On this date in 2001, former pop singer and shaman Mona Fandey was hanged with two accomplices at Kajang Prison outside Kuala Lumpur, closing the noose on one of the world’s weirdest and most sensational recent crimes.
Aging B-list pop crooner Maznah Ismail — “Mona Fandey” was her stage name — had transitioned to a gig as a high-rent spiritualist and healer, known locally as a bomoh.
In that capacity, she and hubby Mohd Affandi Abdul Rahman landed a politician with more money than sense. After collecting a bunch of cash from him, they got him to lie down with his eyes closed as part of a ritual that was supposed to make money fall from the skies. Instead, the couple’s assistant Juraimi Hussin chopped off his head, and Mona went on a shopping spree.
The effect of the grisly celebrity murder was heightened by Mona’s cheery demeanor throughout the trial and thereafter, as if a murderess’ notoriety was the pinnacle she never achieved as an entertainer.
She and her husband maintained an unsettling placidity about their demise to the very end. Some sources say she uttered the mysterious remark, “I will never die” just before her hanging. (Others have everyone silent.)
The end of the three killers was hardly the end of such a headline-grabbing case in the public memory. Her cell is becoming a protected “heritage site”, and her story has been treated on screens both small and silver.
On this day..
- 1984: The Hondh-Chillar Massacre - 2020
- 1675: Boyarina Morozova, Old Believer - 2019
- 1907: Afanasi Matushenko - 2018
- 1715: Seven at Tyburn - 2017
- 1803: Ludovicus Baekelandt, Vrijbos bandit - 2016
- 1483: Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham - 2015
- 82 BCE: The defeated populares of the Battle of the Colline Gate - 2014
- 1984: Velma Barfield, the first woman in the modern era - 2013
- 1801: James Legg, crucified ecorche - 2012
- 1972: Evelyn Anderson and Beatrice Kosin, missionaries - 2011
- 1920: James Daly, Connaught Rangers mutineer - 2010
- 1924: Ali Reshti and Sayyid Husain, to placate America - 2009
- 1963: Ngo Dinh Diem - 2007
Mona Fandey is no human being. She is an animal in the shape of a human being. She deserved to hang and she deserved her death
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Wow, that’s really screwed up. I know this sounds really “little-kid-ish,” but she scares me in a way. Ugh… That’s just messed up. Wow.
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What a remarkable and twisted story! I had no idea.
We are a truly screwed-up species.
gruesome…