MS Unsolved is a series that hopes to raise awareness of cold cases in Singapore and generate new leads. If you have any information on the cases, reach out to MS News or the police.
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Singapore’s a relatively safe place for young persons to wander around, but now and then, people do go missing.
Naturally, the small number of missing-person cases here means that it’s all the more astonishing when a healthy, young person vanishes without a trace.
One of the more mystifying cases is that of Tina Lim Xin Ying.
The 14-year-old, who left her Choa Chu Kang home to visit her grandfather in 2002, never made it there.
More than a year later, at his wake, her family claimed to have received a mysterious call, with seven relatives all recognising the caller’s voice as Tina’s.
A Facebook post by Crime Library Singapore in 2020 had briefly reawakened interest in this cold case.
Tina, a Secondary 2 student at Unity Secondary School, was last seen at 22 June 2002 at her home in Block 462 Choa Chu Kang Avenue 4.
According to Lianhe Zaobao, at 4pm that day Tina’s father Lin Wenzhi (transliterated from Mandarin) suggested that she go to Jurong to visit her grandfather, who was sick.
Tina called first to make sure someone was home before leaving, and her father was supposed to bring her home the next day.
When she left, she didn’t bring any extra clothes nor her passport. She also did not bring much money with her, which meant it was unlikely that she had intended to run away.
However, she never made it to her grandfather’s place.
Mr Lin called Tina’s friends and relatives and no one was the wiser of the girl’s whereabouts.
He subsequently made a police report.
Desperate to find his daughter, Mr Lin printed 7,000 flyers and circulated them across Singapore, Zaobao said.
He received many calls but no viable leads.
When he couldn’t find her locally, he tried overseas, heading to Malaysian destinations such as Penang, Ipoh and Sarawak state.
He even travelled all the way to the Thai border, but to no avail.
Tina was Mr Lin’s eldest child with his first wife, whom he divorced. He had three other children with his second wife.
After Tina had been missing for three years, Mr Lin offered a reward of S$30,000 for information about her whereabouts.
However, no news emerged.
A teenage girl going inexplicably missing would be mystifying enough, but Mr Lin said something happened more than a year after Tina’s disappearance that was even more bizarre.
Her grandfather died on 28 Oct 2003, and the family put up an obituary. In it included a message to Tina, asking her to come and see him for the last time.
In the days after that, they received 13 calls from an unknown caller they believed to be Tina.
When Mr Lin picked up one call during the wake, six other relatives were also present, and recognised the caller’s voice as Tina’s.
However, whoever it was on the other side said she couldn’t reveal where she was, only that it was “very dark”.
The person on the phone also sounded very distressed, according to Mr Lin’s interview with The New Paper.
The calls renewed the family’s hope that Tina was still alive and would one day return.
When the police investigated the calls, they were traced to a residence in Pasir Ris.
However, there was no sign of Tina. The police determined that Tina could not have made the calls from there.
Hence, the trail went cold again. Still, the family was not convinced that the calls were not from Tina.
As Mr Lin spent most of his time searching for Tina overseas, his job and the family’s income was affected.
This created tension between him and his second wife, and they eventually split.
With no leads after decades have passed, Tina was eventually declared dead in absentia in 2010. She remains missing to this day.
If you have any genuine information about Tina, please contact the police or Crime Library Singapore at 6293 5250.
Originally published on 21 December 2020, updated on 15 July 2024.
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Featured image adapted from Facebook and Google Maps.
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