John Martin Scripps - Appeal and Hanging

Appeal and Hanging

On 15 November 1995, Martin announced he would appeal the sentence. He later dropped the appeal without giving an explanation on 4 January 1996, four days before it was to have been heard. He turned down a subsequent chance to petition the President of Singapore for clemency, saying that he was impatient to be executed.

In the days before his hanging, Martin wrote of an "emptiness" inside him and lamented that no one had loved him besides his family and his ex-wife María, in a series of misspelled notes (he was semi-literate):

One day poor. One day reach. Money filds the pane of hunger but what will fill the emteness inside? I know that love is beyond me. So do I give myself to god. The god that has betrad me. Can I be a person again? Only time will tell me.

You may take my life for what it is worth, but grant thows that I love, pease and happiness.

He complained that in prison, "You are told every day that you are not a member of the uman rase ." The week before he was due to hang, he dreamed that he had avoided the sentence by committing suicide:

I tied the rope around my little neck before I got up on the old creaky chair. I reached down and picked up a handful of earth and put it in my mouth. Then I crawled up to the old creaky chair and pulled the rope tighter and tighter still. I was on tiptoe, just one more pull, then my feet left the chair knocking it over and darkness embraced me as the heavens opened. I woke up in darkness and felt a heavy weight on my chest. I cried out, "Mummy, I am here."

Martin's mother remarked, "Whoever he is now, he's the person the prison service trained him to be. These bastards have no right to take my son's life. I brought him into the world. I am the only person who can take him out of it." However, no one formally protested against the hanging. At dawn on 19 April 1996, Martin was hanged in Changi Prison together with two Singaporean drug traffickers. On that day, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Royal Thai Police closed their files on the murders of Sheila and Darin Damude, declaring the case effectively solved.

When Martin's ex-wife María heard that he had been hanged, she said:

John disappeared on several trips and went to the United States and Southeast Asia. I knew something awful was happening, but I could not believe he had started killing people.

I knew this would happen to John but I didn't know it would hurt so much. The last memory I have of him is a message he sent promising we would meet in the next life and that he would never let me go again.