99 Months By Ram Tiwary

99 Months by Ram Tiwary is based on the true case of the Sydney double murders with the author being initially found guilty of the murders for which he spent 99 months in jail.

99 Months by Ram Tiwary

On September 15, 2003, Singaporean Tay Chow Lyang, 26, was bludgeoned and stabbed to death in his Sydney flat and a couple of hours later, his flatmate Singaporean Tony Tan Poh Chuan, 27, met with a similar fate after he returned from a lecture.

256 days after the double murders on May 28, 2004, Ram Puneet Tiwary, a scholarship student also from Singapore who shared the flat with the murdered victims, was arrested on suspicion of being the murderer. Prosecuting officers said his motive was that he owed Tay A$5,045 in rent and killed Tan to cover up the dispute. Tay, Tony and Tiwary were all students of the University of New South Wales.

Tiwary, who was in the flat at the time of both murders, said he was sleeping in his room and was woken at about 2pm when he heard Tan shouting for help. Fearing for his safety, he remained in his room and only ventured out of his room when he heard that it was all quiet. On seeing his dead friends, he called the police. On June 20, 2006, a 12-member jury pronounced Tiwary guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment without parole in 2006. Tiwary appealed.

In 2008, a three-judge court ruled the earlier trial had been improperly conducted and granted a retrial as they found that the judge at the original trial gave the jury improper instructions on some of the evidence, and that there had been evidence which did not support a conviction.

At the retrial in 2009, Tiwary’s defence revealed chat messages from Tay as evidence that Tiwary had been paying his share of rent and expenses. But after 17 hours of deliberation, the jury delivered another guilty verdict and Tiwary was sentenced to jail for 48 years.

At the second appeal in 2012, it was highlighted that Tay, a conscientious student, missed a lecture the day of his death (which had never happened before) and Tan got into a white car with three still unidentified people not long before he and his flatmate were found dead.

The three-judge panel in the Court of Criminal Appeal, comprising of Chief Justice Tom Bathurst, Justice Elizabeth Fullerton and Justice James Allsop, quashed Tiwary’s convictions, citing that the two victims were behaving unusually on the day of their murders, that there was evidence that Tan had bought a baseball bat for protection just before he died, the existence of three unknown people picking up Tan just minutes before his death and that there was no forensic evidence linking Tiwari to the murders at all. There was reasonable doubt that Tiwary had killed the two men.

Australian prosecutors announced that they would not appeal against the acquittal.Tiwary returned to Singapore on Sept 19, 2012. Although a free man, the memories as well as the experience of the 99 months of incarceration still continue to haunt him today.

The double murders remained unsolved to this day. The victims’ families are of course unhappy with Tiwary’s acquittal as shown in the Youtube video below.

Having read the book 99 Months written by Tiwary, I think Tiwary is unlikely the murderer and the case against him seemed to be an effort to bring a quick close to the murders with the prosecution ignoring a lot of evidence that are detrimental to their case.