Ram Tiwary: Sydney Double Kill
EACH YEAR, nearly ten thousand students from Singapore study in Australia, mainly for higher or tertiary education. It is a pivotal step in building better lives for themselves and their families and they also constitute an important stream of income for the Australian economy. For many, Australia is nearer and cheaper than the UK, and safer than living and studying among drug-crazed, gun-toting Americans that they see so often on television. But that image took a tumble, at least for a little while, when one spring afternoon in 2003, two bright, conscientious Singaporean students were found bludgeoned to death, their bodies bloodied to such an extent that even seasoned New South Wales cops had never encountered before.
Their flatmate, a fellow Singaporean who discovered their bodies and called the police, was subsequently arrested and charged for their murders. There were no other eye witnesses. A jury found him guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Pleading innocence throughout, Ram Puneet Tiwary managed to get a retrial, which reduced his jail sentence to 48 years. However, his second appeal in 2012, presided over by three of the most senior judges in New South Wales, overturned the prior judgements and acquitted him, allowing Tiwary to return to Singapore a free man after eight years in prison.
The families of the victims were devastated. Just when life was almost getting back to its old rhythms, the man jailed for killing their sons, brothers and husbands was free, as if none of it had ever happened.
But what if Tiwary was really innocent? Perhaps not wholly innocent, as one of the appeal judges intimated, but what if he wasn’t the one who killed the two men in the most grisly fashion?
Tay Chow Lyang and Tony Tan Poh Chuan, both 26, easily fit the Asian student stereotype. Diligent, serious-minded, electrical engineering undergrads at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), they never missed classes, were hardly ever late and their results slips lit fires that their social life did not. Tan’s telecommunications technology classmates had no doubt that he would graduate with first class honours, and Tay was working on a motor movement control thesis that could one day have medical applications in helping people with muscle control problems.
As both hailed from working class families, getting a good education would secure a bright future and a better lot for their families. Both men graduated from Singapore Polytechnic, which made them a little older and perhaps more ‘mature’ than their classmates. Tan was on an SAF scholarship and aimed to be a Major by age 30; Tay was paying his own way but being the top student of his cohort at his polytechnic gave him direct entry to the final year of his undergrad course.
Both were married, with young wives awaiting their return in Singapore, so they generally spent all their time studying and left the flat they shared mainly to go to school or to buy groceries. They also pretty much stuck to the Asian community on campus, socialising mainly with fellow Singaporeans or other Asians.
Their flatmate Tiwary, then 23, was quite different from them. Like Tan, he was also studying in UNSW on an SAF scholarship. But unlike Tan and Tay, whose parents had little education and lived in three-room HDB flats earning a living with their hands (both their mothers worked as part-time hawkers), Tiwary came from a more privileged middle-class background. He completed his primary and secondary education in Brunei, where his father was the vice principal at St. Andrew’s School.
At school, Tiwary showed little interest in his mechanical engineering course. More often than not, he skipped lessons and if he attended, he would arrive more than halfway into the class. Indeed, there was a joke among his friends that it was easier to find him at a pub than on campus. He also frequented the casino. Although a friend who often partied with him testified in court that Tiwary did not have a gambling problem, the latter would nevertheless sometimes lose hundreds of dollars or a thousand in a single day. And despite earning the full salary of an infantry officer, with additional allowance for expenses while studying abroad, Tiwary’s bank account was in the negative — he had overdrawn by a few cents — at the time of the double murders. Although funds had been disbursed to him from the SAF to pay for his school fees, he had not paid the university for a semester.
To sustain his lifestyle, he also worked as a security guard. While Tay and Tan were often in bed by midnight and in school by 9am, Tiwary kept very late nights and slept in. He was even found to have stolen a fellow student’s laptop computer and student ID card.
And unlike his flatmates, Tiwary was very social, thoroughly mixing with the international students and also had an Australian girlfriend. Naturally, he wasn’t doing very well in school. In fact, he failed several subjects and when it was time to submit his result slips to the SAF (a requirement for all SAF scholars), he faked his submissions using results from his girlfriend’s test scores.
The three men lived at 109 Barker Street, a two-storey house in the Sydney suburbs, located near the university campus. They shared the four-bedroom apartment on the upper floor, while their landlord lived in the unit below them. The three flatmates managed to live together, but tensions arose on several fault lines.
It was initially agreed that Tan, who had learnt to cook, would prepare the meals while the others would wash up. That fell through: according to Tan’s mother, her son, who was a very neat person, was frustrated that the others didn’t wash up and so he stopped cooking for the rest. Everyone just handled their own meals and grocery purchases in the fridge were labelled accordingly.
While Tan was fastidious about neatness, Tay was very careful and responsible with finances. He was also the listed tenant for the apartment the three were staying in, and would settle the monthly rent promptly before collecting from the rest their share. He insisted that they split the utilities bills evenly, which was a sore point for Tan since he didn’t use the phone that much, relying on the internet instead to make calls to his wife. Tay even listed shared expenses down to toilet paper, that everyone had to bear their rightful share.
He also had notes about money owed to him by his friends, and Tiwary in particular owed him a little more than AUD5,000 in rent. This would later be highlighted by prosecutors as a possible motive for Tay’s murder. Although the defence countered that Tiwary’s family was well off and there was no reason for him to brutally murder two persons over such a sum, the fact is that Tiwary had not been paying rent for around half a year.
There were no direct eye witnesses to the slaughter that occurred, so the sequence of events is at best an educated construction, built from Tiwary’s testimony and forensic evidence that could always be more complete.
It was Monday, September 15, 2003. Around noon, Tay was at home. It was his first time missing a lecture. Tiwary was also at the apartment, asleep in his room as he claims, which was normal for him around that time. There were no signs of forced entry into the apartment, but there was at least one assailant in the house and he was assaulting Tay with a blunt object. Tay tried to shield himself from the blows, suffering injuries to his hands that included a crushed finger on his left hand, but to no avail. He was clubbed in the head and stabbed in the neck. As he lay on the living room floor, no aid arrived. According to Tiwary, he slept through the entire assault.
Meanwhile, it was also a rather unusual day for Tan on campus. For starters, he was unusually late for his midday class. Classmates noted that he appeared uneasy, and Tan also told a classmate that he and Tay had to cancel a meeting, as if both men had made other arrangements that afternoon. At 2pm, after the lecture ended, instead of walking or cycling back to his apartment, his classmates saw him getting into a car with two or three Asians in it, along the road leading back to the apartment at Barker Street. As far as the investigation was concerned, these others in the car were the last people to see Tan alive, but they were never found. They did not come forward despite appeals in the media and the police were not able to trace their identities.
Around 2pm, Tan entered the apartment. According to the coroner, Tay could have been alive for some two hours after his assault, so this was about the time when he died. As he walked along the corridor towards the interior of the apartment, where Tay lay but steps away, Tan was also assaulted with an aluminium baseball bat that Tiwary had bought two days before for self defence. He too, tried to fend off his attacker and attempted to run back to the front door. One of his fingers was broken from trying to block off the ferocious assault. He screamed; at the corridor, he was bashed in the head so hard that his spectacles were crushed and several of his teeth were knocked out in a spray of blood and bone. As he lay slumped against the front door, his skull caved in from the impact of the blow to his head. His scalp was torn off and parts of his brain were exposed. He was then stabbed in the neck three times, with such force that his voice box was also punctured.
The following is a brief conversation that Tiwary had with the emergency line operator who he called at 2.20pm, after being awakened by the commotion outside. His voice was shaking and he was stuttering, which his then girlfriend later testified was something she had never heard him do.
What can be gleaned from this is that even if Tiwary had slept through Tay’s murder, he was awake when Tan was being killed. If he had rushed out of his room, he would have been right in the middle of Tan’s murder. Although his statement to the Australian police was that he was in the apartment the whole time, he told his friends that he was actually outside and stumbled upon the bodies when he returned. His lawyer explained this by saying that Tiwary was ashamed that he did not come out to help Tan.
So perhaps it was the case that although awake, he waited through the duration of the assault before emerging from his room to find both his housemates dead, before barricading himself in his room to call the emergency services.
Most unusual is the fact that Tay and Tan died two hours apart. Had the assailant, after killing Tay, waited two whole hours for Tan to return? What was he doing in all that time? As the prosecutor put it, “What’s a killer doing for two hours in the unit and not checking Tiwary’s room? You think he’d be sitting outside watching TV and hoping that Ram Tiwary doesn’t catch him?”
Through all this, the landlord was having lunch in his unit a floor below. He had no idea what had happened; he only saw Tiwary run past his ground floor window when the ambulance arrived.
It was also reported that as the ambulance crew saw Tiwary run up to them, with blood on his hands in a very distraught, agitated state, they actually locked themselves in the ambulance and waited for the police to arrive.
When the police arrived at the crime scene, they were shocked to find both victims, especially Tan, so bloodied. Their skulls had collapsed and blood was splattered on the walls, soaked into the carpets, and even sprayed onto the ceiling.
It wasn’t till eight months later, on May 28, 2004, that Tiwary was finally charged for the murders. After a long trial, he was found guilty in 2006 and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
He appealed the judgement, and was successful in that the earlier convictions were overturned, and a retrial was ordered. However, in the retrial, he was again found guilty, and sentenced to 48 years in jail. At the first trial, the defence even pulled chat logs from Tay’s computer, detailing rather amorous chats with a former polytechnic classmate in Singapore, dated from a year before (2002) to two months before the double murders. But other than an invasion of a dead victim’s privacy, these did not have any bearing on the case and are hence not reproduced here.
Undeterred, Tiwary appealed the judgement a second time and was acquitted in 2012, on the grounds that the evidence was less than conclusive in proving his guilt in the double murders beyond all doubt.
Although observers echoed the cries of the victims’ families, “If not him, who?”, there are considerations that made the three senior judges on the panel at Tiwary’s second appeal less than sure that he killed the two men. Despite this, they did concede that Tiwary was perhaps not wholly innocent, that he could have known who the assailant(s) were. But the crux of the matter was, did he do it?
The blood trail was inconclusive. Detective Sergeant Philip Elliott, who had been on the force for 19 years, was among the first to arrive at the crime scene: “In my experience, I have not seen that amount of injury to a deceased’s head as a result of an attack by a weapon.”
With all that blood found on the crime scene, the murderer would have plenty on him as well, from blood splatters on impact and violent swings of the bat and knife. However, very little blood was found on Tiwary — just a little on his hands, feet and ankle; not enough to suggest that he was at the scene as the murders were being committed.
What little blood that was on Tiwary could have gotten there as he moved around the apartment, and as he claimed, Tan coughed blood on him as he was checking his pulse.
Moreover, while the bat and knife had Tan’s blood and tissue on them, Tay’s was not found on either weapon. The bat in the house belonged to Tiwary. But there was also evidence that Tan had bought a baseball bat for self protection, which was not found on the scene. Were other weapons used by other persons to kill Tay?
Even if Tiwary had killed Tay, and in the two hours before Tan returned, managed to wash himself and dispose of the weapons before killing Tan, there was no evidence that blood had been washed off in the house, and no bloodied towels or water marks on the murder weapons to suggest that they had been cleaned.
It couldn’t have been easy to kill two grown men either, even with a weapon. And it was not certain that Tiwary, who attended (but did not complete) a Ranger course for elite infantry, would have been able to kill two men without injuries or even scratches to himself.
In all, there were just too many maybes to condemn a man, who must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond all doubt.