- Joined
- Jul 16, 2008
- Messages
- 21,857
- Points
- 113
Tina, who was staying at Choa Chu Kang Avenue 4, was last seen on June 22, 2002.
According to Zaobao, Tina was bored at home during the school break so her father, Lim Boon Kee, advised her to visit her sick grandfather in Jurong.
The girl called her aunt, who was staying with her grandfather, before leaving the house.
Before she left, Lim told Tina that he would pick her up the next day.
Tina never reached her grandfather's house.
...
1 year later
...
Slightly over a year after Tina went missing, her sick grandfather passed away.
Lim put up an obituary in the newspapers and appealed through Shin Min Daily News for Tina to come home and pay her last respects to her grandfather who doted on her immensely when he was alive. His dying wish was to see his granddaughter one last time.
Nov. 1, 2003: The last day of Tina's grandfather's wake.
At 5.30pm, the phone rang. Lim took the call. There was silence. Lim instinctively knew that the caller was his daughter.
"I asked if she was Ah Ying and she said yes. She said she wanted to see her Ah Gong," he told The New Paper.
More ominous information came out during that call:
"I asked who she was with and she said she couldn't say. She also said she couldn't come back because someone wouldn't let her... She said she was in Singapore, but don't know exactly where, except that the place was very dark."
That wasn't the only call made to Lim's family that night. They received 10 calls in total between 5.30pm and midnight. The family managed to get their hands on a phone recorder and taped two conversations.
A TNP reporter who heard one of the recordings later wrote that the caller spoke in a hoarse whisper, accompanied by muffled sobbing, "as if she was afraid someone would overhear her".
However, here is the curious thing: According to Zaobao, police investigations traced the phone calls to a home in Pasir Ris. After interviewing the family residing in that location, the police determined that Tina did not make the call from that household.
Was it just a cruel prank?
Lim and his family swore that the girl they heard on the phone was Tina, even though they did not ask questions that could verify her identity.
While the calls led to a dead end, they gave the family renewed hope that Tina was alive.
Three years after Tina's disappearance, her father offered a S$30,000 reward for information on her whereabouts, but no news of her came in.
Tina was presumed dead in 2010, seven years after her disappearance.
https://mothership.sg/2020/12/tina-lim-xin-yin-missing/