On 2 November 1984, 19-year-old interior designer Lim Hwee Huang () was thrown off a tenth storey HDB flat at Kallang Bahru, after she was raped by 27-year-old Eurasian Singaporean Hensley Anthony Neville, who fled to the neighbouring country Malaysia. He was on the run for more than two years before he was finally arrested by Malaysian police, who sent him back to Singapore in March 1987 for the charge of murdering Lim. Neville, who was caught in the Malaysian state of Selangor, was also a suspect behind two unsolved killings in Malaysia.
Despite facing a capital murder charge and the death penalty, Neville refused to be assigned a lawyer in his case and elected to represent himself in court. He became the first person to stand trial for murder without a lawyer in Singapore. Six years after he first committed the crime, Neville was found guilty of the murder of Lim Hwee Huang, and he was sentenced to death by the High Court on 22 November 1990, and he was hanged after he lost his appeal.
Death of Lim Hwee Huang
On 2 November 1984, the police received a report that a young woman had fallen to her death from one of the flats at Kallang Bahru. She was wearing only her underwear and a shirt at the time she died.
The victim was identified as 19-year-old interior designer Lim Hwee Huang. Lim's death was initially classified by the police to be suicide. However, the forensic pathologist Chao Tzee Cheng, who performed an autopsy on the deceased, found bruises around her neck and injuries at the sexual organs of Lim, which proven that Lim did not commit suicide, and that she had been killed by a possible rapist by strangulation. The police thus re-classified the case as murder. They also found Lim's trousers, which she last wore before she was killed by her alleged rapist.
According to Lim's family (who resided at Hougang), they were saddened and shocked to hear about Lim's death, and they noted that Lim often would always be punctual when she go to work at Balestier (where her interior design company was located) and also would reach home on time, and they noticed something was wrong when she never came back or at least called as usual to inform them she was staying out (which she often would do whenever she stayed outside of home). At the time of her death, Lim, who was the youngest of three children and only daughter of the family, was survived by her parents and two older brothers.
Suspect's arrest
After they started the police investigations, the police determined that Lim was thrown off from one of the ten-storey flats nearby. The owner of the unit was identified as 27-year-old Hensley Anthony Neville, a Singaporean of Eurasian descent (a source claimed Neville was Malaysian-born). However, despite the police's summoning of Neville to cooperate with investigations, Neville was never found, and it was believed that Neville had left the country. Hence, the police placed Neville on the wanted list as a suspect of Lim's murder, and his photo was released publicly on newspapers to call for information from the members of the public regarding his whereabouts.
In February 1987, after some investigations, the Royal Malaysia Police, having received the Singaporean police's appeal, finally located the prime suspect Hensley Anthony Neville, whom they found hiding in the Malaysian state of Selangor and later, 30-year-old Neville was arrested by the Malaysian police at a bus stop at Klang. Neville was later extradited from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore by flight on 18 March 1987, and he was charged with murder for the death of Lim Hwee Huang, two years and four months after she died.
The Singapore Police Force also thanked the Malaysian authorities for helping to track down and arrest Neville, who was one of the twelve suspects extradited to Singapore with the Malaysian police's assistance between January and June 1987; among the list of suspects extradited also included Tan Cheow Bock, a Singaporean labourer later sentenced to death in September 1990 for the 1980 high-profile killing of a babysitter Chia Chun Fong.
It was later investigated and uncovered by the Malaysian authorities that Neville was also the prime suspect behind an unsolved double murder, in which he allegedly killed two people before burying them in cement on 5 April 1986 at a garden in Batu, Selangor. However, the Malaysian police did not make any formal charges against Neville for these two murders and went ahead with extraditing him to Singapore for the charge of killing Lim upon the request of the Singaporean authorities.