Sheila Damude, a 49-year-old school administrator, from Victoria, British

Columbia, had flown into Bangkok for a two-week stay with her son who was

on a ‘gap’ year tour of the world. 22-year-old Darin had broken his leg while

travelling with friends, and she wanted to give him some motherly attention.

They had decided to take a tourist trip to the Thai ‘Paradise Island’ of Phuket.

On 15 March, mother and son arrived at Phuket Airport and were collecting

their thoughts, in the usual arrival turmoil, when Scripps sidled up to them.

‘I was on the same plane as you. Do you have a problem?’ he enquired.

Within minutes, Scripps gleaned the information that Sheila and her son

wanted to get to Patong Beach, but they were not sure how much to pay for a

taxi.

With his marauding instincts fully attuned, Scripps, ever the experienced

traveller, told them about ‘Nilly’s Marina Inn’, where a room would cost them

about US$18 a night. The small luxury hotel lay on the quiet southern end of Patong Beach, one of the most popular beaches on the island. He suggested that

they share a taxi with him which would give them all a cheap ride. Mother and

son exchanged glances and nodded their agreement. They were clearly very

impressed by this helpful young man and soon they were on their way along the

dusty roads to Patong Beach.

Scripps signed himself in, at Nilly’s Marina Inn, as Simon Davis, a

shopkeeper from London. No one noticed, in a revealing slip of the pen, that he

had inadvertently signed his name ‘J’ Davis. The consummate traveller, he had

stayed there before, always drawing admiring looks from the pretty female staff

who deferred to him as ‘Mr John’.

The Damudes caught the lift to the second floor and were shown into a

spacious deluxe suite overlooking the bay, a Miami Vice view with jet-skis and

speed boats swooping on to white sands. Scripps took a nearby room, just across

the corridor, which overlooked scrubland at the back of the hotel.

The Damudes had two king-sized beds, a well-appointed mini-bar, IDD

telephone, colour television, air-conditioning and a kitchen area. There was a

separate bathroom and shower and even a safe, in which they could store their

valuables.

If the room was quite luxurious, especially at the low cost, the view from their

window was priceless. Situated across from a long, sandy beach and a narrow

road, was the crystal clear water of the Andaman Sea. Looking out from their

balcony, two tall palm trees grew out of the sandy soil, where two of the local

girls were breaking open the coconuts. The girls looked up and when they saw

the handsome young Darin, they broke into giggles. At that moment, the

Damudes thought they had found Heaven but, as the next day approached, they

would be pitched into Hell.

Meanwhile, after a short walk to Patong’s exciting nightlife, the Damudes

spent the evening exploring the shops for silk garments. Scripps hired a high-

powered 450cc Honda motorcycle, and ended up on the seafront at The Banana

Bar. Throbbing with music, the place was full of good-time girls, who would sell

their young bodies for less than the price of a meal. He danced the early hours

away and had sex with a young woman on the beach before retiring for the night.

The Tourist Police admired his yellow and green motorcycle parked on the

double-yellow lines outside the hotel and decided it was not good policy to issue

a parking ticket to a holiday-maker.

During the next morning, Sheila and Darin came down for breakfast, which

they ate in the sunshine. After the meal, they searched the rather dismal fish tank for signs of life, and Sheila flicked through the postcard rack for something

suitable to send to her husband back home. This was the last time they were seen

alive. It is believed that they returned to their room to make plans for the day

ahead.

At about 11.00am, people wandering about outside the small hotel next door

noted a large flood of red-coloured water flushing down an open drain that led

from Nilly’s Marina Inn to the sewer under the road.

Because John Scripps has never been charged with the murders of Sheila and

Darin Damude, he refused to discuss the case with me. Nevertheless, using the

known evidence, it is possible to reconstruct what happened when the Damudes

returned to their room at the Inn.

Scripps knocked on the door and entered their room on some pretext and,

within seconds, he had stunned them with a stun-gun. Such a weapon was found

in his possession when he was arrested. With his victims immobilised, he took

out his hammer and beat them to death – swabs from his hammer matched

bloodstains on the carpet in the room occupied by the Damudes – after which he

dismembered their bodies, using the butchery skills he had learned so adroitly at

Albany Prison.

After stealing his victims’ travel documents, passports and credit cards, he

went on yet another shopping spree. The skulls, torsos and several limbs,

belonging to the Damudes, were found between 19 and 27 March, scattered

around the local countryside. Also, during this time, a Thai woman, out walking

her dog in the area, found other gruesome remains, partially tipped into a disused

tin mine shaft. The identity of the victims was later confirmed using dental

records.

The Western world has become hardened to this kind of cold-blooded

multiple murder. The gruesome details of the killings perpetrated by, for

example, Kenneth McDuff, Harvey Carignan and Peter Sutcliffe, have become

all too familiar. When the latest sensational murder case features in the

headlines, we have the feeling that we have read it all before. Dismembered

corpses, anonymous victims, apparently motiveless crime and bizarre acts of

violence have become common currency.

But this is not so in Singapore where violent crime and murder are unusual. In

this draconically ordered City State, where even the pavements seem to have

been scrubbed clean and where the glass of the skyscrapers sparkles spotless in

the sun, crime comes in rather more sanitised forms.

Famously harsh punishment awaits those who dare to drop litter or carelessly discard chewing gum. Here, taxis are fitted with a warning bell, which rings

automatically if the driver exceeds the 50mph speed limit. It is not that

Singaporeans have not encountered murder before. They have their share of

domestic homicide, averaging fewer than 50 murders a year in a population of

two-and-a-half million. Murders committed in the heat of the moment always

seem to be more understandable.

It fell to Acting Superintended Gerald Lim to lead the investigation into the

crimes committed by John Scripps. At the time of Lowe’s murder, he was the

senior investigating officer with the Special Investigation Section of the CID,

and his work began on 13 March 1995, in Singapore Harbour, with the discovery

of a pair of feet, which were poking out of a black bin-liner and tied up with a

pair of large, blue, Woolworths underpants.

A boatman made the next discovery, for, bobbing among the pleasure boats,

off Clifford Pier, were two thighs – white, hairy and bound with strips of orange

fabric.

Finally, on 16 March, a plump, male torso was retrieved from the water.

These gruesome remains belonged to the same male Caucasian body but the

head and arms of the body have never been recovered.

Lim had dealt with fatal fights between immigrant building workers and he

had come across domestic murder, but this was something completely and

horrifyingly different. He examined the green-tinged, rotting flesh and wondered

at the person who could be responsible for such cold and calculating destruction

of another human being. And this body was not just headless and armless, it was

nameless.

As most visitors to Singapore were registered as hotel guests, the detective’s

first stop was the centralised hotel registration computer. Within hours, a fax had

been sent to every hotel in Singapore, asking if any guests were missing, or who

had left without paying their bill. The Riverview Hotel responded immediately.

Two guests – Gerard Lowe and Simon Davis – had checked out of Room 1511

without paying. But there was something else, the manager said. His duty

reception staff recalled that the Englishman had been seen lugging a heavy

suitcase through the foyer, the night before he and his companion disappeared. It

was also noted that when he returned to the hotel, several hours later, he was

empty-handed.

On 14 March, the police in Johannesburg, South Africa, received a report

from a distressed Mrs Vanessa Lowe, who said that her husband was missing.

He had not called her from Singapore to say that all was well which, she explained, was totally out of character. Her concerns soon reached Gerald Lim,

and he invited her to fly to Singapore, to view the disarticulated body and a few

items of wet clothing.

Before Vanessa Lowe arrived, Lim had determined that ‘Simon Davis’ had

been using his victim’s Gold credit card. Davis was now the prime suspect and a

warrant was issued for his arrest. Police now believed he had murdered Lowe for

his money.

When the distraught woman arrived, Superintendent Lim met her at the airport

and, as delicately as he could, he asked her to identify the corpse. She bravely

pointed out various marks on her late husband’s body. She recognised the

appendectomy scar on the abdomen, the freckles on the back and the bony lump

just below the right knee. She also identified the underpants, used by Scripps to

tie up his victim’s thighs, and the orange strips were from here husband’s T-

shirt.

For some inexplicable reason, Scripps returned to Singapore on 19 March and,

after a short struggle at Immigration Control, he was arrested and taken into

custody. When officers opened the backpack of the man calling himself Simon

Davis, which had been seized during his arrest, they were amazed at what they

found. There, along with an ‘Enjoy Coca-Cola’ beach towel, a Pink Floyd

cassette, a bottle of Paul Mitchell shampoo and some featherlite condoms, was

what they came to describe as a ‘murder kit’.

Scripps was carrying a 10,000-volt ‘Z-Force III’ stun-gun, a 1.5kg hammer, a

can of Mace, two sets of handcuffs, some thumb cuffs, two serrated knives and

two Swiss army knives. And that was not all. Another of his bags was filled with

clothes, suitable for a middle-aged woman, consisting of skirts, dresses and even

some pearl earrings. Hidden among them were passports in the names of two

Canadian citizens, Sheila and Darin Damude, each of them containing crudely

pasted-in photographs of Scripps. He was also found to be carrying more than

US$40,000 in cash and travellers’ cheques, together with the passports, credit

cards and other belongings of Lowe and the Damudes.