Of all the crimes that make breaking news, it is brutal murders that send chills down one’s spine and are often too gruesome to comprehend.

Malaysia has its fair share of high-profile murders with details as visceral as they are disturbing.

1. Mona Fandey, the killer bomoh (1993)

Prior to her claim to infamy, Maznah binti Ismail was a pop singer with the stage name Mona Fandey. Some recordings of her performances can still be found on YouTube.

After giving up singing, she gained a reputation as a witch-doctor, and allegedly had many rich and powerful clients.

One of them was Batu Talam state assemblyman Mazlan Idris, who paid her RM2.5 million in cash and land titles to make his political career soar.

Instructing him to lie down and close his eyes, Mona’s husband beheaded him; the couple then cut up and partly skinned the corpse before burying all 18 parts under a storeroom.

Police however soon caught on when Mona began carelessly flaunting her newly gained wealth. It wasn’t long before the cops discovered Mazlan’s butchered body in her house.

Sentenced to death, Mona’s last words prior to her hanging on Nov 2, 2001 were, “I will never die.”

Popular rumour states that while in prison, guards saw her floating, walking on walls on all fours and outright disappearing from her cell.

2. The Jalan Turi murders (1992)

On April 23, just before midnight, while her husband Rakesh Talwar was flying off to London on business, Suneeta Talwar returned home from an outing with friends.

She barely escaped with her life, running to a neighbour’s place after being attacked by her security guard, Ariffin Agas.

While she was fortunate, a far worse fate had befallen her two children, Kabir, 11, and Arjun, 7, and their maid, Natalia Fernandes, 45.

When the police apprehended Agas, he led them to the septic tank behind the bungalow where the three corpses were found, butchered.

Agas, who is believed to have a psychiatric condition, had bludgeoned his victims with stones and a chopping board, then returned to his guard post acting “normal”.

An investigating doctor deduced that from the five teeth of Kabir’s found at the scene of the crime, that extreme force had been used on the boy.

Agas was sentenced to death in 1994, and executed in 2002.

3. The body in the trunk (1975)

A gruesome discovery was made decades ago in the garden of a bungalow along Lorong Limau Manis 2 in Bangsar Park, Kuala Lumpur.

A trunk filled with the body parts of Kenyan woman Maria Theresa, 24, was dug up and the bungalow’s owner and Theresa’s husband, Kingsley John Lewis, 32, taken into custody.

Theresa, supposedly an unfaithful wife who was flirtatious and abusive, had been hacked to death, dismembered, then stuffed into the trunk.

According to Lewis, her death was necessary to protect his 14-month-old son from her.

The jury found him not guilty of murder but of culpable homicide, and he was imprisoned but not executed since it was deemed a crime of passion.

Since then, the bungalow has exchanged hands multiple times, although it’s alleged no one has stayed long.

4. Heartthrob, serial rapist and murderer (1986-1987)

From 1986 to 1987, Malaysia was terrorised by a series of rapes that saw 18 women sexually assaulted and five of them murdered.

The serial rapist was Lee Chow Meng, whose reign of terror began after he was dumped because of his philandering ways.

With misogynistic sentiments, he trawled the newspapers in search of victims; teachers and florists who advertised their services were easy victims.

He would telephone them to meet him, often at a fast food outlet where he would spike their drinks so they couldn’t fight back when he robbed and raped them.

To keep the authorities off his trail, he used aliases and on five occasions, murdered his victims to silence them.

He was the target of a decade-long police manhunt but was caught in 1997, when he was shot in the thigh while trying to escape. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

5. Body parts in a drain (1993)

On July 8, 1993, a grass-cutter came across the grisly remains of a woman in a drain in Jalan Langgak Tunku. Some 11 pieces, all wrapped in plastic bags, had been found.

Investigators later saw that the body had been cut up methodically.

The police were eventually led to Cindy Chua, who identified the victim as her sister, Lily Chua Yue See, 30, a singer and pub dancer.

Lily, a mother of two young children, had been in a relationship with Gan Wei Seng, a pastor-turned-music teacher.

When Gan was arrested, he led the police to the knife he used to dismember Lily, admitting that he had stabbed her in the chest during a lover’s tiff. He was sentenced to 12 years of imprisonment for culpable homicide.