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Her Feet Were Never Found

Singapore - Two men had intimate contact with the gruesome remains of Miss Liu Hong Mei.

For both, the picture of her face, the look in her open eyes and her dismembered body will remain etched in their minds.

Leong Siew Chor, 51, is the man who strangled, then chopped her into seven parts. His was the gruesome, despicable deed.

The other, Mr Aloysius Hoeden, 42, put her back together. His task was the gruesome good deed.

Leong, her supervisor and lover, will not have long to grapple with his conscience. He was sentenced to hang for the murder yesterday.

Mr Hoeden, an embalmer, will live with a clear conscience - and a troubling memory.

Leong spent about three hours hacking away at her body.

Mr Hoeden, an in-house embalmer at Direct Singapore Funeral Services, took six hours to make her as complete as he could last June.

In his 15 1/2 years on the job, he has embalmed more than 6,000 bodies. He has seen victims of violent murders.

Yet nothing prepared him for what would be the most shocking and challenging cadaver he has had to work on.

Hong Mei, a China national, was strangled and dismembered into seven parts by Leong on 15 Jun last year.

Even for a man so accustomed to seeing, touching and working on dead bodies, what Leong did was shocking.

His first thought: How could anyone do this to another human being?

'I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw her dismembered body. It was the worst case I have ever seen,' he told The New Paper.

'She was so young to suffer such a terrible fate, so I resolved to do my best embalming and stitching her up nicely.'

No one would get to see her body after his work. Yet, he was determined to do the best that he could.

Why?

He explained: 'Not having people view my handiwork doesn't mean that I'll be less careful, because I'm the one who can see my own handiwork, and it has to reflect that I did my best.

'I knew that it would be a closed coffin, and I could understand why because the body is really not viewable. I did my best to retard the decomposition, but the body was already in a bad condition.

'People want to remember her as a pretty, young girl, not a body which was brutally chopped up and half-decomposed.'

Hong Mei's upper and lower torsos were found washed up on the banks of Kallang River. Her severed head and shins, minus her feet, were found at a Tuas incinerator amid tons of garbage.

Her feet were never found.

In a six-day trial, the court saw gory pictures of her chopped-up body parts and heard how Leong had systematically chopped each part up, starting from the feet up to the head.

He then disposed of them in Kallang and Singapore Rivers.

When Mr Hoeden started work on Hong Mei's body, it was already partially decomposed.

He thought he had seen his worst case a few years ago, when a murder victim was slashed more than 100 times and he had to stitch her up.

But that didn't come close to Hong Mei's dismembered body.

'At least the other victim's body was whole. I just had to spend time stitching the wounds and touching them up with make-up,' he said.

In Hong Mei's case, he had to unstitch body parts which were sewn together by the pathologists after the post-mortem.

He started from the shins, moved upwards to the lower and upper torsos, and finally her head.

Then, he had to drain the fluid and blood left in each body part and fill them up with embalming fluid to prevent the body from decomposing further.

Mr Hoeden, who has a certificate in reconstructive art from France, said: 'The head was the most difficult to embalm as we had to remove her face, soak it in embalming fluid and then stitch it back on the facial frame.

'Her hair fell out during decomposition, so I took whatever was left, washed it and arranged it on her skull.

'I found a white scarf and held the hair together with it.

'I tried to make her look as good as possible - it's my job.'

It took about six hours before he was done embalming and dressing her up in her favourite white dress.

This was more than three times as long as it takes to embalm an ordinary body.

As is the case with all the bodies he embalms, Mr Hoeden said a silent prayer for Hong Mei and her family before he started work.

He said: 'My prayer is for the deceased to find peace and for things to go smoothly and easily during the embalming.

'For instance, the embalming would take a longer time if the blood coagulates when we're draining out the fluid. It'll require us to massage the body before the flow improves.'

A tiny embalming room in Geylang Bahru is where he painstakingly stitched Hong Mei up - on a cold, metallic table.

As her body had to be held together when it was stitched back, he needed the help of an assistant. This was rare as he usually works alone.

'We had to hold the parts close together so the stitches would be tight and neat,' he explained.

He used more than 500 stitches.

For normal bodies, he uses about 10 stitches to cover up a three-inch hole used to pump in the embalming fluid.

As Hong Mei's feet were never found, undertaker Roland Tay made customised wax feet for her.

Mr Tay, who oversaw Hong Mei's funeral for free, said: 'I wanted to send her off with a whole body because she died so tragically. It was the least I could do.'

The feet came with special rubber trimmings at the ankles, so Mr Hoeden could sew them onto her shins easily.

As a mark of respect, Mr Hoeden took time off to attend Hong Mei's funeral.

'This was a very special case, and I wanted to pay my last respects.'

To this day, he still remembers how her body parts looked before he started work.

His wife, Christina, and three children are 'cool' about his job, as long as he doesn't get nightmares.

He said: 'It may be just another job to many people, but to me, it's a service I give to the family of the deceased so they can send their loved ones off properly.'