MS Unsolved: The missing person case of Susanna Albert
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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The missing person case of Susanna Albert in 1990 is one that still causes much grief to this day. More than three decades after she was last seen, her family is still looking for information about her fate.
Source: Crime Library Singapore
On 3 January 1990, Susanna Albert, then 29, took urgent leave from her place of work and borrowed money from her younger brother Vitas for bus fare to attend a job interview.
Little did Vitas know, it would be the last time he’d see his sister, for Susanna was never heard from again after leaving her home in Bukit Batok.
Calls for ransom from mysterious strangers
When Susanna failed to return well into the night and none of her friends knew where she was, her worried family contacted the police. Soon, Susanna’s missing posters were scattered all over Singapore.
Source: Crime Library Singapore
The search for her yielded no result. However, according to a reenactment by MediaCorp, which claims to “maintain the accuracy of all the events”, Mr Nathan Albert, Susanna’s father, did receive a call from an anonymous caller.
They claimed to have Susanna and demanded Mr Albert bring money to Changi Point to meet them.
Mr Albert refused to come to any kind of deal before his daughter was safely brought home. “If my daughter is with you, why not bring her back to our house? We’ll talk as gentlemen,” the reenactment quoted Mr Albert.
Source: The Strait Times via NewspaperSG
In response, the caller abruptly hung up. The next day, Mr Albert and his son went to Changi Point anyway and asked around, but nobody had seen anyone matching Susanna’s description.
Still, Mr Albert said he had no regrets about not agreeing to the stranger’s demands. “I know he was bluffing,” he said in the show.
Source: meWatch
Some time later, another anonymous call came and demanded S$10,000 for Susanna’s return. When Mr Albert pleaded to be allowed to speak with her, the caller said they’d call back and hung up. The promised call never came.
Important lead found in Susanna’s diary
Source: Singapore Today via NewspaperSG
While the ransom calls led to a dead end, another important revelation came to Susanna’s family 1.5 months after her disappearance. While checking Susanna’s diary, they found that she’d been meeting with a man named Chorhan Muthu.
Susanna believed this man could help cure her hands and legs, which were handicapped by the polio disease she’d contracted as a kid.
As Mediacorp’s reenactment shows, Mr Albert went to the video store where Susanna worked to ask for information, and the store’s staff confirmed Susanna and Muthu’s connection. However, they did not know where the man was.
Source: SingaporeToday via NewspaperSG
Firmly believing that finding Muthu was the key to finding his daughter, Mr Albert went through “great lengths of research and resources” to search for the man, as he later told Crime Library Singapore.
Eventually, he succeeded in helping the police track down Muthu and take the man into custody. Mr Albert mentioned this development in a 2022 letter sent to the Home Ministry hoping to reopen Susanna’s case.
When interrogated, Muthu insisted that he had no idea where Susanna was, and the police later had to let him go due to a lack of evidence connecting him to her disappearance.
Unexpected twist prompts theories
Source: SingaporeToday via NewspaperSG
Muthu’s freedom was short-lived, for in April 1991, he was arrested again for committing a series of robberies.
Reports said Muthu, dubbed as the “Bukit Panjang Strangler”, strangled four women until they fell unconscious, then robbed them of their belongings.
Source: The Strait Times via NewspaperSG
The new development led to theories that Susanna was one of Muthu’s victims. He might have killed her — whether intentionally or by accident — and disposed of her body.
However, there was never any information to support these claims. Muthu was sentenced to nine years in prison and caning for robbery with intent to hurt and housebreaking and vandalism.
Family still hangs on to hope
Susanna’s family never lost hope. Over the past three decades, they made numerous public appeals for information on her whereabouts.
In a meeting with Crime Library Singapore in March 2022, Mr Nathan Albert, then 85, said he was positive that his daughter was still alive.
In another video two months later, Susanna’s brother Vitas sent a message to Muthu himself. Vitas said the family forgave Muthu for anything he might have done, and hoped Muthu could tell them where Susanna was, or where he had last seen her.
The same year, the Albert family sent a letter to the Home Ministry hoping to have their case reopened.
If you or anyone you know may have valuable information, reach out to MS News or the police to help Susanna’s family find closure.
Also read: The Unsolved Murder Of Tan Lay Lan: Ex-Masseuse Found Dead In 2008 Feared For Safety
The Unsolved Murder Of Tan Lay Lan: Ex-Masseuse Found Dead In 2008 Feared For Safety
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Featured image adapted from Crime Library Singapore and The Strait Times via NewspaperSG.
