Mimi Wong

Mimi Wong, birth name Wong Weng Siu, was born in 1939 at Singapore, Straits Settlements.

She was the offspring of her father's second wife.

According to articles that covered her case, it was said that Wong had an unhappy childhood since her birth.

Wong's father died of unknown causes when she was eleven months old.

Her biological mother Leong Kuan Fong was so poor that she was unable to continue taking care of Wong, which led to her being sent to live with her father's first wife Ho Ah Soong and her nine half-siblings.

Other than poverty, Wong suffered abuse from Ho and her siblings, who verbally and physically abused her at every moment, even at times in the presence of Wong's birth mother.

Whenever it was mealtime, Wong's nine half-brothers and half-sisters were allowed to eat first, while Wong was not allowed to join them.

She would only be given leftovers once the whole family finished eating.

Wong did not have a chance to go to school during her childhood.

She started to work at age fourteen, first becoming a factory worker to support herself.

Despite this, Wong continued to live in extreme poverty.

In 1956, the year she turned 17, Wong Weng Siu was invited to a picnic by a friend.

During this time, she first met a HDB sweeper named Sim Woh Kum, who was six or seven years older than her.

Sim was also working as a school canteen stallholder at the time he first knew Wong.

Subsequently, both Wong and Sim became romantically involved.

The couple dated for the next two years before they married in 1958.

In that same year, both Wong and Sim welcomed their first son.

Their second son was born four years later in 1962.

However, the marriage slowly became marred by marital issues and arguments.

Wong, who possessed a bad temper since she was young, and with a family history of mental illnesses, was said to have frequently abused her husband, and would not hesitate to arm herself to physically assault Sim whenever their arguments turned violent.

Sim, who was a naturally mild-tempered person, often silently endured these physical abuses, which at one point left a scar on his forehead.

He even ran out of the house numerous times whenever Wong picked up a knife or wooden rod with intent to pick a fight.

Wong even went as far as to abuse her own mother-in-law, which led to her being considered an "empress daughter-in-law".

Not only that, Sim himself was a compulsive gambler, who often gambled away their hard-earned money, which aggravated the family's already-precarious financial situation.

The gambling habit would cost Sim his job and the family's life savings.

This forced Wong to take up part-time jobs to support their family, including a stint at a bar as a hostess.

Despite his loss of employment, Sim persisted in his gambling habits, and he sometimes stole Wong's hard-earned income to feed his own appetite for gambling.

Given their financial difficulties and Sim's own incompetence, Wong was slowly disillusioned with Sim, and she ultimately decided to leave him in 1963, resulting in Sim having to take care of their two sons and his own elderly mother alone.

After her separation from Sim, Wong would purposely strut with her boyfriends in front of Sim, according to his account of his life before Ayako Watanabe's murder.

Sim, who still loved Wong despite their separation, had always hoped that Wong would reconcile with him and often told her not to do that in front of him.

After her separation from Sim Woh Kum, Wong Weng Siu went on to work as a cabaret girl in a bar, adopting a stage name "Mimi Wong".

Using her good looks and slender, sexually-attractive figure, Wong quickly earned popularity among the male customers of the bar.

Wong's reputation was so huge that she even became the queen of all bar hostesses in Singapore.

Wong's defence of diminished responsibility was rejected by the High Court, which found both herself and Sim guilty of Watanabe's murder and sentenced them to death, which also made them the first couple to be subjected to capital punishment in Singapore since its independence in 1965.

In 1966, three years after she first started her bar hostess career, Wong first met Hiroshi Watanabe, an engineer and high-ranking member of a Japanese corporation.

Wong was alleged to have murdered Ayako Watanabe, the wife of her Japanese lover Hiroshi Watanabe, on 6 January 1970.

Wong was not alone in this crime; her former husband and sweeper Sim Woh Kum had also helped Wong to restrain the victim while Wong repeatedly stabbed the woman to death.

The act was witnessed by Watanabe's eldest daughter Chieko (then aged 9), who testified against the couple in their 26-day trial.

Wong Weng Siu (c. 1939 – 27 July 1973), more commonly known as Mimi Wong, was a Singaporean bar hostess who became the first woman to be sentenced to death and executed for murder in Singapore since its independence.

Both were executed on 27 July 1973.