Once a Jolly Hangman (17 page)

Dead Woman Walking

'She went to the gallows dressed all in white. Not virginal white but, for hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, the white of innocence'. This is what one Filipino journalist wrote the day domestic worker Flor Contemplacion was hanged in Singapore. It was believed by many of her country folk she never committed the two murders she confessed to. Some believe she was tortured to obtain the confession. Her execution - against howls of protest in the Philippines and elsewhere - brought relations between the two countries to crisis point. It also affected the outcome of a Philippine senatorial election, blighted the careers of two cabinet members and two ambassadors. The execution of the young Catholic mother sparked outrage among her fellow citizens in Singapore and around the world. An estimated four million mainly young women slave away doing the kind of work no one else wants. They staged daily demonstrations outside Singapore embassies and consulates and took part in street marches in Manila and other large cities. To them it was like a death in the family or rather as Filipina journalist wrote, 'like a family member being murdered by a cold, soulless state called Singapore'. In the Lion City her supporters - mostly fellow maids and labourers - planned a massive demonstration outside Changi Prison before dawn the day she was due to hang. They began travelling by bus, train, taxi, motorbikes, bicycles and on foot. But the plan leaked out. Road blocks were put up on all routes leading to the prison near Changi village. In fear of an even larger demonstration getting out of control and creating more international attention, machine-gun nests were installed on rooftops above the

main entrance and Gurkha troops stood by ready for action. 'Added to this was a repugnance of a Singapore justice system that, seen from the Philippines, was so haughty it was not prepared to admit a mistake had been made', a journalist wrote at the time. This sense of outrage in Flor Contemplacion's home country brought relations between the two countries to crisis point.

A former laundry worker, Contemplacion arrived in Singapore in 1988. Her working hours were from dawn to midnight, keeping two households clean and looking after her employer's child seven days a week without any time off. Even the police said she broke down under the unrelenting pressure of her work from which she had little or no respite. 'She must have snapped', wrote one investigating officer. On 4 May 1991, after getting up at 6 a.m. to mop floors and wash the 'master's' car she was allowed a rare moment off to visit another domestic worker, 34-year-old Delia Maga. According to her confession, she wanted Delia to take a bag of personal items back to the Philippines for her family but she refused, saying the bag was too heavy. To Contemplacion, physically exhausted and emotional drained, this was the last straw She flew into an uncontrollable, maniacal rage. She stabbed Delia and drowned the four year-old boy in her care in a bucket of water. Contemplacion admitted the killings on the advice of her court-appointed lawyer. The plea was apparently part of a plan to win clemency when the case ultimately reached the Supreme Court. It was a fateful blunder.

The case began in a low key and, as is the norm in Singapore, little was reported in the local media. During the four years Contemplacion was in jail and on death row, she was visited only nine times by Philippine consular staff, according to reports. Consequently news of her plight did not get back to the media in her own country. The embassy said its 15 staff members were overstretched trying to meet the needs of the huge Filipino community Back home in Manila as journalists finally began reporting Contemplacion's tragic situation, they believed their own diplomats had abandoned this poor, uneducated, woman of little consequence to her fate in a country she hardly knew. She was easy meat for Singapore's judicial system but as the execution date neared, Filipino citizens everywhere were becoming increasingly angry. One late failed appeal said Contemplacion had
suffered bouts of insanity as a child. Had this evidence been produced earlier it might have convinced government lawyers and psychiatrists she should not be hanged. It was obvious to everyone shed had a serious mental breakdown. But it made no difference. Once she had been tried and found guilty no further evidence was permitted to be introduced. Mounting indignation was greeted at first with disbelief and then with resentment and fury at what was seen as a determination by Singapore to hang her come what may.

Philippine President Fidel Ramos - his party caught in senatorial and local elections - played to the voting masses. He tried to get tough and appealed to Singapore's then President Ong Teng Cheong for a reprieve. It was turned down. New witnesses came forward with conflicting testimony. Some newspaper articles in the Philippines spoke of Contemplacion having being stripped naked by her interrogators and tortured into making a confession. Amid these accusations and recriminations, no one could prove she wasn't guilty. Worse still for her, she never denied she committed the murders.

At dawn on Friday 17 March 1995 Contemplacion was hanged on schedule and around the time she would normally start her gruelling 18-hour working day It was 6 a.m. The Singapore media ignored what was going on under its very nose and did not report the fomenting developments of the case. To them she was just another lowly maid 'gone bad'. They ignored the growing diplomatic riff. During the night before and the early hours leading up to the execution thousands of her country-folk gathered in small groups across the tiny island. They held silent vigils as a prequel to a secret plan to converge on Changi Prison for a final, vociferous mass demonstration to show their horror and disgust to a disinterested if uninformed Singapore at what was about to take place in their name. Back in the Philippines, the Alex Boncayao Brigade, an armed Communist group, threatened to punish Singaporean and Filipino officials whom they accused of ignoring Contemplacion's plight for too long. The Catholic church, which wields enormous influence, also condemned the execution. But it made no difference. Singapore was impervious to all the pleas that poured in from all around the world.

For Darshan Singh, hanging Flor Contemplacion or any woman for that matter is no different from hanging a man. He was up bright and
early on that Friday morning, arriving at the prison in a chauffeured prison vehicle at 4 a.m. He was on schedule. He was dressed casually as always - shorts, singlet and sandals - and he went about his business in his usual calm and methodical way. He had already made complete preparations according to the rules the day before. Contemplacion had been weighed
and her physique judged for him to calculate how far she should drop before coming to a neck-breaking halt and then oblivion. Being slightly built and not very tall, for her it was the long drop. Just long enough to do the job without decapitating her. A short drop would cause painful strangulation. And he had given her long pep talks trying to make her feel as relaxed as possible at what he had to do to her. He explained that he did not want to hang her, it was his job, and she had been sentenced by the court. That was none of his doing. She was asked if she would like to donate her organs saying that her life would not have been entirely worthless if she could save someone else. It was so long ago he could not remember if she signed the consent document or not.

A final photograph, wearing her best clothes, was taken for her family to remember her by. Darshan Singh assured her she would feel no pain; that it would be over in a split second. 'You don't want to spend the rest of your life in this terrible place', he told her so many times during these pep talks in her cell until she must have been convinced of this herself. 'That would be a living death, wouldn't it', he would always add. It was nearing dawn. Just minutes away. He checked his watch and then shackled her arms behind her back and led her to the final steps to the gallows close to her cell. Once on the trap door, her legs were quickly strapped together as is the rule. This is to prevent any last minute panic struggling. Then he uttered those now memorable words he first revealed to me in that historic interview shortly before he hanged Nguyen Van Tuong: 'I am sending you to a better place than this'. He added quietly: 'God bless you, Flor'. Darshan Singh pulled the lever. The twin trapdoors disappeared from under her feet. It was all over in a split second as he promised. Her neck broken where he calculated it would and, as according to custom, she was left to hang grotesquely for ten to twenty minutes before she was taken down. The execution was witnessed by the prison governor, a doctor, her priest and some other senior officials. Shortly afterwards, Darshan Singh
returned to his home in an official car with a cheque for his morning's work. It was $325 - the rate that particular year.

Still the debate raged. Her remains were exhumed for fresh examination by international experts. It changed nothing. All the time, the drama was being played out against a backdrop of increasingly strident street demonstrations across her homeland, flag-burning, recalled ambassadors and cancelled trade and state visits. Ramos sacked the previous ambassador to Singapore, Francisco Benedicto, and suspended the then current ambassador, Alicia Ramos. Foreign Secretary Roberto Romulo resigned, taking responsibility for what the public viewed as a failure to safeguard Contemplacion's interests. His resignation was soon followed by that of Labor Secretary Nieves Confessor.

Three 'quickie' movies, including The Flor Contemplacion Story appeared in the Philippines, each purporting to tell what really happened. The movies and media reports were highly emotive with torture scenes and Contemplacion being drugged, denied food, water and the toilet, water-boarded, even molested by the Singapore police in a bid to extract a confession. A Manila journalist wrote: 'If there is a real story of Contemplacion, it is not that she did or did not kill two people in Singapore. It is that, in her death, she came to symbolise the millions of Filipinos driven by poverty to leave
their families and take their chances abroad. Some are looked down on as little more than modern-day serfs; others are treated with dignity. But all are where they are because they have yet to benefit from Asia's prospering economies'.

It took a very long time for the things to simmer down in Manila. President Ramos set up an inquiry into the case and ordered the exhumation of Delia Maga's remains to determine how she died. The controversy raged that Contemplacion did not commit either murder. However, the new inquiry seemed to conclude that she probably was guilty not withstanding the appalling conditions she worked under that drove her to madness. But many people in the Philippines still believe to this day that she was innocent. 'Singapore might sensibly have considered granting a stay of execution as requested by President Ramos and it is hard to see how doing so would have damaged its criminal justice system', said another observer in Manila. Her mental condition should have been taken into consideration and as is customary in her

country, where the death penalty was still on the statute books at that time though rarely carried out. She would have been provided with a lawyer to advise her during the initial investigations and advised of her rights. This is not permitted in Singapore. The police must be free to carry out their investigations and interrogate the accused without hindrance.

Public sympathy was also with her because of the treatment so many poor and poorly educated Filipino migrant workers are subjected to in overseas countries. No consideration as to her mental history or state of mind on that fateful day was given when she was sentenced to death even though investigators concluded that she had snapped' under the stress of her 18 hour hard slogging days without a break - forced to do so by her slave driver employer. According to statistics, the economy in the Philippines, was heavily dependent on the more than $2 billion sent home annually in the 1990s by an estimated four million Filipinos, the majority women, who work overseas. Although President Ramos seemed initially resigned to the execution, he called Contemplacion a heroine. His wife went to Manila airport to receive the coffin and Ramos sent a wreath to the funeral. He also provided financial help to her dependent children. Regardless of her innocence or guilt, others took up Flor Contemplacion's execution as a rallying cry against the inhumane, abusive, and exploitative working conditions that many of their domestic workers and labourers face abroad. And it was quite a different story when another Filipino maid was arrested in Singapore in 2005 for what became known as 'The Body Parts Murder'.

14

The Maid Singapore Could Not Hang

When Filipina maid Guen Aguilar appeared in court on 15 September 2005 charged with one of the most gruesome murders in Singapore history, the diplomatic turn-out from her country's embassy astounded everyone. The ambassador, Belen Anota, flanked by top diplomatic officials and prominent members of the Filipino community filed into the courtroom. Other Filipinos, mostly young domestic workers and labourers packed the public gallery and stood in groups around the courthouse. Two of Manila's biggest television stations sent camera crews and another dozen print writers and photographers arrived to cover the proceedings. Their numbers were swelled by international wire services including AFP, AP, Reuters and representatives from the local media such as The Straits Times, Today and The New Paper.

Guen Aguilar was facing death by hanging for the murder of her close friend Jane La Puebla, a fellow maid from her home town. But in Manila and across the Filipino diaspora her execution would be regarded almost as an act of war. Her seemingly inevitable ghastly end had all the makings of yet another 'trial of the century' in her country and it sent shock waves through Singapore's corridors of power and fury in the Philippines. It was a particularly ominous sign, and with good cause. Although it was almost ten years since another Filipina maid had been found guilty of two murders and hanged, everyone remembers the name: Flor Contemplacion. Her execution sparked political upheaval in the Philippines and a bitter diplomatic row resulting in a huge backlash against Singapore which still resonates to this day. Even when the atmosphere thawed things were never quite
the same again. Despite the ghastliness of Jane La Puebla's murder, the immediate message from Manila was clear. When Guen Aguila, a 29 year-old mother of two, appeared in court to be formally charged a huge crowd waving placards was already demonstrating outside the Singapore embassy in Manila demanding that this time a fair trial would be held for their fellow citizen. It was an early warning signal to Singapore. The atmosphere was getting tense again.