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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. In 1979, four children from Geylang Baru, Singapore, were found murdered inside their home with multiple stab wounds and their bodies stacked on top of each other.
Although the police received a lot of tips, the murders remained unsolved today. Is there still hope for advancements in forensic science to finally crack this mystery? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 218, The Galang Baru Family Murders.
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings. As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new compelling cases and
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In January 1979, the Tan family lived in a housing and development board flat on Block 58 in Galen, Peru, Singapore, a small neighborhood located in the southeastern part of Singapore. They were 38-year-old Tan Quynh Chai, his wife, 30-year-old Lee May Ying, and their four children, three boys and one girl, ages 10 to 5.
The older three boys were students at a local primary school while their younger sister attended People's Association Kindergarten across the street. Mr. and Mrs. Tan owned and operated a bus company that picked up local children and teachers to take them to school and bring them home each day. That's how they paid the bills and took care of the family. And they were well trusted in the community. The morning of January 6, 1979 started like any other morning for the family.
Mr. and Mrs. Tan left the flat on Block 58 early before any of their four children were awake. They usually got out the door before 6.30 in the morning so that they could get the bus and start picking up the children and teachers to take to school. Then once they got to the bus, they would call home to wake up their four children and make sure they were getting ready to go to school themselves.
But on this particular morning, none of the children answered when Mrs. Tan called the house around 7.10 a.m. The phone just kept ringing and ringing. She waited a couple of minutes, thinking the children might be having a hard time waking up. But then she called the house again, still no answer. So she called a few more times, same thing. At this point, she knew something was off. It wasn't like any of her four children to ignore this many phone calls in the morning.
They all knew they had school that day, and this was how they were woken up every single day. At least one of the Tan kids should have heard the phone ringing. Mrs. Tan then called one of the neighbors to see if they could go and check on the kids to make sure that they were up and getting ready. But when the neighbor knocked on the front door, no one answered. But instead of calling the police, the Tans and the neighbor just assumed the kids were already up and they were at school.
Maybe that's why they weren't answering because they were already in class. There wasn't any other plausible explanation than that. So the neighbor went home and the Tans finished their bus service for the morning. At 10 o'clock a.m., the Tans arrived back home. They dropped off all the teachers and kids for the day and were done with work. But when they stepped inside, nothing could have prepared them for what they saw. All four of their children's bodies were piled on top of one another in a bathroom.
and all four of them were dead. Tan Ka Pong, 10, Tan Ka Hin, 8, Tan Ka Soon, 6, and their baby sister Tan Chin Ni, 5, had been stabbed at least 20 times each. They all had multiple stab wounds to the head, but the eldest had more stab wounds than his younger siblings.
All four kids were wearing t-shirts and pants, and their bodies were stacked on top of one another on the toilet in the bathroom like they were being posed. The bathroom floor was soaked in the kids' blood. The murders sent shockwaves and fear throughout the small, close-knit community of Galen Baru. It was practically unheard of for four young children, 10 years and younger, to be found brutally stabbed to death inside their very own home.
No one could quite wrap their heads around the idea that anyone could do this. Or more importantly, why? Who has anything to gain from murdering four innocent children? Right away, the Singapore police suspected these murders were premeditated and well thought out. Everything from the victims themselves, to the time the children were murdered, to the cleanup, everything was planned from top to bottom. This wasn't some random act of violence committed by a random stranger.
For starters, was the timing of the murders. Mr. and Mrs. Tan left the house around 6.35 a.m. for work that morning. But by the time Mrs. Tan called the house to wake the kids up at 7.10, no one answered. So this suggested to investigators that whoever was responsible was already inside the flat committing the murders. Or maybe they had already done it. It also meant that they knew the parents wouldn't be home.
This was too small of a window for a stranger to randomly break into the house and stumble upon four young kids who were home alone. It seemed a lot more likely that someone knew the Tans routine and knew the parents left the house around 6.30 each morning. They knew the four kids would be home alone for at least 30 minutes up to an hour before leaving for school, making it the perfect time to commit a murder like this.
Second was the lack of forced entry at the flat. This led the police to suspect the Tan kids might have known their killer or killers. No locks were broken, no windows shattered, nothing. It was like the kids themselves let the killer inside the house. It could have easily been someone they trusted. Why would they have just opened the door if their parents weren't home?
Nothing was stolen or missing either. The flat was perfectly clean and in the same condition it always was, so nothing was ransacked. No money was taken, no unaccounted jewelry, absolutely nothing. So robbery wasn't the motive either. Not even any of the neighbors heard anything suspicious that morning.
When the police went door to door looking for possible witnesses, they didn't find anyone. No one reported hearing any screams or commotion coming from the apartment. No one reported seeing anyone suspicious going to or leaving the Tann's flat either, which is quite strange because the units in this particular building were quite close together. If any of the kids had screamed, at least one of the neighbors would have heard something.
This led the police to believe they were looking for at least two killers. They theorized that because none of the neighbors heard any screams, there must have been at least two people involved. One had to be in charge of keeping the kids quiet, while the other took the children one by one to the bathroom where they were killed. It just seemed like way too much work for one person to pull off without raising any alarm bells with the neighbors.
We're also talking about four victims. Even though they were children ages five to ten, that's a lot of victims for one person to manage. It would have just taken one of the kids to run away or start screaming for help for this entire thing to be ruined. Also, is it really possible for one person to control four kids at the same time they were being killed one by one?
If two or more people did it, they might be able to pull this off without any witnesses. Plus, there was obviously a massive cleanup inside the apartment, making it look even more like multiple people were there to help clean up everything so fast. The police searched every nook and cranny of the place and never found the murder weapon.
Their autopsies revealed each kid had been stabbed more than 20 times with a knife, but that's all they really knew. The murder weapons, which were later believed to be a chopper taken from the kitchen and a dagger, were never found, so the killers must have taken it with them.
If they had been careless and left the murder weapon inside the flat, there was a chance to find some fingerprints or maybe even blood that could have been found to help identify the killers. But the police weren't that lucky. Since the kids were stabbed so many times, you would think that there would be blood everywhere throughout the flat. But there wasn't. There wasn't even a blood trail leading into the bathroom where the bodies were found.
Besides a small amount of blood in the kitchen sink, the entire place was squeaky clean. Another clue that this thing was entirely premeditated and well thought out. The authorities found a few strands of long, unknown hair inside the eldest boy's right hand, like he tried pulling at his killer's hair to fight back. This could also help explain why he was stabbed more than his siblings.
Maybe he was the only one who tried to defend himself or his brothers and sister. But at the time, there was no way for the Singapore police to test the strands of hair to see it who it might belong to. So from an investigative standpoint, the hair was essentially useless. Not a single fingerprint or usable piece of forensic evidence besides the hair was found inside the apartment.
It might have been because it was the late 1970s when forensic science was only starting to emerge in criminal investigations. Or maybe it was something else. But by the end of the first day of the investigation, the police were already at a standstill. The Galen-Beru family murders, as it's become known, were led by the Criminal Investigations Special Investigation Section.
From the moment the story hit the Singapore newspapers, the police were under enormous amount of pressure to solve it. You can't just murder four kids from the same family in cold blood and get away with it. So as each hour and each day passed without an arrest, the public grew even more concerned about a child killer on the loose.
Although the exact motive remained a mystery, the police had a hunch in the early days of the investigation. This had to be some type of revenge killing. Murdering four kids is too personal for it to be for any other reason. Revenge. This theory mainly started after Mr. Tan's brother told the local media that the murders might have something to do with an illegal taunting scheme that the parents were involved in.
A tontine is an investment scheme in which the so-called shareholders create a common investment pool and derive some sort of profit or benefit, usually financial when they're still alive. But the only people who are alive actually benefit from it. Dead people don't.
So this idea of tontines became illegal in most countries since it basically allows people to profit off of other people dying. In this type of quote-unquote investment, the longer you live and the fewer fellow investors who remain living, the larger the annual payment.
So if the family was somehow involved in one of these illegal schemes, there might be someone out there who would profit financially from their kids' murders. So on January 7th, 1979, homicide investigators questioned two women in connection to the murders, but later released them, not commenting if the women were of any help.
The women were believed to be linked to this illegal investment scheme and were thought to have killed the kids for money. But the police had no solid evidence to charge them with anything. So eventually, this theory didn't really lead the police anywhere. The Tans claimed they had no enemies and that they couldn't think of anyone out there looking to seek revenge on them. It also didn't make sense because the kids were killed, not the parents.
The kids weren't involved in this investment scheme, so if they died, no one was really standing to gain anything financially. If the parents had been murdered, then this would have been a much different story. So after thoroughly investigating this theory, the police had no choice but to move on from it. Investigators knew the killers had to have known the Tans very well before the murders. They might have even been friends at one point.
Just two weeks before the kids were killed, the family received a strange Chinese New Year card in the mail that may or may not have been sent from the killers. The card showed happy children playing and taunted them with the words, Now you can have no more offspring. Ha ha ha. And the card was signed, The Murderer.
The sender of the card also appeared to have intimate knowledge of the family as they addressed the Tanns by their nicknames. As it turned out, this wasn't just some strange card. It was actually a very important piece of evidence for investigators. That's because Mrs. Tann had recently undergone a procedure after her last child was born so that she couldn't have any more children.
So that means that the card's sender knew the Tans wouldn't have any more kids. Despite interviewing over 100 of the Tans' family neighbors and public appeals for witnesses, the police had nowhere to go, leaving many people fearing the Galen-Beru family murders might turn cold. Four kids brutally murdered in just 15 minutes, leaving behind a spotless crime scene.
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When it came to possible suspects in the murders, the police had very few, which made solving the case almost impossible. But they did have something from the beginning. The first suspect came from a taxi driver.
Several days after the murders, a taxi driver told the police that on the same day of the murders, around 8.30 a.m., a man in his 20s got inside his taxi near the Tans apartment with blood on him. He was also holding a knife. Not only was this tip interesting because it seemed to check all of the boxes, a man seen near the apartment around the same time the murders took place said,
He had blood on him, and he was carrying around a knife, possibly the missing murder weapon. But this guy also matched the physical description of one of the Tann's neighbors. According to the witness, this neighbor often went to the Tann's apartment to use their phone. Even the Tann children knew him and called him, quote-unquote, uncle whenever he came over.
There was a rumor going around the apartment building that Mrs. Tan was having an affair with this so-called uncle guy, aka the same person the taxi driver described. So the police wondered if the motive behind the murders might have had something to do with this rumored alleged affair. When the police brought the taxi driver down to the police station to be interviewed, they
he picked out the neighbor in a photo lineup as the guy that got inside his taxi that morning. Following that, the neighbor was arrested in connection to the murders, but only two weeks later, he was released for a lack of evidence. The only thing they had was the taxi driver's word, and that wasn't enough. The police didn't have anything solid linking him to the murders, and there was only rumors about the affair.
Both he and Mrs. Tan denied it ever happened. Then, a few days after his release, the neighbor, known as Uncle, and his sister moved out of the apartment building. And he was never questioned about the murders again. The second possible suspect was a family member of the Tans.
According to the police, this family member asked Mrs. Tan to buy him a lottery ticket sometime before the murders. Well, it turned out this lottery ticket was a winner for over $50,000. However, Mrs. Tan told this family member that she forgot to buy the ticket. He didn't believe her and thought that she was lying to try and pocket the money.
Then, when the Tans bought a new minibus for their business, he was sure that they were keeping his winnings. Early on, the police considered this to be a likely motive. It's possible this family member sought revenge on the Tans for taking the so-called lottery winnings. But the Tans maintained none of this was true. They honestly did forget to buy the winning ticket, and they weren't lying about it.
Plus, when the cops tried to speak with this family member about it, they disappeared. Early on, a witness told Chinese newspapers he saw a couple, one of them bloodstained, leaving the Tan's apartment on the morning of the murders. However, after looking into this person's claim, the police found it to be a hoax. The witness simply wanted his five minutes of fame and to throw off investigators.
He didn't actually see anyone leaving the apartment that morning. And from the police's perspective, it was just another dead end and a waste of time and resources. Another one of the neighbors, a 68-year-old woman, told the police she usually sat along the common corridor to watch children playing and would have seen anyone coming or going from the Tan family's flat.
However, on the morning of the murders, she was washing her hair and didn't see anyone. With very little evidence into the murders, the children were buried at a local cemetery together, dressed in their best clothes with their school bags, books, and toys. People who attended the funeral said that Mrs. Tan was absolutely inconsolable. She couldn't even watch as her kids were lowered into their graves.
The Galen-Beru family murders became one of the most brutal crimes that Singapore has ever seen. Within a year of the murders, the Tans sold their minibus business and did their very best to try to move on with their lives without their children. But how can you simply move on, especially not knowing who is responsible? After they sold their business, they started working at a company that produced PVC materials.
Despite everything that happened, they still wanted to be parents. They first tried adopting children who were in foster care or who were up for adoption. But when that didn't work out, Mrs. Tan managed to reverse the procedure that she had done earlier, which prevented her from having any more kids. The reversal was successful, and they went on to have two additional children of their own.
a boy who came in December 1983, five years after the murders, and later on, a girl. They were once again parents. As for the murder investigation, it stands almost in the same exact spot today that it did 45 years ago. So even after all of this time, is it still solvable?
In 2004, True Files, a Singapore crime show, reenacted the murders in the final episode of season three. The hope was that the episode would generate new tips and help keep the case alive in the eyes of the public. But that's all it really did. It just reminded people about the murders, but didn't do much else. For the most part, the Tans lived a very quiet life after the murders.
It wasn't until 2021 that a local Singapore newspaper reported that Mr. Tan had died several years earlier and Mrs. Tan was still alive in her 70s living with her grandson. A year later in 2022, the crime show Inside Crime Scene aired an episode on the case.
Like True Files in 2004, the episode only served as a reminder that this case was still unsolved and no arrests were made. With the investigation hitting a standstill, the truth seems farther away than ever. No leads, no progress since day one. But as hope fades, could a breakthrough in forensic technology be what is needed? We'll be right back.
It seems like the only hope this case still has relies on two things. Number one, the forensic evidence. And number two, new witnesses. Starting with the forensic evidence. But simply put, there isn't much. Most of the apartment was cleaned up after the murders. The police only found blood inside the kitchen sink and the bathroom where the kids' bodies were stacked.
But because the murders happened in 1979, there wasn't much law enforcement could do with the blood evidence. No shoe prints or fingerprints were found in the blood, and a lot of the other evidence had already been cleaned up or wiped up. The killers were extremely careful not to leave anything behind. But what about the few strands of hair found in the eldest boy's right hand? Well, that hair could be the key to solving this entire case.
The police know the hair most likely belongs to one of the killers because the boy fought back and pulled at their hair. So if the hair could be tested using new DNA techniques or testing, we might find out who it belongs to or at least get some fresh tips. But it's unclear whether or not the hair is still in the police's possession or if there's even usable DNA on it.
To this day, no advanced forensic testing has been done on the strands of hair. Or, if there has been, none of the results have been made public over the years. So, the key to solving these murders might not have even been tested yet. Besides the hair, the second thing that can happen is that additional witnesses come forward. Maybe there are witnesses who lived in the apartment building.
or people who know who the murderers are because they confessed to them about what they did. Either way, the witnesses might be the heart of what's going to solve this. But what are the chances anyone comes forward 45 years later? You would think if someone knew something back in 1979 that they would have come forward by now. Why wait over four decades to hold on to any type of information?
And even if someone does come forward, can they still be trusted? How would the police verify what they're saying is true? And would there be any forensic evidence to support it? Today, the Galen-Beru family murders remain unsolved. And there haven't been any solid leads in the investigation since the early days back in 1979. And despite a few suspects that have arisen over the years, no one's been charged with the murders.
The murder of those four young kids remains one of Singapore's most brutal crimes. Was it a revenge killing? Did the family know the killers? Was it someone close to them? Were multiple people involved? And the biggest question, will the Galen Baru family murders ever be solved? Or will it go down in history as one of the most bizarre, brutal crimes of all time?
a crime that not even forensic science can unravel. To share your thoughts on the story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales. After each episode, I release a bonus episode where I share my personal thoughts and opinions about the case. You'll want to listen to this one because I'm going to share who I think killed those children.
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