S'porean man, 34, gets life in prison for fatally starving & beating teen sister for months in 2021

A 34-year-old man was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of his sister, then 19, by brutally beating and starving her for months in 2021.

Huang Bocan committed the abuses with two accomplices — Lim Peng Tiong, now 66, and Bocan's girlfriend Chee Mei Wan, now 46 — in a unit at Clementi West Street 1.

On the early morning of May 5, 2021, the police found the victim, Huang Baoying, motionless. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

She had lost 20kg, or about 43 per cent of her body weight, before she died from severe malnutrition and blunt force trauma.

In May 2026, Lim was sentenced to 14 years and 11 months’ jail after pleading guilty to one count of culpable homicide not amounting to murder. Chee's case is still pending.

On Nov. 5, Bocan appeared in court using a Mandarin interpreter and pleaded guilty to murder. He was represented by Tania Chin Li Wen and Nathan Shashidran.

His father was also present, looking solemn throughout the hearing. He appeared to be praying before the sentence was delivered.

A nutrition club

The two Huangs got to know Lim and Chee in 2018 through Chee's company, Colourful Nutrifit, which she called a "club".

Baoying, then aged between 16 and 17, joined as she wanted to lose weight, improve herself, and earn money.

In September 2018, Bocan and Chee, who were married at the time, developed a romantic relationship.

The Huang siblings moved into Lim's home in July 2020 after they had a rift with their father, who felt that the siblings were spending too much on the health products.

Chee joined them after a fight with her husband.

In November 2020, Chee and Bocan introduced physical punishments such as exercise and beatings to correct one another's habits for better sales performance.

Chee was exempt because she was the "coach".

Baoying bore the brunt of the punishments, as Chee felt that she "lacked discipline and motivation" and had poor sales.

Starvation and confinement

The punishments meted out against Baoying escalated over time, with the prosecution describing them as "full-blown torture and abuse".

Bocan deprived his sister of food as a punishment from February 2021, supposedly to teach her to be grateful to people and opportunities.

He controlled her food intake by controlling her finances, and she would be denied food whenever she made a mistake.

When he found out that she had been consuming other food besides the one daily meal of "mixed vegetable rice" that he allowed, he and Chee decided to confine Baoying in the toilet so that she could reflect on her mistakes.

She would sleep and consume her meals in the toilet. For almost the whole of March 2021, Baoying was confined there.

Bocan later chained her to a railing there using chains and a padlock on Chee's instruction, after they found that Baoying was leaving the toilet to look for food.

The beatings

From February to May 2021, Bocan and his accomplices also beat Baoying on many occasions for her mistakes, mostly using a wooden stick with prongs at one end that was used for hanging laundry.

Though much of the beatings were done on Chee's instruction, it appeared Bocan sometimes acted without prompting.

Once in April 2021, when Baoying ran from Chee during a beating, Bocan caught her and slapped her in the face for running away, then pulled her back to Chee who beat her further with the wooden stick.

Another day that same month, Baoying tried to escape from Lim's home, telling Bocan later that she wanted to return to their parents' home.

Bocan and Lim then beat her about 100 times in total with the wooden stick on her thighs and left calf. She suffered substantial bruising afterwards, which Bocan noticed.

She was also slapped around 80 times by Bocan and around 50 times by Lim for falling asleep during a church service.

On other occasions, Bocan beat his sister about 220 times with the wooden stick for "lying", and 240 times for "laziness".

Events leading to her death

On May 4, 2021, a day before she died, Baoying failed to perform squats as instructed and was punished for lying about it.

Chee and Bocan beat her in the living room with a wooden stick, while she remained silent.

Seeing this as defiance, Chee told Baoying that crying would be taken as remorse and she would be given food, but Baoying continued to stay silent.

Later, Lim and Bocan took turns standing on Baoying's thighs to try to make her cry, and Chee poured salt on Baoying's wounds to elicit a reaction. But she still did not cry.

At 11pm, Baoying was brought into the toilet and, with her hands tied above her head, was left under a running tap for 15 minutes.

Her brother then untied her, changed her clothes, and left her on a mattress. She was unable to walk on her own by this point.

Colluded to lie

Sometime past midnight on May 5, Bocan found his sister to be unresponsive.

He suggested sending her to the hospital, but Chee objected as she did not want doctors to call the police. Baoying was thus left alone until about 5am.

The trio then discussed again whether to send her to the hospital, and agreed to lie about the incident.

At 6:02am, Bocan called 995 and was told to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on Baoying.

Baoying was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics, who reported the incident to the police.

Which injuries were intended?

According to an autopsy report, the final cause of death was severe malnutrition with sepsis and extensive blunt force trauma.

In court on Nov. 5, the judge noted following clarification from the prosecution that Bocan had intended to cause severe malnutrition and extensive blunt force trauma.

These led to the sepsis, and cumulatively they led to her death altogether.

Considering the evidence, the judge found that Bocan had caused death by bodily injury through acts of torture and severe malnutrition.

He never wanted his sister to die: Defence

A murder charge can carry the death penalty or life imprisonment, with or without caning.

The prosecution sought a sentence of life imprisonment, and did not submit for Bocan to be caned.

On not submitting for caning, they explained that Chee's culpability was higher than Bocan's, and parity would need to apply.

The defence agreed, adding that caning in addition to a life sentence would be "very harsh".

"He has killed his own sister, and with life imprisonment, this is something he has to carry with him for the rest of his life," Shashidran told the judge. "That itself is a punishment."

He pointed out that the Huang family was broken up when the siblings left their home soon after meeting Chee.

Their father, who had already lost his daughter, is now going to lose his son, he added, calling it a "tragedy for the entire family".

He urged the judge to impose life imprisonment without caning, arguing that Bocan never wanted his sister to die.

"It is his acts... that caused the deaths," he went on. "But the difference is this — in his mind, wrongly, he thought he was helping his sister."

He also pointed out that after Bocan found his sister unresponsive, he had wanted to take her to the hospital, and it was Chee who said no. Bocan had also performed CPR on Baoying.

These facts show that he never intended for his sister to die, Shashidran said.

Sentencing

After a break, the judge delivered the verdict, sentencing Bocan to life imprisonment, backdated to the date of his arrest on May 5, 2021.

He highlighted that Baoying was ill-treated, abused, and tortured for months before her death, and that emergency medical assistance was only sought hours after she was found unresponsive.

She died on the cusp of adulthood at the hands of people she looked up to, who "tortured her in cruel and inhumane ways", he said. Among them was her own brother.

The judge found that Bocan had caused her death with the intention to inflict injury.

Responding to the defence's argument that Bocan had not wanted her to die, the judge said this "clearly misguided and perverse" thinking was not sufficient to excuse what he did.

He did not find caning necessary, given that life imprisonment was imposed.

"I cannot imagine what Baoying had gone through in those months," he said. "She's dead and cannot return, and the accused must face the consequences of his actions."

"Your cruel abuse and torture caused her suffering and took her life. She would have looked up to you... sought your nurturing, and would have cared for you. Yet you treated her lesser than human.

You deserve to be put away for a long time. I hope you will remember always what you have done to your sister."