Sim Ah Cheoh

Sim Ah Cheoh was born in Singapore in 1948.

While it is not known if she has any siblings, she had an overall tragic life which was riddled with poverty, suffering and a lack of love.

Sim's mother died at the age of three, and she was living under the care of her grandparents and other relatives until the age of ten.

Later, Sim went to live with her father, who has remarried, but she was unloved and neglected by her stepmother while living with her father.

After five years of living with her father, Sim became independent.

Due to extreme poverty, Sim was only educated till primary three in a Chinese-educated school, and she also worked as a servant, and took up part time jobs at 13 years old.

Sim remained unmarried in her adulthood, but she had two lovers who were married men, and bore a son from each of these two affairs.

The elder son was born in 1975 while the younger son was born in 1979.

Her eldest son's birth father abandoned her when Sim was four months pregnant in 1975, while her second son's father remained living with his own family (but he did still provide the child living expenses), leaving Sim alone having to raise her sons under extreme poverty.

Sim later had one boyfriend Lim Eng Kee, who remained so around the time she was caught trafficking drugs.

After Sim gave birth to her eldest son, she went to work as a bar hostess and then later became an illegal bookie, but her latter business failed, and she owed around $50,000 to loan sharks, which sent her to further financial trouble.

Due to her immense debts and her desperation to discharge them, Sim Ah Cheoh, then 36 years old, was willing to help two drug traffickers to smuggle heroin to the United States of America (USA), after the duo - 31-year-old contractor Lim Joo Yin (alias Ah Hai) and a 31-year-old unemployed man Ronald Tan Chong Ngee (alias Ah Aw; Lim's henchman) - offered to recruit her.

The promised payment for the job was S$30,000.

On 26 April 1985, Lim, who supplied the heroin, went to Hotel Negara at Claymore Drive with Tan to meet up with Sim.

There were a total of ten packets of heroin, which the men strapped to the body of Sim.

Sim was also given a HK$10 (then S$2.60) note and was ordered to hand the drugs to a man, who would give her another HK$10 note with a sequence number similar to her note.

She was also told to take a plane bound for Honolulu and thus she headed to Changi Airport.

Upon arrival at the airport however, Sim was arrested by the narcotics police and it also led to the arrests of Tan and Lim at the hotel.

All three were charged with drug trafficking.

A total of 1.37 kg of heroin, which has an estimated worth of US$2 million (or S$4.08 million), is weighed from the ten bundles carried by Sim.

With the amount of heroin found having exceeded the minimum of 15g required under the Misuse of Drugs Act, the mandatory death penalty will be imposed if the trio were found guilty.

After the arrest of Sim, her two sons were cared for by their relatives and guardians.

Sim's younger son went to live with his father and his father's second wife but eventually moved back to live with his guardian.

Lim fruitlessly tried to kill himself while he was in remand facing investigations for his crime.

She was originally sentenced to death in 1988 for the crime, for which she was arrested in 1985, and Sim's two accomplices Lim Joo Yin (林裕炎 Lín Yùyán) and Ronald Tan Chong Ngee (陈忠义 Chen Zhōngyì) were also arrested and received the same sentence, and like Sim, both also lost their appeals against their sentence.

Sim and her two bosses stood trial in the High Court of Singapore on 7 July 1988.

Despite confessing to their respective roles in the crime, all three defendants tried to challenge the validity of their statements, claiming that they were not made voluntarily.

In the end, the confessions were ruled admissible as evidence by both the trial judges Lai Kew Chai and Joseph Grimberg.

After the prosecutor-in-charge Lee Sing Lit presented his case, the trio were ordered to enter their defence, but they chose to remain silent.

Sim's defence lawyers R Palakrishnan and Grace Chacko tried to argue that Sim should not be guilty of trafficking but of possession, since there is a 30-minute lapse between her arrest and arrival at the airport, which means that Sim might have the heroin strapped to her body in the airport's toilet rather than the hotel.

On 29 July 1988, all three accused - Sim Ah Cheoh, Ronald Tan Chong Ngee and Lim Joo Yin - were convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to death by hanging.

All three accused later appealed to the Court of Appeal of Singapore against their sentences, but their appeals were rejected on 19 March 1991.

After losing her appeals, through her lawyers, Sim Ah Cheoh decided to appeal to Wee Kim Wee, then President of Singapore, for clemency.

In the petition, Sim's lawyer R Palakrishnan stated that his client has led a tragic and poor life, and she has no marketable skills, no schooling, and upkeep from home, and was a housewife and single mother of two sons.

He stated that these life difficulties resulted in Sim's mental weakness, and caused her to be tempted into crime with the desperation to pay off her debts.

Subsequently, while Lim and Tan were executed on 3 April 1992, Sim was granted clemency and her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, making her the fourth person since 1959, as well as the second female and second drug convict on death row to be pardoned from execution by the President of Singapore.

A year later, Sim was diagnosed with cancer while in prison.

As she was found to have around 12 more months left to live, Sim was granted clemency a second time after she applied to the President of Singapore to pardon her and release her to let her receive treatment and spend the final days of her life with her family and sons outside prison.

Sim Ah Cheoh (沈亚彩 Shěn Yàcăi; c. 1948 – 30 March 1995) was a Singaporean drug trafficker of Chinese descent.

She died at the age of 47 in March 1995, a month after she regained her freedom.