On 2 November 1984, 19-year-old interior designer Lim Hwee Huang (Chinese: 林桂芳; pinyin: Lín Guìfāng)^{[lower-alpha 1]} 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.^[1]

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.^[2]

The victim was identified as 19-year-old interior designer Lim Hwee Huang.^{[lower-alpha 2]} 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.^[3] The police thus re-classified the case as murder.^[4][5] They also found Lim's trousers, which she last wore before she was killed by her alleged rapist.^[6]

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).^[7][8] 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.^[9]

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.^[10][11]

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.^[12][13]

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.^[14][15]

It was later investigated and uncovered by the Malaysian authorities that Neville was also the prime suspect behind an unsolved double murder in Malaysia; in that particular case, Neville 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.^[16]

On 22 November 1990, a little more than six years after Lim Hwee Huang was raped and murdered, Neville's trial, which lasted a total of six days, finally came to an end and he was scheduled to be sentenced the same day after the last stage of closing submissions.

After a ten-minute adjournment of the trial session, Justice Lai Kew Chai, one of the two trial judges, read out the verdict in court, stating that there was sufficient evidence to prove that Neville had performed sexual intercourse with Lim against her will before he threw her out of his flat's kitchen window on purpose to ensure she fell to her death. He also admonished Neville for not only depriving a bright young woman like Lim of her virginity and dignity, but had also "wilfully and cruelly" deprived her of her right to live when he killed Lim. As such, both Justice Lai and the other trial judge Tan Teow Yeow found 33-year-old Hensley Anthony Neville guilty of murder, and sentenced him to death by hanging. Under the law, offenders convicted of murder within the Singapore jurisdiction would receive the death sentence, which was the mandatory punishment for murder.^[33][34]

According to Neville's sister (who was saddened at the verdict), she stated that she observed her brother had given up the will to live as he did not accept the offer of a defence counsel up till the end, and the judges had to guide Neville along on how to cross examine witnesses and make his submissions to allow some fairness for him in terms of making his defence.^[35] Neville also thanked the court for imposing a death sentence upon him.^[36]

In light of Neville's verdict of death, Lim's mother Tan Siok Kim stated that she was grateful to the police and court for having brought the "monster" (referring to Neville) who killed her daughter to justice, and she stated that she was also grateful to Nizammuddean, the Malay cleaner who witnessed her daughter's murder, for speaking up in court against Neville and hoped that he would not be tortured by nightmares anymore.^[37] Lim's mother said that Lim, who became an interior designer after completing secondary school, was always an obedient and filial daughter who never made her parents worry, and the news of her death hit her so hard that she had to take sleeping pills for three years following Lim's murder. Similarly, Lim's father Lim Kok Kian, who worked as a contractor, was also distraught to the point that he no longer could focus on his business, which he later passed on to his eldest son. Lim's second-eldest brother also said that his youngest sister was very cheerful and optimistic, which made them disbelieve the possibility of suicide when they heard of her death.^[38]

While he was incarcerated on death row, Neville engaged a defence lawyer named Peter Fernando to represent him in his appeal against the sentence. Fernando argued in the appeal that although Neville had given conflicting accounts on what happened to the victim, Neville's account in court was the true version of events and he should be given the benefit of the doubt and found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder. On 12 November 1991, however, the three-judge Court of Appeal dismissed Neville's appeal, as they agreed with the trial judges that Neville had "wilfully and cruelly" killed Lim after he committed the rape.^[39][40][41]

On 28 August 1992, nine months after failing to overturn his death sentence by appeal, 35-year-old Hensley Anthony Neville was hanged at Changi Prison. Three months after Neville's execution, Singaporean crime show Crimewatch re-enacted the rape-murder of Lim Hwee Huang and aired it on television, and Neville's execution date was therefore revealed through the show. The episode also included a police appeal for information about the unsolved death of taxi driver Seing Koo Wan, who was later revealed to have been killed by a serial taxi robber Junalis Lumat, who was eventually caught and hanged for killing another taxi driver.^[42][43][44]

Another crime show True Files also aired an re-enactment of the Lim Hwee Huang murder case on 20 December 2004, as the ninth episode of the show's third season. However, the episode itself was unavailable for viewing online and it is currently archived among the records of National Archives Singapore.^[45]

For the next sixteen years, Neville remained as the only person who defended himself without a lawyer during a murder trial. It was only in 2007 when notorious gunman Tan Chor Jin, who shot and killed a nightclub owner named Lim Hock Soon, became the second person to represent himself without a lawyer during his trial for the fatal shooting. Similarly like Neville, Tan was also sentenced to death and eventually hanged on 9 January 2009.^[46][47] When Neville's former lawyer G Raman was interviewed in 2007 about the case in light of Tan's trial, the press reported that the person described Neville as weird for his behavior and lack of cooperativeness during his trial.^[48]

• Capital punishment in Singapore