Murder of Clementina Curci

On 10 October 1990, just three days after her whole family migrated from Italy to Singapore, 38-year-old Italian housewife Clementina Curci Di Girolamo, also known as Clementina Curci, was brutally murdered by an intruder inside her new house at Bo Seng Avenue. After she was strangled and became unconscious, Curci's naked body was immersed in a bathtub full of water, resulting in her death due to both drowning and strangulation. Police also established that several items had been stolen from the house, and the hired cleaners of the house stated they never noticed anything amiss while working outside the house.

A month after the police's first stage of investigations, a 18-year-old cleaner named Maksa bin Tohaiee, a Singaporean, who was part of the cleaning team hired by Curci's family to clean the house and the sole member absent at the time of her murder, was arrested and charged with murder, and Maksa confessed to having sneaked into the house to steal items and strangled Curci before killing her. Although Maksa later attempted to retract his confession and raised an alibi defence during his trial, he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death on 25 November 1992, and a year later, Maksa was executed by hanging at Changi Prison on 26 November 1993.