Ang was a psychopath. Two psychiatrists came to this conclusion after examining him in Changi Jail,
Dr Wong Yip Chong, then the government psychiatrist, saw Ang five times in 16 days in October 1966. He also interviewed his father, mother, sister and two of the brothers, as well as several members of the public with close association with Ang in the past. Dr Wong found Ang in good physical condition, and noted that his intelligence quotient (IQ) was recorded as 128-within the superior intelligence range.
Ang had a good academic record and was among the first 10 in the primary classes and maintained these positions to the secondary level except when he finished at the bottom of the class through playing truant. He completed his Senior Cambridge in 1955, and obtained distinctions in English and Science, and a C3 for Mathematics, thereby obtaining a Grade I certificate. This was obtained with the minimum of effort. Ang claimed that he never studied until the last two weeks of the examination. According to his form master, Maurice Baker, later to become Singapore’s first High Commissioner to India (now professor of English at the University of Singapore), Ang was a fairly quiet boy but bright, and with a great sense of adventure. “If there were a war, he would have distinguished himself.” He was apparently a likeable boy, though conceited. His school records show his conduct to have been good.
In early 1956 he went to work with Dunlops, but resigned after three months in anticipation of discovery by the company of his having ‘irresponsibly and improperly’ diverted some of the company’s products to his own home. He idled away the rest of the year, and in 1957 became a student teacher at Bedok Boys’ School for about six months. His conduct as a student teacher was deplorable. True to his philosophy of maximum results from minimum effort he would leave his pupils’ books to be corrected by his sister or mother. According to the records at the Teachers’ Training College, Sunny Ang was the only student never to attend any classes throughout the term. In 1958 he returned to teaching at St Thomas School, a private school, for one year. There his irresponsible behaviour continued. He was often away from his class. On one occasion he misappropriated school fees, though he later managed to return them to the school.
But in between these two periods of teaching, Ang had tried to become a commercial airline pilot. In May 1957 he was released by the Director of Education from his teacher-in-training course to train as an airline pilot with the aid of a Colombo Plan scholarship. He had always been interested in flying, and earlier that month (on 10 May 1957), he had qualified for his student pilot licence. He obtained his private pilot licence on 29 November, and passed his examinations for his Restricted Flight Radio and Telephone Operator’s Licence in May the following year.
This Colombo Plan scholarship training programme started off with six selected students, but only four were to be chosen for advanced training to commercial pilot level in India. In terms of efficiency, as reflected in the number of hours registered to qualify for solo flying, Ang ranked fourth with 13 hours. But he was not chosen. The fifth student, with over 20 hours, was chosen in his stead. Ang was greatly disappointed: he considered it a gross distortion of justice. He was determined to go on with his training in Singapore, and his mother pawned her jewellery, and borrowed money to enable him to do this. By the time he was finally grounded in May 1959 he had completed 139 flying hours: it had cost his mother nearly $5,000.
Ang admitted to Dr Wong that he had been involved in a number of irresponsible flying incidents, such as skimming over the water and the tops of coconut trees. He would come down low over house-tops to salute friends or a relative, or to look at girls sunbathing on the roof-tops.
Ang also admitted with nonchalance that he was an inveterate liar. His arrogance and his conceit were noted by Civil Aviation officials and his flying instructor. Ang was also over-confident, which is a dangerous disposition in flying. These were in fact the reasons why Ang was not selected for further training to commercial pilot level: an arrogant, conceited, over-confident person, given to irresponsible behaviour, does not often make a good pilot.
Ang was grounded in May 1959 following an emergency landing. He misread a compass and had run out of fuel. At the inquiry he lied and said he had a bird in his engine. This inaccurate explanation was not accepted, and he was not allowed to fly again. He should never have been allowed to fly in the first place because of defective eyesight. A friend took the first examination for him. The second he passed by learning the eye-chart by heart.
His hopes to become a commercial pilot dashed, Ang returned to teaching for about a year. Early in 1960 he became a chicken farmer. He cleared the land, built cages and reared thousands of chickens, and ducks as well for a time. He managed to make about $300 a month, and the farm thrived except when an epidemic wiped out almost all his stock. But he carried on, in spite of a financial loss, and in 1964 he also began to plant tomatoes. He was still farming when he was arrested and charged with Jenny’s murder.
Ang’s sex life seems to have been normal, if enthusiastic. He confessed to getting several girls into trouble: some of them had abortions. He told one girl he wanted to marry her and he induced her mother to lend him various sums of money totalling between $6,000 and $7,000. Much of this money he spent on paying for a Sunbeam sports car which he drove in the 1961 Singapore Grand Prix. When the girl’s mother realized his duplicity she made him a bankrupt. He was so enamoured with another girl that he would talk to her on the telephone when she was away for as long as two and a half hours at a time. He ran up telephone bills of $500 a month. His diary revealed that he had to sell about 200 chickens to settle these bills.
Ang liked girls, but not alcohol, and neither did he gamble. He never frequented night-clubs and he did not know how to dance. All his life he had few friends. Ang was faddish about food. He would never eat pork, the favourite meat of practically all the Chinese. He would eat no other meat than the meat of a chicken.
He was egocentric and vain. His physical health and appearance meant much to him. He would keep fit with a careful diet and regular physical exercises including running. Pimples would seriously upset him. He paid careful attention to his teeth. He was dissatisfied with himself for not being taller than five feet and six inches. For years he tried courses to get taller. He tried to improve his memory and his command of the English language. He was constantly striving to improve himself, physically and mentally.
His fondness for cars led him into trouble. He stole between $6,000 and $7,000 from his father, making the theft appear as though an outsider had taken the money. The police dismissed this possibility and a detective followed him to a car dealer where he was seen to hand over money and take possession of a car. The following day the receipt arrived home. Despite all this evidence, he flatly denied that he had stolen the money. An angry, miserable father drove him out of the house. Sunny went calmly and stayed away for a few days, coming back when his mother forgave him.
He was a skilful and fast driver, though shortly after the 1961 Grand Prix, driving the same Sunbeam he had raced in that event, he killed a pedestrian. He drove the car on to a road island. He claimed he was avoiding the man who, he said, had suddenly stepped onto the road. The coroner returned an open verdict. Ang was subsequently fined $30 for negligence.
At home, Sunny was obedient and helpful to his mother. He was the odd-job man in the house. He was kind to stray cats and dogs. Even during his trial he was concerned for a sick dog on the farm, and from the prison gave detailed instructions for its proper care.
There is ample evidence to show that Sunny Ang’s lying and thieving began at about the age of 10. The thefts started in his own home, then the homes of neighbours, and eventually in shops in the city and society at large. He was in his teens when he bought a set of oxyacetylene cutting instruments to better equip himself for future burglaries; but he sold them before he could use them, to help a friend who had lost his bicycle.
He stepped up his burglary activities after he was grounded from flying. He chose shops in the main shopping centres which were empty at night; he abhorred physical violence. At 1:00 AM in the morning of 12 July 1962, he was caught trying to burglarize a radio shop. David Marshall, Singapore’s foremost criminal lawyer, defended him and successfully saved him from a prison sentence, Ang being placed on probation. Staring at Mr Marshall coldly and with disdain (when counsel had expected a smile and a sigh of relief), Ang walked out of the dock without a word of thanks. He had apparently expected to be acquitted. That night David Marshall said to his wife, “Today I got a man off, and for the first time in 25 years’ practice at the Bar I will live to regret it.”
On probation, Ang worked hard on his farm, though he exasperated his probation officer. He also took stock of himself. He had left school seven years and had achieved very little. He would like to study law, and was confident that he could get a degree within 18 months if he went to Britain for his studies: but he did not have a Higher School Certificate. Nor the money to travel. He now felt that he would like to do well in society. “If I cannot beat them,” he told the psychiatrist, and by ‘them’ he meant the police, society, “then I will join them.” He probably remembered the words of his father the very morning of the day he was arrested in the radio shop. “Do not underestimate the ability and the power of the police,” his father had warned him. Ang made inquiries at the University of Singapore, but met with no encouragement. He read law books in his spare time. And then, sometime in 1963, his father introduced him to a friend, an insurance agent. Sunny began to sell insurance policies. It was about then that he conceived the murderous idea of a quick way to raise money to finance his trip to England to get his law degree.
Dr Wong came to the conclusion that in the legal sense Ang was not of unsound mind. He had no psychotic illness or insanity. There was no defect in his reasoning. In the context of the M’Naughten’s Rules for Criminal Responsibility he would be considered fully responsible for his actions.
As Ang was a psychopath, Dr Wong felt that the abnormality of his mind would be such as to have substantially impaired his mental responsibility. On medico-legal grounds he recommended a reprieve, but hastened to add that, with the facilities available in Singapore at that time, he saw little hope for a cure for Ang. He felt that a sentence of life imprisonment for Ang, ‘with his superior intelligence and his almost classical degree of psychopathy’, should mean what it says. “He is a dangerous person, if released prematurely. Ang has said simply but significantly, ‘I would do it again.’”
The End
When it was known that the Privy Council had rejected Ang’s appeal, friends and relatives at once began to organize a petition to President Yusof bin Ishak to spare his life. Late in October 1966, this petition, and a plea from Ang for clemency, were submitted to the President. The President must accept the advice of the Cabinet. On the last day of January 1967, Ang was told that President Yusof bin Ishak had rejected his appeal for clemency. He would be executed on Monday, 6 February.
Even then Ang did not abandon hope. He was planning a dramatic escape. During exercise time a helicopter would fly over the jail compound, with a rope dangling down, and Sunny would be whisked away to freedom. The coded letters failed to get to his accomplice.
On Friday he was told there was no hope. He accepted this unemotionally and requested the prison chaplain, the Rev. Khoo Siaw Hua, to baptize him. Then he wrote the chaplain the following letter: Dear Rev. Khoo, There is so much that I want to say to you but I am finding it very difficult to put my thoughts into words. So forgive me for this, my farewell letter, being so brief, and, 1 fear, incoherent. Do you remember the day you first saw me here, how I kept repeating to you ‘I’m an atheist!’, almost with pride? But as I watched you come here so often, spending so much of your time and giving so much of yourself to the Pulau Senang boys and the rest of us, expecting and receiving nothing in turn, I asked myself, ‘What is it that motivates this man to such altruistic acts? Is there really a God as he so undoubtedly believes?’ This, plus my brother Victor’s example, led me to spend hours on end pondering over the question of Life. Death, the Existence of God, truth of the Bible and other related matters, my mind ranging far and wide into hitherto unexplored realms. The conclusion I came to were foregone, but I still refused to open my heart to God as I had some unfinished business to carry out, viz. a vendetta. Months passed without any change: but one day, the 17th of December 1967-for no apparent reason I was overwhelmed by a desire to kneel down in prayer and pour out my heart to God, surrendering myself to Him and admitting to Him that revenge was in my heart He listened and understood and as I got to know Him better through the succeeding days and weeks, He told me that I should be above revenge and hate, that only love and understanding should occupy my thoughts and guide my actions. How I wish I could have met you in less tragic circumstances and derived the benefit of your courses. But I nevertheless thank you for everything you have done for me and will be doing for me in the next few days. Through you I found Christ and through Him I shall find the Kingdom of Heaven. We’ll meet again in happier circumstances. Till then, fare thee well. Yours in Christ Sunny Ang
Sunny Ang spent the last few hours of his life praying with the Rev. Khoo, and reading the Bible. The chaplain said, “We talked only about religion and nothing else. He was all the time calm and smiling.”
Ang was told that acccording to prison regulations he could have a last meal to the value of $5. He said, “I just want a nice cold glass of milk.” Milk is not a popular drink with Asians.
Shortly before dawn, Ang, apparently unrepentant and unafraid, walked steadily the 100 paces from his cell to the gallows. The noose was slipped around his neck, the trap-door opened, and at 5:55 AM, on the morning of Monday, 6 February 1967, Sunny Ang paid the penalty for his crime.
The hangman grimly closed the final chapter of a murder case that made legal history in Singapore. This had been the first murder trial without the body of the victim: it was the first time a man charged with murder had been found guilty entirely on circumstantial evidence. The case was also unusual in that it was a crime of coldly calculated murder for greed and gain, a crime in which the death of the victim, and not robbery, was the primary consideration.
At 9:00 AM, Juliet Ang, then recently admitted to the Bar, arrived at the prison in a car driven by a magistrate. She entered the prison and identified Ang’s body. Half an hour later she emerged and the car that brought her drove away. About the same time a van from the Singapore Casket Company arrived. Sunny Ang was buried at Bidadari Cemetery that afternoon.
Sunny Ang was a Chinese. The judge was born in Australia. The foreman of the jury (most of them Chinese) was a Dane. The prosecuting counsel was a Chinese, his assistant a Malay. Ang’s defence was conducted by two Indians. The witnesses were Chinese, Malays, Indians, Eurasians and Europeans. Evidence was given in Chinese dialects. Malay and English. Ang killed Jenny (a Chinese) when Singapore was a self-governing British colony. His trial began when Singapore was part of Malaysia, He was found guilty three months before Singapore was separated from Malaysia. Singapore had become an independent republic by the time his appeals were heard, and President Ishak rejected his plea for clemency. Justice Buttrose retired from Singapore in 1968 and went to live in England. He was the last of the British expatriate judges to serve in Singapore, where he had worked in the legal profession for 23 years. He became a High Court judge in 1957. The Chief Justice, Mr Wee Chong Jin, described Justice Buttrose’s retirement at the age of 65 as a ‘great loss, especially in that he was a judge with immense experience and knowledge, not only of the country’s laws, but also of the people’.