A businessman who admitted to killing his “nagging” wife while the couple was on vacation in the UK by “snapping” and suffocating her to death with a hotel pillow has been sentenced to life in prison.
In the early hours of December 7 of last year, Singaporean couple Soong Fong and Pek Ying Ling, both 51, were sleeping at the County Aparthotel in Newcastle when the husband placed a pillow over his wife to make her “be silent.”
After the incident, the murderer’s husband contacted his oldest son and admitted to hurting the woman.
She has left. She’s gone. I totally lost it. To quiet her, I attempted to cover her mouth. I suddenly lost it.
The police were informed by the court that he also said, “I simply wanted her to be quiet,” after his detention.
He lost his anger, he snapped, and he choked her to death, allegedly to stop her from berating him or bugging him or to keep her quiet, according to prosecutor Peter Makepeace QC.
Fong changed his plea to guilty on the fifth day of his trial at Newcastle Crown Court after originally denying killing Mrs. Pek, also known as Evelyn Pek, and asserting that he did not recall doing it.
Today, Judge Paul Sloan QC imposed a life sentence with a 12-year-and-six-month minimum.
The court was informed that Fong had no prior history of domestic violence and was a “kind and dedicated husband” to his wife of 28 years, with whom he had three grown kids.
The two had been travelling in the UK when Fong fell “significantly” while attempting to capture a picture on the Isle of Skye, falling down a “near vertical slope.”
Fong’s attorney Toby Hedworth QC said that by the time the couple landed in Newcastle, where one of their three boys was attending college, it was “obvious there was something severely wrong with him.”
Fong reportedly passed out three times in his County Aparthotel room before being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance and being released with “ongoing muscle discomfort.”
“CCTV video from the hospital and hotel demonstrates the discomfort you were in — you had difficulties walking,” Judge Sloan said.
The judge said that one of the couple’s kids had instructed his mother not to “scold” Fong in texts sent that evening, and that he subsequently claimed in testimony that she “had a propensity to continually instructing (Fong) what to do and what not to do.”
The court informed Fong that his wife ignored her son’s counsel “out of a sincere concern for your well-being.”
“By the time you got back to your room, you were still in a great deal of agony and anguish.” You were emotionally and physically exhausted.
“Your wife, who would have been as worried and frightened, didn’t let things go to sleep.
“I stress, none of what I have just described could even begin to excuse what you then did, but it perhaps does shed some significant light upon why a normally loving, caring, protective, patient and gentle man should behave in a way which was so utterly and completely out of character,” the letter reads.
According to Judge Sloan, Fong pinned his wife to the bed, put his knees on her shoulders, and covered her face with a pillow, keeping her there until she lost consciousness and then until she passed away. It would have taken “minutes, not seconds,” he noted.
According to the court record, Fong called his son to inform him that his mother had left and said he had “just lost it” after having “tried to cover her lips to silence her.”
Later, he admitted to authorities that he had “simply wanted her to remain quiet.”
In a victim personal statement read out in court by one of the couple’s kids, Aloysius, he and his three siblings claimed to have “lost both parents at the same time.”
The whole mother’s family is devastated. They see my dad as their son and want him to come home to Singapore when he is permitted to, which they want to happen safely.
“What has occurred here in Newcastle has crushed us all,” someone said.
The relationship between my parents has always served as an example for me and my girlfriend, he said, and that hasn’t changed.
Anybody who knew them could tell how much they cherished one another.
Providing some context, Mr. Hedworth said: “Bewildered, distraught, and shattered.”
That person will get a sentence this morning. A guy who is now trapped in a nightmare.
The defendant still struggles to comprehend how he could have committed such a crime, which has made things tough for him.
He still doesn’t really remember what really transpired in that room that evening.