Girl in the Box: Felicia Teo

**Jessica** (0:00)
This is Jessica and you're listening to The Asian Madness Podcast.
Welcome back to The Asian Madness Podcast, everyone. Again, hope you're taking great care of yourself, enjoying your days and staying healthy. Life tends to get busy, so it's always good to check in on yourself from time to time. Do whatever makes you happy, as long as it's legal and not hurting anybody else, of course. So today's case is something I came across somewhere online. The Internet can be such a terrible place, but there is also no place like the Internet. Sometimes I like to give a general blurb on what kind of case we will be looking into today. The circumstances, the backdrop. If I mention family, you know I'm probably going to talk about someone killing their family member. If I mention love, you probably know it's going to be some kind of crime of passion. Then there are friends, the family we find throughout life, the kind of family we get to choose ourselves. So that is today's background. You meet lots of people throughout your lifetime. Some click, some don't. Those that you do click with, they become a friend. And if it gets deeper, they become a close friend. The one thing in common about family, lovers, and friends is that you don't expect to harm them, or vice versa, physically or emotionally. You also expect to help each other when something happens. So if they're not there for you, you end up with questions. Why? So what happened to this 19-year-old from Singapore? Did her so-called friends actually do something terrible to her, or did they simply fail her when she needed help? 19 is very young. Old enough to feel independent, young enough to believe that there's still time for everything. You have dreams, and you have so much potential. While this case is technically solved, there are always going to be some questions lingering, as it is with most cases. People can confess, police can dig up evidence, but the only person who might know more is usually the victim, and the dead cannot speak. Her name is Felicia Teo, or Teo Weiling in Chinese. Let's begin. Felicia Teo Weiling was born on February 23rd, 1988 in Singapore. Her family is of Chinese descent, and she was the eldest of two children in a home that was close, stable, and loving. The siblings lived with their parents in Bras Basah, in the center of a life that, from the outside, looked entirely ordinary. Felicia, who preferred to go by Teo, was the kind of person who made an impression without trying. She had a relaxed confidence, a social ease, and a sense of humor that made her likable in just about any situation. Her family described her as thoughtful. Her friends called her outgoing. Her phone was rarely out of her hand, probably because she was always texting with friends. Sure, it was the early 2000s, but smartphones were already around, and texting was nothing new. She had attended Monks Hill Secondary School, and from there, she moved on to LaSalle College of the Arts. At LaSalle, Du studied fine arts. Her work spoke quietly, but with purpose. It was expressive, occasionally experimental and very personal. She was nearing the end of her diploma program, but of course, she never managed to get there. The future wasn't just something she was seeing through a vision board. It was something that she could almost taste. But you know what people say. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So like most 19-year-olds, her world wasn't all textbooks and portfolios. She had a very full social life, an endless stream of messages buzzing through her phone, and a dynamic group of friends from school, work, and beyond. She had different circles for different parts of herself. Friends from LaSalle, friends from her old schools, colleagues from her job, and a few people who had simply drifted into her life and stayed. To support herself, Teo worked part time at a bar in Clark Quay. It's a buzzing stretch of waterfront nightlife, where locals and tourists mingled. It's also where she could earn a paycheck and still feel like part of the scene. She was a bartender and was quite good at it. Her coworkers remembered her as sharp, reliable, someone you can count on to close up properly at the end of a long night. When she wasn't working or studying, she moved through the city's gathering spaces. She liked Marine Parade with its theater, library, rooftop sports hall, and air-conditioned basketball courts. She liked Clark Quay for its noise and energy. These were places where she felt alive, where everything was happening. In some ways, do was what you get when you imagine a young art school student. She had goals, but was also very fun, creative, and up for a good time. Trying new things and meeting new people was just another day for her. Speaking of friends, though, allow me to introduce to you two young men. Ragil Putra Setia Sukumarjana, an Indonesian-Singaporean, and Ahmad Danyal Mohamed Rafai, a Malay-Singaporean. She met Ragil through LaSalle, and he later introduced her to Ahmad, who was an alumni of LaSalle and a few years older. The three of them became a casual trio, often hanging out at the flat Ragil and Ahmad shared. They drank, they played music, they talked. It was easy. Teo had been to their apartment many times before. She felt safe there. While the activities mentioned may cause some Asian parents to click their tongues and shake their heads, Teo wasn't wasting her life away partying and drinking. There were plans for an internship at a well-known advertising firm, something she was genuinely excited about. And to balance that out, she had already bought tickets for a concert for later that year in August. A show she was attending with friends. Her year was already mapped out. School, work, music, friends. Maybe a job in the industry if everything lined up. And then came June 29, 2007