Murder of Chitrabathy Narayanasamy

On 17 May 2004, Chitrabathy Narayanasamy, a 39-year-old worker at a Sony factory in Tuas, Singapore, was killed by her husband, G. Krishnasamy Naidu, a 42-year-old taxi driver. Krishnasamy approached her outside her workplace under the pretext of wanting her to sign divorce papers and then attacked her with a chopper he had purchased in advance, killing her in front of colleagues. He had been out on bail for only ten days at the time, having been charged the previous month with stabbing Chitrabathy twice. The couple had been married for twenty years and had two children. Krishnasamy surrendered to police nine hours after the killing and was charged with murder the following day.

At his High Court trial, which began in May 2005 before Justice Woo Bih Li, Krishnasamy testified at length about the marriage, describing several extramarital relationships he said his wife had over the years, and his escalating suspicions and violence leading up to the killing. His two children testified against him, describing his repeated interrogations of their mother in the months before the murder. Chitrabathy's acquaintance from her workplace, referred to in testimony as Ashok, and her sister also gave evidence, including an account that Krishnasamy had threatened to kill the sister after the murder, which Krishnasamy denied. Two former partners of Chitrabathy also testified as witnesses.

The defence called two psychiatrists, Dr George John Fernandez and Dr Stephen Phang, who both diagnosed Krishnasamy with morbid jealousy, a delusional disorder, and argued this amounted to diminished responsibility. The prosecution's psychiatrist, Dr Ang Ah Ling, agreed Krishnasamy suffered from morbid jealousy but disputed that his mental responsibility was substantially impaired. On 26 April 2006, Justice Woo accepted that Krishnasamy had an abnormality of mind caused by morbid jealousy but ruled his mental responsibility was not substantially impaired, given his capacity to plan and carry out the killing. Krishnasamy was convicted of murder and sentenced to death under Section 302 of the Penal Code.

Krishnasamy appealed. On 21 September 2006, a three-judge Court of Appeal panel comprising Tay Yong Kwang, V. K. Rajah and Choo Han Teck unanimously allowed the appeal, finding that the trial judge had not adequately explained his rejection of the diminished-responsibility defence despite accepting the morbid jealousy diagnosis. The court substituted a conviction for culpable homicide not amounting to murder (manslaughter) and set aside the death sentence. On 13 October 2006, after hearing submissions from defence counsel Peter Keith Fernando and Deputy Public Prosecutor Lau Wing Yum, the same panel sentenced Krishnasamy to life imprisonment, which under Singapore law following the 1997 Abdul Nasir Amer Hamsah ruling means imprisonment for the remainder of his natural life, with parole possible after at least twenty years served.

The case drew public attention in Singapore and was later re-enacted on the crime programs True Files (2007) and In Cold Blood (2011), and was referenced in a 2019 book by court interpreter N. Sivanandan and a 2021 retrospective article.