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The Unsolved Murder of Dini Haryati — Singapore’s Forgotten 90s Cold Case
Hey everyone, I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of old Singapore cold cases, and I came across one that barely gets mentioned anymore — the rape and murder of 19-year-old Dini Haryati in 1998. It’s insane how little info there is about her online considering how brutal it was.
Dini was an Indonesian student doing a hotel management internship at Albert Court Hotel near Bugis. She was staying in Woodlands and usually took the MRT home after work. On the evening of Jan 5th, 1998, she left work around 6pm, took the train north, and was last seen near the Woodlands MRT phone booths. The next morning she never showed up at work.
Two days later, some workers found her body hidden in bushes along Admiralty Road West, about 100m from the road. She’d been raped and strangled, possibly with her own scarf. The police launched a big investigation — interviews, sketches, everything — but nothing ever came out of it. DNA was taken but tech back then wasn’t what it is now, and there’s never been a match.
What’s eerie is that there was no robbery, her stuff was still with her, and no obvious enemies or jealous exes. Just… gone. Murdered on a quiet path in one of the safest countries in the world. The only clue was a guy seen hanging around the phone booths — early 20s, short hair, T-shirt, jeans — literally could’ve been anyone.
The case quietly went cold by 2000, and even when police re-examined it in 2010 with new DNA methods, it still led nowhere. Her family back in Indonesia still remembers her every year, but there’s almost no public info about the investigation now.
What gets me is how similar it is to other unsolved Singapore murders from the 90s like the Amber Beacon Tower case — young women, random attacks, zero answers. For a country known for its super-efficient justice system, these few unsolved cases really stand out.
Anyone here from Singapore who remembers this one? Or old-school crime readers who have any idea why this never got solved? Feels like it just vanished off the radar.
