Shadowing Practice: The Maid Wanted To Escape…At Any Cost | Bedok Double Murders - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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June 21, 2017, Singapore.
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June 21, 2017, Singapore.
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It's 1.20 in the afternoon and a woman is boarding a ferry at the Harbourfront Cruise Centre.
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She has a bag, a passport and jewelry that doesn't belong to her.
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Behind her in a 6th floor apartment at Block 717,
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Bay Dock Reservoir Road, two people have been left to die.
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She will not be caught for six days.
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At 3.39, someone arrives at that 6th floor apartment.
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It's a man looking for his elderly in-laws.
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His wife had been unable to reach them and was worried.
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The door opens.
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What he finds inside will shock Singapore for years.
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Today we're talking about the Baydok double murder,
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a case where the crime happened in one country.
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The trial happened in another.
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And justice, depending on who you ask,
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may not have happened at all.
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The son-in-law called the police.
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They arrived at the apartment to see the bodies of 79-year-old Chiang Im Fong and his wife,
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78-year-old Chin Sek Fa.
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Both had their limbs tied.
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Chia had blood on his face and visible injuries to his body.
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Chin, according to what investigators could see at that point,
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showed no obvious external wounds,
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though the autopsy would later tell a different story.
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Items were missing from the home,
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and Kasana, the Indonesian maid who had had been working for them for less than a month was nowhere to be found.
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But who were the victims in this case?
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Chia and Chin had lived in the Bay Dock Reservoir Road apartment for more than 30 years.
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Their neighbors knew them well.
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One neighbor on the same floor said she often saw them going out together.
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They were a devoted pair,
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she said, always side by side.
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She described Chin as happy-go-lucky and chatty.
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Chia was quieter.
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A nearby minimart owner knew Qin as a kind woman,
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who came in regularly for groceries and would slip money to the estate cleaner for lunch.
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Before retirement, the couple had run a department store from 1977 to 1990,
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then a string of shops selling shoes and beauty products until 2000.
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They had five children, and one of their sons was living with them at the time.
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By all accounts, they were good employers.
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They treated Kasana well and brought her along on their outings.
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She had been in their home for 27 days.
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That is the full extent of the time she spent with them before the morning of June 21st. Kasana,
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also known as Anna Abdul Mouiz,
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goes by one name in public records.
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She was born on August 10th,
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1976, in Kabuman Regency, Central Java.
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The six child in a family of eight.
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She grew up in Jakarta,
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married in 1996, had four children,
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two sons and two daughters, and divorced in 2011.
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She was not new to domestic work or to life abroad.
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She had worked in Malaysia from 2008 for three years before moving to Singapore.
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On March 3rd, 2017, she arrived in the country for the first time to work as a housekeeper for a Singaporean family.
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Indonesian court documents would later reveal that she was unhappy there from the start
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and she was subjected to verbal abuse on a daily basis.
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She endured it for two months.
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Then on May 6th, she threatened to jump from her employer's apartment building if she wasn't allowed to resign.
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The employer agreed.
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She was sent back to the maid agency.
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Context is important here.
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Migrant and housekeepers in Singapore cannot leave their jobs freely.
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Their visas are tied to their employers.
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And there's another important detail to note.
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Employers in Singapore routinely hold their housekeeper's passports.
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This practice is technically illegal,
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but the system quietly incentivizes it.
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Employers must take out a security bond,
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a financial guarantee of $5,000 Singapore dollars,
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roughly 3,900 US dollars, before a maid can begin work.
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If the maid disappears or leaves without authorization, that bond is forfeit.
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And so it has become a common practice to keep passports,
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not always out of malice,
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but out of fear of the financial penalty.
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Still, this leaves these women,
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and they can legally only be women, incredibly vulnerable.
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They are dependent on their employers for money,
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shelter, their right to remain in the country,
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and their ability to leave it.
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We don't know if Kasana's first employer held her passport,
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but we do know that she was desperate to leave that position,
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and desperate to stay in Singapore.
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She needed to support her children,
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in particular her 16-year-old son,
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and she was short on cash.
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A chicken rice stall she had started with a friend in Jakarta had failed,
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costing her a significant amount of money.
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She needed a job.
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Any job.
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On May 25th, 2017, 19 days after threatening to jump from a building,
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she was placed again.
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The agency sent her to Chia and Chin.
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She hated it from almost the first day.
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According to Indonesian court documents,
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she particularly disliked being scolded by Chin.
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But she stayed because she had to.
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So let's go back to the morning of June 21st, 2017.
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While tidying the son's bedroom closet, Kazana found her passport.
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Until then, she had not known where it was kept.
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Seeing it there, she made the decision to take it and run.
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But she had a problem.
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Chia and Chin were at home.
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According to her own statements,
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later presented at both the Indonesian criminal trial and a Singapore coroner's inquiry,
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she was reportedly inspired by a film called The Revenger Queen to tie the couple up before making her escape.
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The plan was to restrain them,
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take their valuables, and be gone before anyone found them.
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It did not go that way.
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Kasana first went for Chia,
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who was asleep, lying sideways on the bed with his back to her.
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She stuck duct tape over his mouth,
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then began tying his hands with raffia string.
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Chia woke up and began to struggle,
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causing the tape to loosen.
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He shouted.
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To cover the sound, Kasana switched on the television and turned the volume up as high as it would go.
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Then she punched him in the face.
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But Chia kept struggling, causing his skin to tear.
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He began to bleed.
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Kazana panicked at the sight of the blood.
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And in that panic, she decided to pick up a wooden dressing table stool.
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She hit him repeatedly on the head with it, until he stopped moving.
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By that point, Chin was in the room.
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Whether she had been there when the attack began or had entered while it was unfolding is unclear.
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What we do know is that she pushed Kasana from behind.
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Kasana turned, pushed her back,
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and Chin went flying through the doorway of the ensuite bathroom,
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hitting her head against the wall before dropping to the floor.
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As Chin lay there, Kasana bound her limbs with raffia string and tied her to the tower railing.
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But Chin continued to struggle.
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So Kasana held onto the bathroom sink and stomped on Chin repeatedly until she too became motionless.
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The autopsy would later confirm that both Chia and Chin died from blunt force trauma.
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Chia from trauma to the head,
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Chin from trauma to both the head and the chest.
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With no one left to stop her,
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Kasana went through the apartment gathering jewelry,
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watches, cell phones, a laptop, and cash.
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And the final most important item, her passport.
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At 1.20 p.m., she boarded a ferry bound for Batam using her passport,
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a fact later confirmed by immigration records.
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For some reason, she would tell a wildly different story to the people she met while on the run.
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To them, she said that she had hidden in the engine room,
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holding her breath and suppressing her coughs so she wouldn't be discovered.
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Around 2.50 p.m., she called the maid agency using an unfamiliar number.
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Kasana didn't speak for long.
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She just said that she had made a mistake and that the residents of the flat should return home immediately.
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Then she hung up.
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Staff at the agency, sensing something was wrong, alerted the couple's daughter.
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The daughter tried calling her mother.
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No answer.
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Then the landline.
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Nothing.
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And that is when she sent her husband to the apartment to check on them.
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Kasana, now safely in Indonesia,
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traveled Tunkal Iliar in Jambi province on the island of Sumatra.
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It's a small town about three hours from the provincial capital and more than 185 miles from Singapore.
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On June 24th, three days after the murders,
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she headed to Hotel Nanbur.
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It was closed for the night.
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She slept elsewhere and checked into the hotel the next night.
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She was on the run,
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but during her time in the town,
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she made no attempt to keep a low profile.
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She checked into the hotel using her real name and went repeatedly to a nearby internet cafe,
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spending her time reading news reports about the murders in Singapore.
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A 24-year-old man named Haryanto noticed her.
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He knew her name.
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She hadn't been trying to hide it from anyone.
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He saw what she was reading and noticed that the suspect's name in the reports was also Kasana.
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He also remembered something else.
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At the internet cafe, she had been overheard on the phone saying,
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how was their condition?
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I don't know if they died.
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I'm willing to repent by staying at a Pisan Tren.
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Now, a Pisan Tren is an Islamic boarding school.
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In Indonesia, it's a place where students live,
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study the Quran, and seek spiritual guidance.
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A friend of Harianto's also later recalled that Kasana had mentioned wanting to go to one to make amends.
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What she would be repenting for, she never said.
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Suspicion built and at some point, someone called the police.
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Late on June 27th, 2017,
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though some sources recorded as June 28th due to the timing,
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Indonesian police raided her room at Hotel Nanbar and arrested her.
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When they searched her belongings,
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they found jewelry, watches, three cell phones,
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a laptop, and cash in multiple currencies,
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including Singapore dollars and Indonesian rupiah,
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amounting to around 195 US dollars.
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Under questioning, she cracked, confessing to the murders.
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Singapore wanted Kasana back to face trial,
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but there was a problem.
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Under Indonesian law, there is a principle known as personality.
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It means that an Indonesian citizen who is arrested in Indonesia for a crime committed overseas cannot be extradited.
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Instead, they must be tried in Indonesia.
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Singapore and Indonesia signed an extradition treaty in 2007,
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but in 2017, it had not yet been ratified by the Indonesian parliament,
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so it had no legal effect.
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This meant Kasana would remain to face trial in Indonesia.
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What followed was a coordinated cross-border investigation between the two countries.
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The case against Kasana was built and her trial took place in Jakarta in 2018,
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from February 27th to May 2nd.
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She was charged with premeditated murder and theft.
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Witnesses from Singapore gave evidence,
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some in person and others through video link.
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The court found her guilty.
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It had the power to sentence her to death,
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but it chose not to.
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Kasana was sentenced to life imprisonment.
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She appealed.
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On August 15, 2018, the Jakarta High Court upheld her conviction,
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but reduced her sentence to 20 years.
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No reasons were given for reduction.
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She has been serving her sentence in Indonesia since 2018.
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Three years later, Singapore held its own proceedings.
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On September 1st, 2020, a coroner's inquiry began in Singapore.
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The inquiry was Singapore's way of officially examining what had happened,
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on its own terms and under its own legal system.
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It could not try or punish Kasana,
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but it could establish the facts and determine who was responsible.
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Bloody fingerprints found in the apartment's unsued bathroom were later tested and confirmed to belong to Kasana.
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The blood was identified as Chia's.
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The investigating officer, assistant superintendent of police,
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Mahathir Mohamed, also gave evidence.
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He confirmed the autopsy findings and reported the outcome of the case in Indonesia.
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On September 2nd, 2020, the state coroner delivered her findings.
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She ruled that both deaths were cases of unlawful killing and that Kasana was responsible.
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The coroner extended her condolences to the couple's family,
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though the family was not in court to hear it.
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Kasana is serving her sentence in an Indonesian prison.
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She should be eligible for early release in 2031.
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She told investigators she never meant to kill Chia and Chin.
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And here's where the motive question gets complicated.
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Kasana's account, consistently across both her Indonesian trial and the Singapore coroner's inquiry,
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is that she only wanted to escape.
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That the deaths happened because the couple fought back.
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But Indonesian police drew a different conclusion.
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Their assessment was that the primary motive was robbery.
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that she went in there to take things,
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that escape was a secondary goal or a cover story.
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The evidence supports both readings.
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She prepared restraints in advance.
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She systematically gathered jewelry, watches,
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phones, a laptop, and cash after the killings.
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She knew exactly where to look.
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None of that looks like panic.
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But she also made that call to the maid agency.
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She told them to send someone.
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She didn't have to do that.
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It seems she had a plan.
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It just didn't account for two people who refused to stop fighting back.
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Tia and Chin were married for decades.
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They ran businesses together, retired together, grew old together.
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A neighbor said she always saw them side by side.
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They were side by side at the end too.
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Found in the same apartment on the same afternoon by the same man who had been sent to check on them.
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And by the time they were found,
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their killer was already safely out of the country.
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Can it be considered justice if she was tried
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and punished in her country of origin instead of the country in which she committed the crime?
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What do you think?
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Let me know in the comments.
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That is all for today.
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Thank you for watching.
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Context & Background
The video titled "The Maid Wanted To Escape…At Any Cost | Bedok Double Murders" provides a gripping narrative of a tragic crime that occurred in Singapore on June 21, 2017. It describes a shocking discovery made by a son-in-law seeking his elderly in-laws, only to find them brutally murdered in their apartment. The transcript is rich in detail, illustrating the backgrounds of the victims, Chiang Im Fong and Chin Sek Fa, who were known for their kindness and community spirit. Furthermore, it highlights the suspicious circumstances surrounding their maid, Kasana, whose actions led to a widespread investigation that shocked the local populace. This context is essential for understanding the emotional tone and the urgency present in the dialogue, both valuable elements to pay attention to when learning English.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- "What he finds inside will shock Singapore for years." — A powerful sentence that expresses a strong emotional response to discovering something unexpected.
- "He has a bag, a passport, and jewelry that doesn't belong to her." — This phrase illustrates possession and can be useful in discussing personal belongings.
- "She treated Kasana well and brought her along on their outings." — This highlights the importance of kindness in relationships and can be used in various conversational contexts.
- "Both had their limbs tied." — A phrase that can serve in narratives related to crime or suspenseful storytelling.
- "The trial happened in another." — This can be a prompt for discussing legal matters and the implications of different jurisdictions.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
To effectively use the transcript from "The Maid Wanted To Escape…At Any Cost" as a learning tool, follow these steps:
- Start with Listening: Play the video or audio while paying close attention to the speaker's intonation and pronunciation. It's ideal to use a shadowing app that allows you to replay sections as needed.
- Read Along: Follow the transcript closely. As you hear each phrase, see if you can match it with the text. Understanding the context improves comprehension during IELTS speaking practice.
- Practice Speaking: Use the shadow speak technique by repeating phrases just after hearing them. Mimic the speaker’s tone to gain confidence in your pronunciation and rhythm.
- Break Down Complex Sentences: For phrases that are difficult, like "What he finds inside will shock Singapore for years", break them into smaller parts and practice each segment before combining them.
- Engage in Conversation: After shadowing, utilize the phrases you've learned in real conversations. Discuss the topics of crime or community with friends who are also learning English, which can solidify your grasp of these expressions.
By implementing these strategies, English learners can enhance their speaking skills while enjoying compelling content. Combining techniques like shadowing with engaging narratives, such as those found on YouTube, creates a rich learning experience that can lead to greater fluency.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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