Ang Mo Kio corridor murder: Woman gets life sentence for killing boyfriend

SINGAPORE: A Vietnamese woman was sentenced to life imprisonment on Tuesday (Oct 7) for murdering her boyfriend along a corridor of a public housing block in Ang Mo Kio four years ago.

Nguyen Ngoc Giau, 43, was found guilty of the charge on Tuesday, with Justice Dedar Singh Gill saying he was satisfied that the elements of the charge had been established beyond a reasonable doubt.

"I also find that the accused has not succeeded in establishing, on a balance of probabilities, either the defence of intoxication or the defence of sudden fight," he added.

Nguyen had stabbed Mr Cho Wang Keung, 51, along the common corridor on the fifth floor of Block 562, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3, on Jul 15, 2021.

Mr Cho was a jewellery assembler and landlord who owned a three-room flat at the public housing block.

Nguyen, who is a Singapore permanent resident, moved in as a tenant in July 2020 but began sharing a bedroom with Mr Cho after they became romantically involved.

In July 2021, the couple fell out because Mr Cho wanted to break up with her and evict her.

The prosecution said that Nguyen was upset because a female beer promoter had visited the flat days before the attack, and that she had seen the beer promoter sitting on Mr Cho's lap.

The day before the murder, Nguyen tried to call Mr Cho more than 30 times and texted him "call me back f*** you" at about 11am. At 8.56pm, she texted him: "446 good", referring to the coffee shop where the beer promoter worked.

She suspected that he had gone there to drink with the promoter. 

After drinking beer herself and making unanswered calls to Mr Cho, Nguyen sharpened a knife and confronted him outside the flat at about 12.50am on Jul 15, 2021.

When she discovered a male tenant taking photos of the assault, Nguyen turned on him and he fled down the stairs, the court heard previously.

The police arrived minutes after that and found the couple in a pool of blood. Mr Cho died later that morning of stab wounds to the neck, chest and back.

Nguyen was assessed to have alcohol-use disorder and likely to be in a state of "acute alcohol intoxication" at the time, a report by the Institute of Mental Health showed.

She was represented by three sets of lawyers under the Legal Assistance Scheme for Capital Offences scheme, namely, Mr Favian Kang from Centurion Law, Mr Kalaithasan Karuppaya from Regent Law and Mr Ng Yuan Siang from Eugene Thuraisingam's eponymous law firm.

At the trial, Nguyen – a petite woman with long hair – testified about her tumultuous relationship with the victim.

She had first come to Singapore in 2010 and met her husband while working in a KTV lounge. They married after two months and have two children together.

She said she last visited her children in 2019 and her last contact with her husband was some time before that.

She said Mr Cho was also married when they began their relationship, and that he grew fond of her after she cared for his daughter, who was more than two years old at the time.

However, she said they drank and quarrelled every day and fought about five times a week.

In the defence's closing submissions, it urged the court to find her guilty of a lesser charge of culpable homicide not amounting to murder instead.

It argued that this was "not an egregious case", but that of a couple in an unhealthy relationship, which was "plagued by quarrels and fights".

"Ms Nguyen and the deceased allowed their passions to get the better of themselves due to alcohol," the lawyers said. 

"A misunderstanding was blown out of proportion. They quarrelled and hit each other many times before, but their previous fights did not reach a nasty stage like the present instance, where both sustained multiple serious stab injuries."

The defence also said that Nguyen was so intoxicated that she could not have formed the intention to cause the stab wounds to the victim, or that his death was caused by a sudden fight.

The lawyers argued that Nguyen suffered very serious and life-threatening injuries, raising the possibility that the victim had inflicted them during a violent struggle, which is a foothold to establishing the defence of a sudden fight.

However, the judge rejected the defences put forth by the lawyers and convicted Nguyen.

JUDGE'S FINDINGS

Justice Gill said he acknowledged that Nguyen was intoxicated at the time, but it was not so severe as to prevent her from forming the intention to inflict the fatal wounds.

"The evidence instead portrays someone who remained capable of forming specific intentions and acting upon them in a rational and calculated manner." 

As for the defence of a sudden fight, Justice Gill said that Nguyen had made a "deliberate choice to arm herself with a sharp knife" and used it to inflict serious wounds on the victim.

"This shows a degree of conscious decision-making at the time of the incident, even if it falls short of premeditation." 

He also said that the defence had failed to prove that there was a sudden fight "in the heat of passion upon a sudden quarrel", and that the defence's case "rests largely on speculation and attempts to draw multiple successive inferences from circumstantial evidence".

Although the DNA evidence and blood pattern analysis indicated that there was physical contact between Nguyen and the victim, these were consistent with the victim's natural defensive reaction while being attacked, he added.

Nguyen's DNA being found under the victim's fingernails and on his clothing "does not lend credence to the assertion that he had stabbed her", he said.

He added that this was "a tragic case of love gone wrong" and that "a life has been needlessly lost".

The prosecution said that it would not be seeking the death penalty for this case and that there was "no issue of caning" given her gender. Under the law, women cannot be caned.

The defence had nothing to add, since the only other possible sentence for the charge was life imprisonment.

Nguyen told the court: "I wish to appeal."

She was convicted of murder under Section 300(c) of the Penal Code, where the act is done with the intention to cause bodily injury to a person and the injury intended is enough to cause death. The maximum penalty is death or life imprisonment with caning.