David Lim
When asked why he had to kill her, David Lim replied, I couldn't go back to jail.
According to police investigations, when the elevator arrived for nineteen-year-old part-time IT student Cherie Tan, who was on her way home after a night out with friends, on the void deck of Block 449, Jurong West Street 42, to take her up to the apartment she shared with her parents on the twelfth floor at approximately 2:10 am Thursday night, the doors parted to reveal a urinating Lim.
In his confession, forty-seven-year-old convicted rapist Lim stated that when he realised that he had been caught in the act and was afraid that it would result in a parole violation that would send him back to Changi Prison, he panicked and quickly overpowered and dragged Tan into the lift, rendering her unconscious in a chokehold. He then went back up to the fifth floor in the elevator and, dragging Tan with him, returned to the apartment where he lived with his elderly mother. There Lim proceeded to rape the still unconscious girl and strangle her to death with her own brassiere in his room at the front of the two bedroom apartment while his mother was sound asleep in the room at the back.
Seconds before the lever was thrown at the gallows at Changi, David Lim saw, in the utter blackness of his hood, the clear bright morning decades ago when he was a boy of ten. He had dropped a distance behind his parents and his older brothers as they made their way down a winding footpath through a small forested area to the beach. The boy had a fear of the sea and a fear of drowning and he was thinking of how he would give anything in the world to be somewhere else when just ahead of him, through the sheaths of wild lallang, a cat carefully made its way out of the brush. It was halfway across the footpath when it stopped and turned and stared at David with eyes of green and gold. It had three legs. And at the moment his neck snapped from the weight of his body and he vacated the physical realm, it struck David as curious that you never saw a three-legged animal feeling sorry for itself.
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