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CHAPTER 3
THE HEADLESS CORPSE

    Seminyak, Kuta community was shocked yesterday. A headless male body was found slumped in a ditch on the side of the road . . .
    The headless body is now being kept in a freezer at Sanglah Hospital’s morgue .
    – Nusa News , 3 March 1998

    It was early. The sun was glistening across the watery paddy fields and the morning air was already warm. It was calm and quiet – the stillness belying the brutality of the night before. But the dark night’s secret was quickly revealed in the dawn light. Three small children were playfully running across the fields, laughing and leaping over watery channels, when they stumbled across a pair of legs sticking out of a ditch. Full of childish curiosity, they went in for a closer look and got the shock of their young lives.
    The early morning stillness quickly broke into chaos. Police, journalists and spectators fast descended on the scene, surrounding the headless corpse, still face down in the ditch. Photographers and cameramen got in close, snapping shots of the stocky, middle-aged body, the torn striped green shorts, the sleeveless batik shirt. They zoomed in on the mutilated, jagged neck, the bloated feet in green thongs, broken bits of teeth. It was gruesome, but graphic shots sold newspapers in Bali. Spectators gawped as police busily searched for clues; a murder weapon, a blade, an axe, anything that would give them a lead. Fishing in the corpse’s pockets, they discovered a driver’s licence, its photo ID instantly providing the headless man with a face.
    Meanwhile, sitting at home with his wife and three young daughters, listening to the news, was the killer, Saidin. He felt no remorse and no fear. He was a hired assassin; it had been a job. And although his quickly hatched murder plot hadn’t gone perfectly, he’d executed it well. He already knew what he’d tell the judge if he got caught, though he doubted he ever would.
    But leaving the man’s ID had been a mistake. Police were piecing the case together quickly. The dead man had lived in Java, south of Jakarta, and after police had broken the tragic news to his son, he’d told them his father had flown to Bali the day before the murder to collect an overdue debt. He gave the police a name and address. The trail was now red hot.
    Police raided a residence in the Bali coastal area of Klungkung and arrested the named man on the spot. They threw him into their van and took him to the local station. He refused to talk. They hurled him against walls, punched him, kicked him and jabbed him with an electric cattle prod until he was begging for mercy. But they didn’t stop. They turned up the prod to its maximum 220 volts and shocked him in the chest, the legs, the groin. His body was shaking violently. But he still refused to cooperate. They jabbed him again, and this time the shock slammed him back into the cement wall. He cried out in pain. Blood dripped from a gash in his head as he collapsed to the floor, his legs too weak and too shaky for him to stand any longer. Finally, the man broke. He named the assassin.
    The killer, Saidin, was immediately arrested. The family man and former solider went without a struggle. He was not contrite. He’d killed a man for money, but the man had had it coming. He did not deny his crime. He would tell the judge why he did it. On the day of the murder, Saidin had been called to a meeting at his friend’s house and was told that a Javanese man was threatening to kill his friend’s family because of an unpaid debt. ‘I want you to finish him off,’ Saidin’s friend told him. ‘When?’ ‘Tonight if you can do it.’ He offered a fee of three million rupiah ($670). Saidin felt it would be honourable to protect his friend’s family. He took the job.
    In the dark of night, Saidin and his younger brother Tony drove their victim to Denpasar, luring him with the promise of cash. Saidin told him that a shopkeeper in Denpasar owed his