“A GIRL should not be too beautiful but just regular-looking.” These were the poignant words of a distraught father after he lost his daughter under very cruel circumstances on Feb 17, 2005.
She was the only girl among four siblings and it proved too much to bear for Goh Eng Seng, a general manager of an oil palm plantation, when it came to identifying her body at the University Malaya Medical Centre mortuary.
The victim, Goh Lee Fang, 26, was found raped and murdered in her barely three-month-old boutique on the first floor of the newly-opened Curve shopping mall at Mutiara Damansara in Petaling Jaya.
Lee Fang, described as a stunning beauty and who co-owned the boutique with her two friends, had opened her business for the day at 10am as usual.
About three hours later, the first floor where her boutique, which specialised in children’s clothing, was located became a scene of chaos when her business partner arrived.
She found Lee Fang’s body sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood at the back of the store.
The woman, who suffered multiple stab wounds, was dead and had been sexually assaulted.
Police arrived at the scene minutes later and swept the place for clues.
Except for her handphone, her valuables were found intact at the store, ruling out robbery.
Police were optimistic of solving the case as the place was installed with highly-sophisticated closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, but it soon turned to disappointment for the investigators.
As the mall was new and completion work was still in progress not all the CCTV cameras, including the ones closest to Lee Fang’s boutique, were wired, denying police of the strongest lead they had in tracing the victim’s attacker.
However, with the footage they had in hand and a witness account of a man who was last seen at Lee Fang’s boutique, police investigators went to work.
Days after her death, a businessman in his 30’s was arrested, but he was later released after he produced a strong alibi.
As months went by, police came to a dead end in tracing the attractive boutique owner’s killer and the case went cold.
On her first death anniversary, her family had offered a RM10,000 reward for information that could led to Lee Fang’s killer.
Her family also shared fresh information with police, hoping it would lead to closure of the case. But everything led to a dead end. After more than 15 years, the cold-blooded killer who took Lee Fang’s life remains at large.
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A most foul and chilling mystery
