Pan Hui ( – 20 October 2007; ) was a 15-year-old girl who was found dead on 20 October 2007 inside a rental flat in Marsiling, Singapore. 45-year-old bus driver Ong Pang Siew (born 17 August 1962; ), Pan Hui's step-father, was charged with murder. It was revealed in court that after the divorce, Ong and Pan's biological mother had been arguing regarding Ong's need to visit his biological son. On the date of the killing, Ong went there to see his son and his conversation with Pan eventually escalated into an argument that led to the strangulation.
Ong was diagnosed by the defence's psychiatrist to be suffering from major depressive disorder, which impaired his mental responsibility at the time of the murder, and his prior consumption of alcohol likely also contributed to the impairment of Ong's mental state at the material time. However, the trial court rejected the defence's psychiatric evidence and ruled in favour of the prosecution's psychiatric opinion, and Ong was hence sentenced to death for murder. However, upon Ong's appeal, his conviction of murder was reduced to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and Ong's death sentence was commuted to ten years' imprisonment.
Background Pan Hui was born in Jilin Province, China in 1992. She was the only child of her mother Xiu Yanhong and her biological father, whose name is unknown. Xiu first came to Singapore for work in 1997, divorcing her husband and gaining custody of Pan two years later.
Born in Singapore on 17 August 1962, Ong Pang Siew was the sixth of his family's twelve children, two of whom died prior to Pan's murder. He first met Xiu in 1997 while he was working as a bus driver. He and Xiu eventually developed a relationship after he went to China to meet her. In July 2002, Ong and Xiu were officially married and Pan thus became Ong's stepdaughter, taking on her stepfather's name. Xiu gave birth to Ong's biological son Cong He on 8 August 2003. Due to her poor command of English, Pan re-started her primary school education by enrolling in Primary 1 at Yishun Primary School at the age of ten. According to Ong, him and Pan "got along well".
However, by 2005, their marriage had considerably soured; Xiu had become a masseuse and started to spend more time with clients, leading to Ong to suspect she was having an affair. Pan fell out with Ong the following year, after Ong reportedly slapped her on her birthday. Eventually, Xiu moved out of the matrimonial home and lived at a rented flat in Marsiling. In May 2007, Xiu filed for divorce. The motion was granted in October 2007, with Xiu gaining full custody of Pan and joint custody of Cong.
Following the custody battle, Ong reportedly fell into a depressed state. The court allowed Ong to visit his son on weekends, but according to Subhas Anandan, Xiu often purposely made it difficult for Ong to talk with him.
Murder At around 9pm (UTC+08:00) on 20 October 2007, soon after a beer-drinking session with friends, Ong called Xiu to inquire why he had not been allowed to see his son Cong. The conversation turned heated, and after Ong used some "nasty words", Xiu hung up. Ong called Xiu ten more times, before heading to Xiu's flat. Xiu and Cong were not at the flat at the time.
Once Ong arrived, he conversed with Pan concerning her recently acquired Singaporean citizenship and her Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) test results. However, they began to argue once Ong accused Pan of caning Cong, which she denied. Ong then saw Pan pick up something beside her computer, which he believed to be a knife, leading him to a struggle.
Zhao Jing, a fellow tenant, reported seeing Ong shout "Who am I?" in Mandarin while strangling Pan and smashing her head against the floor. She called Xiu, who was heading back to the flat with Cong, followed by 999. By the time the police arrived, Pan had died. Ong was sighted sitting on her body. According to Dr Teo Eng Swee, a forensic pathologist who examined Pan's corpse, a moderate to severe degree of pressure had been applied to her neck, which also had a few superficial incisions caused by a knife; a broken blade was reportedly discovered at the scene where Pan was killed.
Before he was arrested, Ong called several people, profusely apologizing for what happened. In a call with his brother, he even claimed that he was considering suicide. Subsequently, Ong was arrested at the scene, and he was charged with murder a day later. Ong was subsequently ordered to stand trial during a preliminary hearing in May 2008.
Trial of Ong Pang Siew
On 29 September 2008, 46-year-old Ong Pang Siew stood trial at the High Court for the murder of his stepdaughter Pan Hui. Ong was represented by renowned criminal lawyer Subhas Anandan and Sunil Sudheesan, while the prosecution was led by Amarjit Singh and Diane Tan. The trial was presided by Justice Tay Yong Kwang of the High Court.
During the trial itself, Ong did not deny that he had strangled Pan, but he stated he never intended to cause her death, and his main defence was diminished responsibility. Dr Tommy Tan, a private consultant psychiatrist, testified that Ong, who had both hypertension and diabetes, was suffering from major depressive disorder (or depression) at the time of the murder. He noted that Ong exhibited several symptoms, like the loss of sleep, weight loss and loss of interest in his work during the months leading up to the murder. While his friends noted Ong was still cheerful and optimistic as usual, they noted he had lost a lot of weight prior to the killing, and there were observations from his family that Ong was getting more depressed and moody, especially since the divorce proceedings. Dr Tan also noted that Ong's family had a history of depression: Ong's parents, who both died by the time of his trial, suffered from depression and some of his siblings were also diagnosed with depression and still receiving treatment while Ong's trial was ongoing. Dr Tan stated that based on his extensive interviews with Ong and his family members and friends, he thus came to the diagnosis that Ong was suffering from depression, and his mental responsibility had been substantially impaired at the time of the murder, and Ong's behaviour of irrationally mumbling to himself and sitting on Pan's corpse was abnormal and corroborative of his psychiatric condition. Dr Tan also pointed out that Ong's intake of at least 20 cans of alcohol before the murder led to him being acutely intoxicated by alcohol at the time of the murder, and it also additionally affected his state of mind when he killed Pan.
However, the prosecution argued that Ong was a cold-blooded murderer who came to the flat with a premeditated intent to commit the murder of Pan, and stated that Ong's motive was to make sure his ex-wife could suffer from the pain of losing a loved one, after the divorce and his separation from his son and stepdaughter. The prosecution also called upon government psychiatrist Dr Jerome Goh, who claimed that Ong was not suffering from depression at the time of the murder, and also claimed that Ong's intake of alcohol would not have sufficiently impaired his mental state when he strangled Pan to death. At one point, during the prosecution's cross-examination, in which it suggested that Ong had intentionally caused the knife wounds on Pan, Ong broke down in tears as he denied doing on the stand.
On 12 March 2009, Justice Tay Yong Kwang delivered his judgement. He stated that he accepted the prosecution's arguments and psychiatric opinion, and found that Ong was not suffering from diminished responsibility at the time of the murder and he was able to act normally in spite of his supposed alcohol intoxication, and he had intentionally strangled Pan to death with a view to cause her death. Therefore, 46-year-old Ong Pang Siew was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Under Section 302 of the Singaporean Penal Code, the death penalty was mandated as the sole punishment for murder in Singapore.
According to Pan's mother Xiu, while she did not forgive Ong, she still hoped at least, Ong could appeal and escape the death sentence since after all, he was still her son's birth father and they used to be a couple, and she also hoped her daughter could rest in peace and not hate her stepfather for what he had done. Xiu was still saddened over her daughter's death even after a few years had passed since the case occurred.
Ong's appeal On 8 July 2010, Ong Pang Siew's appeal was heard before the Court of Appeal. The main points of the defence's appeal was that Ong was indeed suffering from diminished responsibility at the time of the murder, and they also urged the appellate court to accept the defence's psychiatric evidence. During the hearing of the appeal, the appellate court had harshly reprimanded Dr Goh for his poor assessment of Ong's psychiatric state after they reviewed his reports, before they reserved judgement to a later date.
On 8 November 2010, the Court of Appeal's three-judge panel, consisting of Chief Justice Chan Sek Keong, and two Judges of Appeal Andrew Phang and V. K. Rajah, returned with a verdict, and Justice Rajah pronounced their judgement. In the verdict, the three judges accepted that Ong was suffering from diminished responsibility when he killed Pan Hui, as a result of major depressive disorder and alcohol intoxication. Justice Rajah also stated that after comparing the psychiatric reports of Dr Tommy Tan and Dr Jerome Goh, they found that Dr Tan's evidence was more reliable and his assessment of Ong's mental state was much more complete than Dr Goh, and they first noted that throughout his assessment, Dr Goh conversed with Ong in Mandarin instead of Hokkien, which Ong was much more fluent in speaking and more comfortable to communicate with, and there could also be miscommunication on that part, which led to little rapport established between Dr Goh and Ong, in contrast to the huge rapport Ong formed with Dr Tan with their conversations being made in Hokkien.
Apart from that, Justice Rajah stated that the older Dr Tan had much more experience (15 years in total) than Dr Goh in conducting psychiatric evaluation of murder suspects during his previous employment at the Institute of Mental Health and current private practice, in contrast to the younger Dr Goh whose assessment of Ong was the first murder case he encountered during his eight-year psychiatrist career. The appellate judges also found that unlike Dr Tan, who had interviewed many of Ong's kin and friends and considered his family's medical history, Dr Goh did not inquire further on the medical history of Ong and his family, and did not further interview the other family members and friends of Ong apart from two of Ong's siblings, and this posed a huge inadequacy and lack of completeness in his medical evaluation of Ong, and therefore his reports were rejected in favour of Dr Tan's opinion. The appellate judges found that while Ong had indeed strangled Pan and killed her, it was not a case of cold-blooded or premeditated murder, but rather a case of Ong acting irrationally due to his mental state and killed Pan, and his behaviours of sitting on Pan's body, talking to himself and even calling his employer and brother about not able to work anymore and wanting to commit suicide were extremely abnormal instead of being rational.