For the “monstrous cruelty” dealt upon an intellectually disabled young lady that went on for eight months, a couple has been slapped with jail sentences of at least 14 years each.
Tan Hui Zhen, 33, will serve 16-and-a-half years in prison, while her 38-year-old husband Pua Hak Chuan was given 14 years in jail and 14 strokes of the cane, according to Channel NewsAsia.
Both pleaded guilty to savagely assaulting their 26-year-old housemate Annie Ee Yu Lian from August 2014 until her death on April 13, 2015. Their inhumane abuse left Ee with twelve fractured ribs, seven fractured vertebrae, a ruptured stomach, as well as multiple blisters and bruises at the point of her death.
Prosecutors had initially sought 15 years’ jail for Tan and 14 years’ jail and 12 strokes of the cane for Pua, and the final court decision should more than satisfy them. To the public, however, it would seem that no amount of jail time and caning could ever absolve the couple for the sadistic, vicious torture they put their “friend” through.
Savagery in Woodlands
Tan was 17 and Ee was 13 when they met in 2001, when Tan was a sales assistant at a clothing shop that Ee’s mother was a regular customer at. Though they lost touch for a while, they struck up their “friendship” again in 2013, when Ee, estranged from her family, moved into the couple’s four-room flat in Woodlands.
At first, the agreement was for her to help out with the housework, but she ended up paying rent of S$500 (US$371) a month and doing chores like cooking and cleaning for the two, Channel NewsAsia noted.
Ee, who held a waitressing job, had to give Tan her entire paycheck of S$1,200 (US$890) and was only allowed a weekly allowance of S$50 (US$37), which later decreased to S$30 (US$22).
The abuse began in August 2014, when Tan admitted she slapped Ee several times for a period of five months — first with her bare hands, before progressing to a pair of bedroom slippers. When Tan was tired of the beatings, she would make her husband, the “standby slapper”, take over.
Besides using weapons like a plastic belt, a bamboo stick, a plastic dustbin, and a heavy roll of shrink wrap to hit Ee, Tan also constantly scolded her with words like “pig brain” and forced her to record fake sums of money in Tan’s “book of debts” to make up for every instance of her angering Tan, whom she called jie jie (older sister in Mandarin). Some of Ee’s purported misdeeds included lying and spending too much time in the shower.
Things got worse in December 2014, when Ee started receiving daily beatings until her death. When her colleagues started displaying concern over her bruises, Tan made her quit and find another job. From then on, the pair only hit Ee on her buttocks to make the injuries easier to hide.
The beatings resulted in huge blisters on Ee’s buttocks — one even measured about 8cm in diameter — and her injuries got so bad that the couple had to use sanitary pads to bandage the wounds.
On Apr 12, the day before Ee died, she was delirious, suffered numerous rib fractures, had bruises and blisters all over her body, and was short of breath. Having felt “useless” for not being able to do what her jie jie instructed her to do, she even attempted suicide by slitting her wrists with a pair of scissors but was stopped by Pua.
Even while the incontinent Ee was lying on the floor in a puddle of her own urine that day, the couple blamed her for being attention-seeking and punished her for her “bad attitude”.
The duo then beat her with the shrink wrap, threw a plastic dustbin at her so hard that it cracked on impact, and left her on her bed. Ee was lifeless by the time they checked on her the next morning.
To get rid of the fingerprint evidence, Pua tore a layer off the shrink wrap and flushed it down the toilet. Tan called her brother to tell him Ee had committed suicide, then she called the police. When officers arrived at the scene, Tan claimed Ee sustained injuries from her own clumsiness; it was only later that the couple admitted to assaulting her.
Response
Ee’s siblings have since spoken up, supporting a petition currently spreading around that calls for heavier sentences against the inhumane duo.
