On the early morning of 21 April 1999, a 56-year-old former police officer named T. Maniam was ambushed by two men who used weapons to brutally beat him to death on the road between his house and his neighbour's home in Phoenix Garden, Singapore. His death was witnessed by his elder stepdaughter and one of his neighbours, together with the neighbour's maid. Following police investigations, three suspects, including Maniam's second wife Julaiha Begum, were arrested for the alleged murder, and the remaining two suspects, Loganatha Venkatesan and Chandran Rajagopal, were identified to be the men seen at the scene of the crime.
When the trial of the three killers started in December 1999, it was charged that Julaiha, who was having a soured relationship with her husband and got into legal disputes with him, and it was said that she plotted to kill her husband with the two other defendants and another two men (one still at large as of today and another had backed out of the plan before the murder) in order to get full ownership of the flat and the proceeds from the sale of the house. On 14 March 2000, the High Court found all three guilty of murder and sentenced them to death by hanging. The trio were hanged in Changi Prison on 16 February 2001 after the loss of their appeals against the death sentence.
Murder On the early morning of 21 April 1999, 55-year-old former police officer T. Maniam was about to go to work. When he reached his car, he noticed that a truck was driving towards his car. Suddenly, the truck hit the back of Maniam’s car, and two men stepped out of the mysterious vehicle and took Maniam by surprise.
Armed with blunt instruments, the two men went forward and attacked Maniam, who fell down and was brutally beaten until he died while he was lying on the road between his house and his neighbour's home in Phoenix Garden, Singapore. At the same time, from her bedroom window, Maniam’s elder stepdaughter Fairos, then aged 29, witnessed the horrifying scene of her father being beaten to death on the road outside her neighbour’s house, much to her shock. Fairos was not the only one who witnessed the gruesome crime. A maid named Aurea David and her employer, Geraldine Tan Poh Choo (), also saw what happened to Maniam.
After the short but swift attack, the two men left in their truck. An ambulance arrived at around 7.25 am, and the paramedics pronounced Maniam dead at the scene. Dr Teo Eng Swee, the forensic pathologist from the Health Sciences Authority, conducted an autopsy and found that the cause of Maniam’s death was due to severe head injuries. The base of Maniam’s skull was cracked from ear to ear, and there were at least four blows inflicted to the left side of his head and one to the right, and another to the neck. A part of Maniam’s right middle finger was also being hacked off by the blows as he raised his right hand to defend himself. Defensive injuries were also concentrated on his arms and hands.
Investigations
Inspector Gordon Toh, a police officer who was formerly mentored by Maniam, became in charge of the case when the police were contacted about the alleged murder. When Toh began his investigations into his mentor’s death, he heard from Fairos that she recognized one of the two assailants as 25-year-old Loganatha Venkatesan, the boyfriend of her mother and Maniam’s estranged second wife, 51-year-old Julaiha Begum.
Based on this information, the police tried to look for Venkatesan in Little India. An informant contacted the police and told them that Venkatesan was about to fly out of Singapore very soon, and he was right at the moment at his lawyer’s office to settle his affairs before he was due to board his flight. The police managed to arrive on time at the lawyer’s office to arrest Venkatesan as a suspect in relation to the murder of Maniam. Later, the police managed to arrest a former neighbour of Julaiha, and the neighbour told the police where to find Julaiha before he was released. Based on the address given, the police arrived at a Tah Ching flat occupied by an ethnic Malay family, who rented a room to both Julaiha and Venkatesan. Julaiha, who was at the flat when the police arrived, became the second person to be arrested as a suspect in her husband’s murder.
Forensic evidence also revealed that there was some blue paint found on the back of Maniam’s car and broken plastic pieces found on the ground near Maniam’s car. The truck seen at the scene of crime was eventually located, and both the broken plastic pieces and paint were matched to the truck. When he was questioned by the police, the owner of the truck, Sarveshvaran Ratnasamy, told the police that he was not driving it on the day of Maniam’s murder, and he said that he actually loaned the truck to his two friends, known to him as Chandran and Mani respectively, the former whom said he wanted to use it for carrying a fridge.
After Sarveshvaran told them that Chandran lived in a rented room in Changi Road, both police officers, Staff Sergeant Erulandy Guruthevan and Inspector Zainal Abidin Ismail, led a group to conduct a police raid to apprehend Chandran. At around 5.30 am, on 28 April 1999, the police found Chandran’s place of residence, and they arrested Chandran, who shared the room with his friend Narayanasamy Tamilvanan and three other Indian males. Tamilvanan and the three other tenants were later released, while Chandran remained in police custody, and a police search yielded the discovery of Maniam’s photograph and written vehicle numbers in Chandran’s wallet. Chandran, whose full name was Chandran Rajagopal, was Venkatesan’s 24-year-old childhood friend, and both of them came from the same village of Pudukuppam, India. Chandran, Venkatesan and Julaiha were all charged with murder.
Mani, who allegedly helped drive the truck on the day of Maniam’s death, was not caught, and the police placed his name on the wanted list.
Background Early life and career of Maniam Madavamani s/o Thuraisamy Thagavelu, better known as T. Maniam, was an ethnic Indian born in Singapore in 1943 during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore, which ended in August 1945. He later grew up and joined the local police force at the age of 20 in 1963. During his early years in the police force, Maniam became married to a woman named Laxhmi in 1966, and the couple had two sons.
Aside from this, Maniam was known to have investigated and cracked several murder cases, and sent several murderers to the gallows. One case investigated by Maniam was the murder of Lim Lee Tin, a woman who often dressed up as a man and was killed in 1989 by both Chin Yau Kim and his friend Ng Kim Heng for repeatedly harassing Chin’s older sister Seow Noi, who plotted Lim’s murder after she had had enough of her harassment. The Chin siblings and Ng were convicted and hanged on 31 March 1995. Another case was a schizophrenic killer named Neo Man Lee, who murdered Judy Quek in a public bathroom on 4 September 1984. Neo, who happened to suffer from a relapse of his illness when he killed Quek, was sentenced to life imprisonment for culpable homicide in March 1989.
During his years of service in the force, Maniam had also mentored a few police officers, including former artist Gordon Toh, who was the same investigating officer that caught his mentor’s killers. Toh, who retired in November 2017, said to a newspaper in 2018 that he had a close relationship with his mentor and was at first shocked to hear that he was assigned to investigate Maniam's death.
Relationship with Julaiha Begum Affair and second marriage In 1981, Maniam first met Julaiha Begum, who reported to the police about alleged spousal abuse. Back then, Julaiha had recently divorced her first husband, Abdul Kareem s/o Mohamed Shariff, with whom she had two sons and two daughters, Fairos and Sairah. Julaiha took custody of her younger son and two daughters, while Abdul Kareem had custody of their elder son. Since then, Maniam began to see more of Julaiha, and their relationship slowly grew intimate. Fairos and Sairah, who were five and eleven years old respectively when they first met Maniam, remember him fondly as he brought them up well and took good care of the two of them, as well as Julaiha's second son.
Later, Maniam became estranged from his wife and continued his affair with Julaiha, with whom he had fallen in love. He moved in to live with Julaiha and eventually divorced his wife, Laxhmi. Despite his divorce, Maniam remained in contact with his sons and ex-wife, and his sons still considered him as a good father. Julaiha and Maniam then became married in 1991. Unknown to the newly-wedded couple, their happiness would not last long.
Deterioration of relationship Two years later, sometime in 1993, Maniam, who reached his 50th birthday, officially retired from the police force after 30 years of service. After his retirement, he began to open his own security business. Unfortunately, at around this time, his relationship with Julaiha began to decline. In combination to her prior disappointment that their new family home at Jurong Kechil was bought solely under Maniam's name two years before, Julaiha was insecure as Maniam’s retirement had posed a threat to her lavish lifestyle, and she often posed unstable moods over the situation. Still, Maniam did not mind as he still loved Julaiha.
Later, Maniam purchased a house at Phoenix Garden, this time under both his and Julaiha’s names. Still, there were more conflicts that brought the couple’s relationship into further decline. Firstly, Julaiha began to be more possessive of Maniam, as she grew jealous of her daughters for growing more attached to her husband as they grew older, as well as the relationship between Maniam and his two sons from his first marriage. She was also insecure that Maniam would leave her one day. Whenever she was upset, she was said to have gone into the room to beat her daughters up and throw objects around. Besides, whenever the couple argued, Julaiha would be the aggressor and pick a one-sided physical fight. Julaiha also went as far as to accuse her daughters of having an affair with their stepfather, which hurt all three of them.
The relationship between Julaiha and her family would deteriorate even further in mid-1995. The family of four went to India for a short holiday trip, but due to some unknown problems with the Indian authorities, both Sairah and her mother were detained in India for half a year and did not return to Singapore as scheduled. At that time, Sairah was enrolled as a tertiary student in an Australian university, and Maniam, who returned to Singapore with Fairos as scheduled, had to apply on behalf of Sairah to defer her studies until she returned in the end of 1995. During their time in India, Julaiha had unjustifiably blamed Sairah for their detention in India.
Julaiha’s affair and legal disputes
Later, sometime in 1996, during these unsettled times, 48-year-old Julaiha first met 22-year-old Loganatha Venkatesan, who was asked to come to the Maniam household to cut down a mango tree in the family's house garden. Despite the 26-year difference, Venkatesan became attracted to Julaiha, who still looked youthful and elegant even in her forties. It was then that both began an illicit affair.