1997 Kallang landlady murder information

On 13 March 1997, at one of the HDB flats in King George's Avenue, Kallang, 53-year-old Sivapackiam Veerappan Rengasamy was discovered dead in her bedroom by her son. Sivapackiam was found to have been stabbed three times in the neck and she died from the wounds. During police investigations, Sivapackiam's tenant Gerardine Andrew, a 36-year-old prostitute, told police that on the day of the murder, she returned to the flat and saw three people attacking her landlady and robbing her, and they threatened her to leave after briefly holding her hostage.

The three suspects - Kamala Rani Balakrishnan, her brother Mansoor Abdullah and Mansoor's friend Nazar Mohamed Kassim - were all arrested within the next few days. It was determined from the trio's confessions that the mastermind of the robbery was actually Gerardine, the same tenant who rented a room from Sivapackiam. Apparently, Gerardine was unsatisfied with the tensions between her and her landlady and thus asked the three to assault and rob Sivapackiam, but Gerardine insisted she never intended to kill her landlady. Gerardine and the three suspects were all charged with murder.

Eventually, the two men - Nazar and Mansoor - were convicted of murder and sentenced to death while Gerardine was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment for culpable homicide not amounting to murder in their joint trial. However, the prosecution's subsequent appeal led to Gerardine being sentenced to death for the original charge of murder, and she was executed alongside the two men in February 1999. Kamala was the sole person out of the four to escape the gallows after she was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for culpable homicide and conspiracy to commit robbery in a separate trial.