Orchard Towers is an 18-storey office building in Singapore located on the corner of Claymore Road and Orchard Road. Construction was completed in 1975. The first five floors are a combination of bars and retail outlets with the remainder leased as offices. During the day the building functions as a retail and office style building, but the building is best known as a landmark entertainment complex famously described as the "Four Floors of Whores" or simply the "Four Floors". In addition, one of the towers houses 58 freehold condominium residential units. Orchard Tower houses the Embassy of Romania on the 8th floor, Honorary Consulate of Mauritius on the 9th floor and the Embassy of Cambodia on the 10th floor.
History
A cinema was located on level 4 in the early 1980s. It was subsequently converted into a nightclub and performance space called Top Ten, later renamed Top 5. By the mid-2000s the building's nighttime prostitution had come to dominate its daytime retailing of electronic goods and jewellery. The sex workers and their clients were mostly foreign. By the mid-2010s the building was ageing and run-down in comparison to the majority of up-market shopping malls on Orchard Road, with its retail units tenanted by sex shops, beauty parlours and girlie bars.
On 2 January 2002, Michael McCrea, a British expatriate in his 40s, murdered his driver friend Kho Nai Guan and Kho's fiancée Lan Ya Ming in his apartment in Pinewood Garden. Audrey Ong had helped McCrea in the murder. After the murders, the bodies of the two deceased were left inside a silver Daewoo Chairman 400 which was abandoned on the 6th storey of the Orchard Towers car park. Peter Chong discovered the car on 7 January 2002 and informed the car park's security guards, who informed the Singapore police. The case was known as the Orchard Towers double murder. On 7 February 2003, Audrey Ong was sentenced to 12 years in jail for helping McCrea to dispose the bodies. On 27 September 2005, Michael McCrea was extradited to Singapore on Singapore Airlines Flight SQ228. On 29 June 2006, Michael McCrea was sentenced to a total of 24 years in jail for two amended charges of culpable homicide not amounting to murder and one charge of causing evidence to disappear.
