Six-year-old Lim Shiow Rong lived with her parents and younger sister in Toa Payoh, Singapore. Her mother Ang Goon Lay ran a coffee shop, while her father Lim Kim Siong was an addict who had previously served time for drug offenses.
Lim was a student at Poi Ching School, and was described by elders and teachers as a very streetwise, tomboyish type of girl, who was so friendly that she often talked to strangers, and was even said to follow any man who claimed to be a friend of her father’s. This tendency, sadly, may have been what got her killed.
At around nine-thirty p.m. on the night of June 24th, 1995, Lim was hanging out in her mother’s coffee shop, as she normally did; her mother worked in the shop until eleven every evening. She told her mother that she was going to meet a friend of her father’s, and though her mother tried to dissuade her from going, the child went anyway.
Ang closed the shop at eleven p.m. and became concerned because Lim had not returned. She searched for her daughter around Toa Payoh all night, but found no sign of her, and the next morning at around nine a.m., reported the girl’s disappearance to police.
What Ang didn’t know was that only an hour before the report was filed, a teenage boy who’d been playing soccer at Jalan Woodbridge had found the body of a little girl, sitting partially upright in a drain. Investigators identified the victim as Lim Shiow Rong, and determined that she had been raped and strangled. The location where her body was found was approximately five miles from her home.
Authorities honed in on one suspect in particular, a customer of Ang’s coffee shop who often came in and acted somewhat suspiciously. The man would specifically come into the shop when Lim’s father was not there, for example, and he would only talk to Lim when he was in the shop. Several witnesses also reported that he had bought the little girl candy on multiple occasions. The suspect was described as a dark, stout Chinese man, standing about five-foot-five and aged between thirty and forty years old. People often saw him in the area around the coffee shop, and noted that he usually wore a polo shirt and shorts.
During the inquiry, detectives discovered that Lim had written the date June 24th on her wall, which was the same day she went missing, although the year she wrote was 1994, not 1995. They also found a scrap of a cigarette carton in the bag she’d left behind at the shop when she vanished; the scrap had a pager number written on it, as well as a Chinese character that meant “little brother.” Though investigators believed this pager number was likely linked the Lim’s death, they were never able to locate its owner.
Lim’s surviving family periodically makes pleas in the media for help in solving the case, and although police confirm that the investigation is still open, the individual who murdered Lim Shiow Rong is still unidentified.
Crime Immemorial 