-old engineer from Tianjin, was one of those women. She met Leslie in 2016, after he found her crying at the bottom of her condominium.
He offered her a ride home and quickly asked her to be his girlfriend. She thought he was a divorcee. In reality, he was still married. But the mask began to slip when he scammed her out of $20,000 under the guise of an investment.
When she realized she’d been lied to, she demanded her money back and threatened to expose him at his workplace. That threat sealed her fate. On the morning of July 12th, 2016, Yajie’s colleagues watched her get into a black BMW. It was the last time anyone saw her alive.
Leslie initially told police they had argued, and he pushed her out of the car at Gardens by the Bay. But CCTV showed his car driving along the roads with no sign of Yajie. Later, forensic teams found her blood in his car. He finally admitted the truth — he strangled her in a blind rage.
Panicking, he drove around aimlessly with her body in the back seat. He even went home and slept. The next day, he drove to a deserted road in Lim Chu Kang, found a lorry with a canopy, placed her body inside, and set it on fire. The body didn’t fully burn, so he bought more charcoal and kept the fire going for three days.
He then scattered the ashes in the sea. The absence of her body didn’t stop the investigation. Using mitochondrial DNA analysis — a relatively new technology at the time — forensic experts confirmed the burned hair and clothing remnants belonged to Yajie. Leslie’s defense centered on his claim of “intermittent explosive disorder” and that he was provoked.
But the judge saw through his lies, deemed him an unreliable witness, and convicted him of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, not death, and chose not to appeal. This case mirrored an eerie tale from 53 years earlier. In 1963, a charismatic race car driver named Sunny Ang took his girlfriend Jenny Cheok scuba diving at Sisters’ Island.
Jenny, a bar waitress who barely had a primary education, was head over heels for him. She had no idea he was bankrupt and desperate for money. Sunny, a man who had already orchestrated a car accident in Malaysia hoping to cash in on her insurance, saw this dive as another opportunity. He took out hefty accident insurance on Jenny and named his own mother as the beneficiary.
He helped her into her diving gear, watched her dive in, and waited. She surfaced once after 10 minutes, then disappeared. Her body was never recovered. Days later, a single flipper was found — it appeared to have been tampered with, with a cut that no shark bite could have made.
Sunny’s demeanor didn’t help his case. He was hasty in making the insurance claim, didn’t seem worried, and even smiled for photos. The prosecution pieced together 16 points of circumstantial evidence, and the jury convicted him of murder. He was sentenced to death and executed.
Two women, two murders, 53 years apart. In both cases, no body was ever found. The men were both conmen driven by money. One was hanged.
The other was given life in prison. But the question nobody can answer — would either of them have been caught if they had chosen their victims more carefully?
