SINGAPORE — Desperate to prove his worth to his first true love, Leong Wei Guo put nails in her husband’s car tyres and tampered with its anti-lock braking system.

The attempts to kill Amanda Yeo Pei Min’s husband ultimately failed, however, landing both her and Leong in jail.

On Wednesday (March 11), Yeo and Leong were respectively sentenced to five and four months behind bars. They pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to cause grievous hurt by a rash act to her then-husband, who is now aged 28. 

Yeo, 26, has since divorced her husband and broken up with Leong, 25. 

Leong’s lawyer Thomas Tham told the court that when the two lovers became friends on Facebook in 2014, Yeo told Leong about her marital problems and they began having an affair.

“The actions of the accused were out of deep love for Amanda, his first true love. He was then young and immature,” the lawyer added.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Houston Johannus sought the sentences imposed, calling it an “unusual and reprehensible case”. Yeo’s motive was borne out of “blind rage and malice”, he added, while Leong committed his offences out of a “foolish sense of bravado”.

The prosecutor described Yeo as the mastermind of the plot, for she had instructed Leong on how to sabotage the car and knew what her husband’s travel plans were.

The duo’s initial charges of abetment of murder and attempted murder were later downgraded as part of their plea deal. 

They could each have been jailed up to a year, fined up to S$2,500 or both.

THE PLOT

The court previously heard that after Yeo’s husband found out about the affair, Yeo moved out of his parents’ flat — where they had been living — and stayed with her mother in Toa Payoh.

The couple continued to quarrel frequently and Yeo’s husband said that he wanted to leave her.  Around this time, Yeo became pregnant with Leong’s child.

At this point, she decided to kill her husband with Leong’s help. In early January 2018, she told Leong that her husband's death would solve all of her problems.

Knowing that her husband was frequently on the road as a Grab private-hire car driver, and that he drove fast, she cooked up a plan with Leong to sabotage her husband’s Honda Odyssey.

On Jan 6, 2018, Yeo handed Leong some nails and told him to puncture the car tyres with them. 

The next day, Leong went to the multi-storey car park where the car was parked and used a pair of pliers to insert one nail each into the front and rear left tyres of the car. He covered his face with a jacket and sent her a photograph of the damaged tyres.

When this attempt failed, Yeo told Leong to tamper with the car again by loosening the wheel bolts and cutting the braking wires a few days later. 

She had learned that her husband would be driving to Genting Highlands in Malaysia with his parents and their two children.

In the early hours of Jan 11, armed with a wire cutter and spanner, Leong went over to the same car park. He cut the anti-brake locking system wire with a cutter after unsuccessfully trying to unscrew the wheel bolts with the spanner.

Court documents stated that if the car had been driven with the wire cut, the front wheel could have locked during emergency or hard braking, causing the driver to lose control of the car. 

Another driver who was parking his car noticed Leong walking around suspiciously with a jacket draped over his head. The driver then called the police at about 1am.

Police officers arrived at the scene and spoke to Leong, who could not coherently explain what he was doing there at that hour. After they found the spanner and wire cutter in his sling bag, he eventually admitted that he wanted to damage a car there.

They arrested him upon discovering the damaged car wire and Yeo was arrested a few hours later.