Once a Jolly Hangman (15 page)

McCrea was also a fitness enthusiast who was proud of his muscular physique and prowess. He installed a full size punch bag in the corner of his bedroom and he worked out every morning before breakfast. Kho was easily overcome by McCrea who finished him off with blows from a metal rod. During the fight Lan went to Kho's aid repeatedly smashing a vase over McCrea's head injuring his arm as he tried to ward off the blows. Then he knocked Lan unconscious with a single punch. Later that same day when they came out of their drug haze and realised Kho was dead and Lan still conscious. They set about cleaning up the apartment deciding what to do. Most importantly, they wanted to know from Lan where she and Kho had hidden a large stash of heroin

and amphetamines that had gone missing. After being so generous to Kho, McCrea realised Kho had been betraying him. Whether they were successful in getting the semi-conscious Lan to talk or not was another closely-guarded secret during investigations and even during the trial in 2006. Whatever happened, McCrea decided Lan would have to be killed or else become a witness to the crime. He could be hanged on possible drugs charges anyway - if the police were able to find them.

The next day, after constantly interrogating her as she lay semi
conscious on her bed, he put a gloved hand over Lan's face until she stopped breathing. Then he and Ong set about hiding the bodies. When the police and Central Narcotics Bureau officers eventually came upon the scenes they soon realised they had uncovered a mine of information relating to an underworld drug scene they could only dream about. They knew they had more big fish to fry. Before they fled, McCrea and Ong recruited two willing helpers to clean up the flat and remove any incriminating drugs they could find. Drugs alone could have got them both an appointment with the hangman without two murder charges to answer. An Englishwoman, Gemma Ramsbottom, McCrea's former bookkeeper, and Singaporean Cheo Yi Tang, were persuaded to help with the cleaning, hiding the bodies and destroying the grisly evidence. The pair told police that after driving around nature reserves, rainforests and the coastline looking for a spot to dump the bodies, it was decided to leave them in Guan's silver Daewoo Chairman 400, in a high rise car park then flee before the police were aware of what had happened.

The case became known as the Orchard Towers Murders. Orchard Towers is a high-rise shopping plaza in a red light district more famous for its sleazy nightclubs and which boasts of having 'four floors of whores' popular with sex tourists and sailors. The bodies, by then rotting almost beyond recognition, were found by a security guard and quickly identified. Warrants were issued for the arrest of McCrea and Ong, and their friends and associates were rounded up for questioning. Officers of the Central Narcotics Bureau took part in the investigations when blood tests revealed heavy drug and alcohol use by the victims shortly before they died. By then the wanted couple was out of reach. First they fled to Britain where McCrea had a former wife, parents and siblings, and then to Australia where he had a current wife, Brunetta,

a former model, pregnant with their second child. He turned up unexpectedly at their home in Melbourne one Saturday afternoon with Ong at his side.

Brunetta McCrea was not too pleased with this new addition to her family. An inevitable disturbance broke out. Police were called. McCrea had arrived in Australia using a fake passport under one of his many aliases: Mike Townsend. McCrea refused to return to Singapore voluntarily and because Australia cannot by law to extradite anyone to any country where the death penalty might be imposed, a long legal battle ensued between the two countries. Just as interesting, it was the investigations into the alleged murders that led them to discover Bohl's drug trafficking activities - activities that could attract the death penalty for her, too. This bizarre twist to the McCrea murder case was revealed to me by a former CNB officer just as I was coming to an end of my research for this book and is fully related in the previous chapter. Bohl was spared the noose only when the German government intervened at an early stage and used its economic muscle to force the Singapore government to reduce the charges
against her so she would not hang. McCrea managed to escape the noose, too, but had these strange coincidences continued to a bitter end, they might well have hung together in Changi Prison one Friday morning at dawn. McCrea was eventually sent back to Singapore on condition that the charges would be reduced to culpable homicide which carried a maximum penalty of 10 years' jail. In June 2006 - seven months after Nguyen was hanged for trafficking heroin - he was sentenced to a total of 24 years on the two charges plus four more for destroying evidence of the crimes. In effect the death penalty for him had been abolished even before his trial began and Singapore did not like it at all. They wanted to hang him!

Send in the Marines!

On 23 September 1994, a Dutch engineer became the first Westerner to be hanged under Singapore's draconian drug laws. Johannes van Damme went to his ignominious death on the gallows despite appeals from Queen Beatrix, the Foreign Minister and the Pope. Van Damme, a handsome, burly man of 56, claimed to be a secret agent in the employ of his country. Whether or not he really was their undercover man in Lagos the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hans van Mierlo, made a strenuous effort to save his life. The anti-Singapore sentiment that reached ferocious levels across the Netherlands shocked everyone. As preposterous as it seems, in a national poll half the population demanded the government send warships to Singapore and rescue van Damme using military force. But Singapore ignored this wild expression of anger and all the pleas that came from the Netherlands, the rest of Europe and around the world. In a damning response, the Minister said his government and people were greatly disappointed and appalled to learn of the execution'.

It also coincided with the opening of the ASEAN-European Union ministerial talks taking place in Karlsruhe, Germany. Mierlo was among the 12 EU ministers who attended the dialogue with their Asian counterparts. The execution had taken place only hours before the meeting opened. German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel said in his opening address the EU regretted the execution but the subject was not discussed during the ministerial meeting. The Singapore Foreign Minister, Shunmugam Jayakumar, said it would have been 'hypocritical' if they had changed the date deliberately so that it would not coincide
with the meeting. To many human rights activists it suggested that the van Damme execution was another example of Singapore's resilience to Western pressure, when it suits them. Jayakumar explained that the execution was a matter of the law taking its course. He said that granting clemency on the grounds that capital punishment was anathema to the country of an offender would undermine Singapore's integrity and reputation for impartial enforcement of the law. It would also be a serious breach in the Republic's battle against drug traffickers who were 'worse than murderers'. 'A murderer normally kills one person, but a drug trafficker erodes the fabric of society', he said. Referring to drug abusers in Singapore, he said: 'People are our only resource. And there are 8,000 in drug rehabilitation wasting away, completely useless to our society until they are rehabilitated'. He went on to claim that 'the number of drug traffickers would have tripled or quadrupled if Singapore did not have the death penalty. It works for Singapore. We want to keep it'.

Van Damme was arrested at Changi airport in September 1991 after 4.3 kilograms of heroin were found hidden in his suitcase. He had arrived from Thailand, a major shipment point for narcotics, the court was told, and was in transit to await a flight to Athens. A resident of Nigeria since 1976, he said that he had been set up by a Nigerian criminal operation he had exposed to the Dutch intelligence agency. According to
newspaper reports at the time, his assertion of innocence seemed to gain some credibility particularly after the Dutch Foreign Ministry confirmed that he had been working with their intelligence agency up to the time of his arrest. The exact nature of those activities was not disclosed, however, and Dutch officials said they did not directly involve the drug charges in Singapore. But that should not surprise anyone concerning the murky world of spies and spying, just as it should surprise no one that the murky world of drug traffickers and their pursuers is steeped in secrecy and more often treachery and corruption. The judges and investigators in van Damme's case might well have taken his explanation more seriously. According to court records, van Damme, married to a Nigerian, said he had been carrying the bag for a Nigerian engineer and did not know what was expertly packed inside the false bottom. Nigerian drug smugglers reportedly work with Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese syndicates who control
much of the heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia. At that time, Singapore had executed scores of people, including many foreigners from other Asian countries, under a 1975 drug law that mandates capital punishment for possession of as little as a half an ounce of heroin.

According to an Agence France Press report from The Hague, the then Dutch Prime Minister, Wim Kok, said the execution cast a 'grey veil' over his country's relations with Singapore. He revealed that the government had summoned the Singapore Counsellor, Kheng Hua Iseli, to emphasise the 'profound distress' they all felt. Kok said it was impressed upon her that on both emotional and ethical grounds the Netherlands could not accept the decision to go ahead with Van Damme's hanging. He said it demonstrated the cultural gap between the two countries and that he had urged Iseli to consider ways of bridging this gap by putting an end to 'these particularly inhumane judicial procedures'. The Prime Minister said his government had discussed whether there should be diplomatic and economic retaliation for the execution. But the idea was abandoned because such relations would have been restored after a few weeks or months anyway, with the risk of creating the impression that his country was wiping the slate clean. According to an archived press report I found, van Damme's family in the Netherlands, said they were 'completely in the dark as to what actually happened and can only conclude that other people deliberately or unintentionally involved in this situation a man who was by nature law-abiding'. The family released a copy of the usual bluntly worded telegram that they received from Singapore the previous week: 'Death sentence passed on Johannes van Damme will be carried into effect on 23.9.94. Visit him on 20.9.94. Claim body on 23.9.94'. It was signed by the superintendent of Changi Prison. But while foreign migrants and guest workers regularly ended up on the gallows for similar offences, van Damme's execution marked a significant ramping-up of enforcement at that time.

By the strangest of coincidences barely five months earlier another Dutch citizen, Maria Krol-Hmelak, aged 57, had been arrested in her hotel room in Singapore in possession of 1.6 kilograms of heroin. It was said at the time that Krol-Hmelak and van Damme, both long time residents of Nigeria, did not know each other. She was married but
estranged from her Dutch husband who had left her to live in Brazil. A few days earlier, in another Singapore hotel, a 36-year-old Nigerian, Peter Johnson, was found
with 0.33 kilograms of heroin. Both Krol- Hmelak and Johnson were working for a Nigerian trading company in Lagos called Kenrods Ltd. While Krol-Hmelak and Johnson were languishing in Changi Prison awaiting trial, van Damme's case was dealt with much faster and was on death row sentenced to hang before their trials even began.

The Austrian-born Dutch citizen, Krol-Hmelak, had studied law, then economics and finally became a chartered accountant. She was married to Frederik Krol and had a son by him named Christopher. Frederik Krol was a mechanical engineer and the family went to live in Nigeria to work for Kenrods in the 1980s. He travelled widely, often to Brazil to make contacts with Volkswagen and other car companies. While there in 1989 he found another job, resigned from Kenrods and abandoned his wife and son leaving them totally penniless. In April 1990 Maria Krol- Hmelak was persuaded to join Kenrods and was assigned to establish a branch dealing in coloured gemstones. At that time the gemstone business in Nigeria was booming. Many new minefields were developed and new varieties of stones were found. Nigeria had large deposits of sapphire, aquamarine, tourmaline, amethyst, emerald, garnet and crystal quartz. She obtained all the necessary permits and licences and began establishing a market in Germany. She soon found she could obtain better prices in Thailand and in October 1990 went to Singapore and Bangkok to obtain orders. However, Krol-Hmelak returned to Nigeria at the end of November to discover that the Middle East Gulf crisis threatening war was in progress and prices were falling drastically. When the war began the bottom fell out of the market. One gram of good quality sapphire that once sold for US$140 plummeted to US$20. At this time Krol-Hmelak was in Bangkok and was told to wait there until things improved. When the war ended the market did not recover. Her boss in Lagos told her to go to Singapore to meet a Mr Oloo, a relative of the company's chairman Felix Obeke. Krol-Hmelak was hoping to be recalled to Lagos where her son Christopher was being cared for by friends. But instead Obeke informed her that Johnson, a new company director, was coming to Singapore for the first time. She was asked to stay on, check
him into the Park View Holiday Inn where Oloo had stayed before, and show him around. All she knew about Oloo was that he was a cousin of Okeke who was the 'big boss' of Kenrods. She also heard that Okeke was an 'evil man' who had relieved Oloo of $200,000 in a business deal that went wrong. During one of her trips to Bangkok Krol-Hmelak received a call requesting her to bring several Caterpillar tractor engine parts which she collected from Oloo back in Singapore. These turned out to be heavy pistons which were smothered in thick grease. She asked Oloo why he was not taking them himself. He explained that he had to go to Jakarta then to Lagos for the wedding of his sister.