The year of 1979 would be less than a week old before an appalling quadruple child murder took place in a small home in Singapore.
Tan Kuen Chai and Lee Mei Ying were a hard-working couple who lived in a one-room flat in the Geylang Bahru subzone of Kallang, Singapore. They ran a small business, driving children to and from school in a mini-bus, and also had four young children of their own.
On the morning of January 6th, 1979, the pair set out at a little past six-thirty a.m. to make their daily rounds. As usual, their children—ten-year-old Tan Kok Peng, eight-year-old Tan Kok Hin, six-year-old Tan Kok Soon, and five-year-old Tan Chin Nee—were left sleeping at home; their mother would call to wake them for school a bit later on in the morning.
At ten minutes past seven, the children’s mother did just that, but immediately became concerned when no one answered the phone. She called back twice more, and again received no answer. Starting to panic, she then phoned a neighbor and begged them to go to the flat and knock on the door. The neighbor did as she was asked, but from within the apartment came only silence.
Tan Kuen Chai and Lee Mei Ying hurried back from their rounds, arriving back at their flat at approximately ten a.m. Once inside the flat, they encountered every parent’s worst nightmare.
All four of the Tan children had been butchered and left in a pile in the bathroom. Each of them had been slashed across the head and face at least twenty times, and the oldest boy’s arm had nearly been severed.
From the beginning of the ensuing investigation, it seemed clear that whoever had murdered the children had thoroughly planned the crime, and was likely a close associate of the family. The flat showed no sign of forced entry, and nothing whatsoever had been stolen. The only clues found at the scene included a small amount of blood in the kitchen sink, where the killer had presumably cleaned himself up, and a few strands of long hair clutched in the hand of one of the victims, Tan Kok Peng. The murder weapons, thought to be a dagger and a tool akin to a cleaver, were never found.
Even more chillingly, the parents received a Chinese New Year card shortly after the murder that contained a picture of children playing, along with the words, “Now you can have no more offspring ha ha ha,” written in Mandarin. This message seemed to indicate that the killer knew that Lee Mei Ying had a tubal ligation following the birth of her youngest daughter. The writer of the card also knew the couple’s nicknames, Ah Chai and Ah Eng, all but confirming that the murderer was a close friend or relative who had perhaps perpetrated the massacre in order to exact some twisted revenge.
Although the fact of the assailant’s intimate familiarity with the family narrowed the pool of suspects down considerably, detectives were nonetheless never able to gather enough solid evidence to make an arrest, and the ghastly mass murder remains unsolved.
In a somewhat happy coda, however, Lee Mei Ying was later able to have her tubal ligation reversed, and the couple gave birth to a son five years after the shocking crime that robbed them of their previous four children. They later had a daughter as well.
Tan Kuen Chai passed away several years ago, though Lee Mei Ying was still alive as of 2021. That same year, the investigation into the murder was reopened due to new information from a neighbor. The case remains open as of this writing, and received further media interest after being featured on a 2022 episode of the Inside Crime Scene program.
Crime Immemorial 