On 9 May 1974, at the Upper Perak Road house of her sister-in-law, 53-year-old Quek Lee Eng (郭丽英 Guō Lìyīng; also spelt Kwek Lee Eng), alias Quek Sock Khing (郭叔卿 Guō Shūqīng), was strangled by her 44-year-old sister-in-law Sim Joo Keow (沈如娇 Shěn Rújiāo) for a monetary dispute, before Sim dismembered Quek's corpse into multiple parts and abandoned them in various parts of Singapore, including two earthen jars at her own home. The death of Quek was uncovered with the discovery of her legs in a mosque's toilet on Aljunied Road, and the additional sighting of blood flowing out of the earthen jars at Sim's house (where Sim hid the victim's torso) caused Sim to be arrested and charged with murder. Sim was eventually convicted of manslaughter and causing the disappearance of evidence, and thus sentenced to ten years in jail on 27 January 1975.
Disappearance of Quek On 9 May 1974, 53-year-old Quek Lee Eng, the head of a tontine group and wife of a wealthy local textile merchant Sim Keng Soy (aged 54 in 1974), was last seen leaving for her sister-in-law's house, and she did not return to her Pheng Geck home in Sennett Estate even till nighttime. As a result, Quek was reported missing by her family, whose prior efforts to locate her were met with failure. As part of their investigations into Quek's disappearance, the police interviewed Quek's family members. One of them was Sim Joo Keow, a 44-year-old mother of six and housewife married to Quek's younger brother. Due to her house being the purported last destination Quek headed to before she went missing, Sim was called in as a witness for questioning. Sim told the police that on the day Quek disappeared, Quek and Sim met up at a bus stop and planned to meet a third person to settle some money matter. However, at the bus stop, a car with a man and a woman pulled up, and Quek entered the car alone while Sim refused to, before the car itself left with Quek inside it, and Sim claimed it was the last time she saw Quek before she went missing. While she was being probed by the police, Sim was interrupted by her daughter Quek Pek Hiah (郭碧霞 Guō Bìxiá), who urged her mother to speak the truth, and as it turned out, Sim had earlier told her daughter a different story of what happened to Quek. Sim was said to have given two different versions of what happened to Quek; one of them was the account Sim provided to the police and also recounted to her daughter much earlier, and the other, which was recounted right before the police probe, was that Quek came to Sim's house with a couple, and over there, Quek quarreled with the couple over some money issues, and Sim said she witnessed the man using a knife to slash Quek on the face, and Sim herself was punched into the eye when she tried to intervene and diffuse the fight. Sim said she ran out of her house after this, but by the time she returned, Quek was nowhere to be seen. Regardless, the police inspector took note of the differing accounts provided by Sim about Quek's last known whereabouts, and he requested to have a search in Sim's rented two-storey house at Upper Perak Road (located in present-day Jalan Besar). However, the inspector did not find anything suspicious, and Quek remained classified as a missing person since then.
Discovery of body parts
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