I believe the closest I ever came to pulling the trigger on an innocent person happened, thankfully, only once in my life. Four men were on death row for six years for a murder they had not committed. One died while he was detained at Bang Kwang. Another contracted a deadly disease there and died five months after he was released. The third died of cancer a few years after getting out. One sole survivor lives to tell of the shocking travesty of justice that occurred in recent Thai history.
What appeared to be a straightforward homicide turned into one of the most shocking cases of police corruption in Thailand. The vicious murder of the teenage girl paled in comparison to the way the police conducted their investigation and their disregard for four innocent men.
On July 25, 1986, a couple called Sa-ngat and Saiyut Srimuang woke up early and went about their daily work of collecting crabs in a mangrove forest to sell near their home in Samut Prakan province, south of Bangkok. In the forest, they came upon the body of a girl. The Srimuangs called the police immediately who rushed to the scene. The body was identified as that of Sherry Ann Duncan, a Thai-American schoolgirl. She was 16 and had been murdered. The Samut Prakarn police found no wounds on her body and at first they assumed she had died of suffocation, possibly by strangling.
Sherry’s parents, Joe and Kloyjai, were questioned first by the police as was Winai Chaipanit, a wealthy businessman in his early forties who was Sherry’s lover with the consent of her mother. This kind of relationship is called ‘old cow eats young grass’ by Thais.
Sherry didn’t come from a happy home. Reportedly Joe acted inappropriately towards his daughter, especially when he was drunk. After Winai met Sherry at a restaurant run by Joe and Kloyjai in 1985, Kloyjai decided it was better to allow her daughter to be with Winai as he would support her in every way. So they lived together in a condominium.
Winai reported Sherry’s absence to the police on July 26, one day after her body had been found in the mangrove forest. The police also interviewed her classmates who said that after school on the afternoon of July 22, they saw Sherry getting into a taxi that had been waiting for her. They assumed she went home in it as usual. However, none of her classmates remembered the licence plate or saw the driver’s face clearly enough to give a description.
The police found themselves in an investigatory cul-de-sac. At the same time, however, the media was covering the story extensively and the angry public demanded that the killers of this young lukkrueng (biracial) girl be brought to justice. This resulted in a huge amount of pressure being put on the authorities to solve the case quickly, even though there were no eyewitnesses and the police force did not have the facilities to gather forensic evidence.
After just 27 days, on August 21, 1986, the police arrested five men who were believed to have been involved in the murder, including Winai. Police Lieutenant General Lertlum Thammanisa, the deputy superintendent of Samut Prakan Provincial Police, held a press conference to announce the arrests. The police said Winai had been enraged after he discovered that his teenage lover was seeing another man behind his back, so he paid four of his employees and business associates to kill her. They concluded that Sherry was drugged in the taxi and left to drown at the mangrove forest, which explained why there were no wounds on her body. The five men were arrested at a company that belonged to Winai.
Winai was to be tried as defendant number one. The other four men—Rungchalerm Kanokchawanchai, Pitak Kakhai, Krasae Ployglum and Thawat Kijprayoon—were to stand trial as defendants number two to five.
What led the police to arrest these men was testimony from a key witness named Pramern Potplad, the driver of a three-wheeled tuk tuk. He went to see Sherry’s mother after he learned about the murder from the papers and later gave his statement to the police on August 20. Pramern said that while driving around the myriad roads of Bangkok looking for business, he came across two men carrying an unconscious girl out of a building, with three men walking behind, in Soi Suan Ploo in Yannawa district of the city. Thinking the girl needed immediate medical attention, Pramern stopped his tuk tuk and asked if they wanted a lift to the hospital but the men said no. During the court hearing, Pramern told the judge he vividly remembered the face of the unconscious girl, whom he later knew as Sherry from the papers, because she was a biracial girl with distinctive beauty.
The prosecutor dismissed the charges against Winai due to insufficient evidence on November 6, 1986. However, the Samut Prakan Provincial Court handed down death penalties to the four remaining defendants and they were sent to Bang Kwang. Rungchalerm fainted on hearing the sentence while the other three men and their families were in tears.
Although the murder was high-profile, initially I didn’t pay much attention to it as homicide is no stranger to Bang Kwang. Shortly after I started out at the prison in the 1970s, I witnessed the execution of a murderer for the first time in my life. Over the years, you could say I became desensitised to the idea.
That first execution was of a gang-leader named Sa-ne, who was condemned to death by a summary execution order issued by the military government of General Thanom Kittikajorn in 1972. Sa-ne’s gang had raped and murdered a 10-year-old girl. They shoved dirt into her mouth to stifle her cries for help and strangled her to death afterwards. The other three members of his gang were let off with life in prison as some of them were as young as 14. Sa-ne wasn’t spared as he was above the legal age. He spat vile oaths and curses at the officials who were present at his execution while insisting that he hadn’t committed any crime. I was unfortunate enough to witness many more cases like this.
I became interested in the murder of Sherry on hearing that Rungchalerm, one of the four condemned men, had died on October 22, 1991. Shortly afterwards their appeal plea was accepted by the Appeal Court. I hope it offers the tormented soul of Rungchalerm some peace to know that the original verdict was overturned the following January.
Before his passing, I caught only glimpses of his visits with his wife. They both appeared to be inconsolable and in tears most of the time. His health had deteriorated quickly in prison and he was moved to the hospital. A long-term prisoner named Vibul, who was assigned to mind him there, told me that Rungchalerm suffered from asthma, which was exacerbated by trauma and his surroundings. Vibul made light of Rungchalerm’s condition, saying it served as a rain forecast because his breathing would be laboured before it rained. Vibul said he regularly injected him with adrenaline to relieve the symptoms.
Vibul was on anti-depression medication and felt particularly drowsy one evening, so he asked another inmate to mind Rungchalerm for him while he went to sleep early. He instructed his replacement that, if Rungchalerm had an asthma attack during the night, he must get him to sit upright on his bed and make him hug a big box and rest on it until the attack went away, as the doctor had recommended.
He was awoken at about 4am by his replacement and rushed to Rungchalerm’s bed to find him dead. His replacement claimed that during the night Rungchalerm had an asthma attack and, although he tried to get him to sit up, he resisted his help. Thinking it was not serious, the man just left him. He passed away at the age of 51. The official cause of death was heart failure.
After the Appeal Court overturned the original verdict, the remaining defendants were ordered to be kept on remand while they waited for a ruling by the Supreme Court, except for Krasae, who was granted bail with help from his boss at a security guard company.
In the meantime, Winai, petitioned the National
Police Office (now known as the Royal Thai Police) claiming the four men had been convicted wrongfully on false evidence. His petition led to the reinvestigation of this case by a team from the Crime Suppression Division.
On March 8, 1993, the Supreme Court upheld the Appeal Court’s verdict and the three men were cleared of murder. They had spent more than six years behind bars.
They were finally set free and I sighed with
relief that those innocents would not die at my hands. The suffering of these men and their families was far from over, however.
Pitak contracted tuberculosis during his incarceration and died five months after he was released. The disease had already reached the untreatable stage by then. His mother Intum took her frail son to their hometown of Chiang Mai, a tourist province in northern Thailand, so he could spend the last chapter of his life in peace. They had to live in separate huts so Intum would not catch the disease. Wanting to make his final days happy, she created a garden for her son.
She said, ‘My son loved flowers so I bought lots to plant around his hut where he lived next to mine. Visitors all complimented him on how lovely his hut looked.’
Intum, who was in her sixties when she got back a shadow of her son, said, ‘He lived with me for five months before I lost him to the disease forever.’
Although it must have been a great comfort for Pitak to know that his mother was always on his side, his paternal relatives held him in contempt for causing the family to lose face, despite his acquittal. They refused to do him the last honour of attending his funeral, so as to express their resentment towards him. Having a quiet funeral is considered a social disgrace in Thailand. Pitak also lost contact with his pregnant wife, whom he never heard from again after he was sent into Bang Kwang.
Thawat had a brief reunion with his family. One of his three daughters, Ratchanee, who was nine when he was arrested, was always adamant that Por was innocent in spite of what people around her said.
‘My classmates and neighbours said my father was a killer. He suffered so much. Everyone believed the news [that he was guilty], even my grandmother.’
Not only was her father unduly punished, so were she and the rest of the family. Despite Thawat wife’s best efforts to support their three daughters, she could not afford to send them to school for long. Two of them finished lower secondary level only while the third just completed primary level. The absence of a ‘rice-winner’ affected all their futures.
Ratchanee, who finished lower secondary education, said, ‘Had my father not been put away, I would have had a chance at higher education.’ She earns a living washing clothes while the other two left to find work. As for Thawat, he was unable to find work in Bangkok after he was released and went to work for Winai in the north of Thailand.
In different interviews, Krasae revealed what had happened prior to his wrongful arrest. While being detained, he was subjected to a beating by a group of policemen.
‘They asked me to come to the police station and forced me to confess to a crime I didn’t commit. I refused and they ganged up on me. There were many of them and I don’t recall everything. I remember one police officer in particular who dealt a kick at my chest that was so vicious I fell over, my back hitting a desk behind hard. Then I was kicked in the back again and fell over face down, my head slamming onto the floor.’
Krasae went to see a doctor after the assault and X-rays confirmed that he had cracked his spine. ‘I was about to be tried by the court of first instance and I couldn’t afford any treatment. [He was a security guard, earning a meagre 3,000 baht a month at the time.] After I was sentenced to death, I was transferred from the court’s holding cell to the prison right away.’
While on death row and shackled, he got by with painkillers from the prison hospital and ointment to relax his muscles, sent in by his mother. He also claimed the assault impaired his brain functions and he became slow-witted.
He recalled the time he was on death row saying, ‘I didn’t know what to think or hope for: to be set free or to die. Drained of any will to live, I was not my own person. I thought, “If it’s my time to go, then I’ll have no choice but to go.” I wasn’t even told that another police team was reinvestigating my case to catch the real culprits. There were many kinds of people on death row. Some said they were innocent but got snared by the police who like to close cases quickly. I believe there are innocent people on death row but I don’t know how they end up there. The law should guarantee compensation for those who are wrongfully incarcerated.’
Although he is alive and free, Krasae has to live with the constant reminder of the atrocity the police inflicted upon him. ‘I still have to take medication to cope with my back pain every day. If I walk for too long, my feet go numb. I can’t sleep on my back because doing so is simply too painful and my back goes numb. I have to sleep on either side.’ He also admitted to being haunted by an intense fear of the police.
Unlike the other two men, who at the very least had homes to go to after release, Krasae’s life after prison was bleak as no one was waiting for his return. He used to live in Klongtoey with his wife, daughter and son. His wife suffered from debilitating depression after he was put behind bars, however, and tried to cope by taking to alcohol, which brought about her untimely death before he was released. His daughter was raped and killed when she was 17 years old, though he was not told of this until after his release. Her killer has not been arrested.
‘Had I not been in jail, I would never have let anyone hurt my children,’ he cried. His daughter, who was an exceptional student, had been preparing to take an examination for a scholarship to study in Japan before she was murdered. Krasae also lost contact with his son, who went missing.
Krasae became a monk in an attempt to gain solace after the series of tragedies that had befallen him. Some Thais choose to be ordained as monks or nuns after unfortunate incidents happen in their lives in a bid to start afresh. Krasae eventually returned to secular life, found a partner and work. In order to sustain a hand-to-mouth existence, he took odd jobs that presented themselves including as a Siamese fighting-fish seller and a security guard, which he had been before prison.
About Rungchalerm, Krasae recalled, ‘He definitely was the one who took it the hardest among the four of us. He missed his family tremendously—especially his children who were still young at the time he was put away. Not a day went by without him crying... he literally cried himself to death.’
In a poem Rungchalerm wrote in 1991, which unwittingly became the last note to his family, he desperately lamented being jailed for the crime he didn’t commit while assuring his children that, even though he had been separated from them, they never left his thoughts.
Tun, his wife, had to take care of their three children, who were between the ages of seven and 11, when her husband was taken away. She found it unbearable trying to console her children, who were being harassed because of their father, and her husband, who couldn’t come to grips with his fate. Upon hearing the verdict by the first court, she fainted, as did her husband. Tun visited him twice a week but they are not happy memories, she says.
‘It was hell on earth for him. Every visit, we cried and he complained about physical and sexual assaults. The conditions in the prison became unbearable for him and his health deteriorated.’
Supawadee, the eldest child, got a job at a golf course with his undergraduate certificate while the youngest child Rungruengrit had to quit school because Tun couldn’t pay for his education. He used his lower secondary certificate to get a job as a messenger. ‘If Por were with us, our lives would have been better and I could have finished a bachelor degree. He was a hard-working man and we were about to buy a new house and a car,’ he said.
Sulaporn, the middle child who was more fortunate than her siblings, got a bachelor degree. She recalled the day the court decided to sentence her father to death.
‘The day before, we went out together as a family in high spirits. The next morning Mae told us three to go school as usual. She put on a brave face and assured me that Por would be home by the evening for sure because he had done nothing wrong. We came home that evening to find out that he would never come home for good. We cried. Five years later, neighbours told us he had died in the prison. It was heartbreaking.’
Rungchalerm’s family receive
d some small help from the police. A spokesman for Royal Thai Police asked Sulaporn’s university to waive her intuition fee. To their best memory, this is the only act of kindness the family received from the police. They lived in a slum.
The murder of Sherry Ann Duncan made headlines again almost two years after the three scapegoats were released. The Crime Suppression Division had been reinvestigating the case and on February 6, 1995, they arrested two brothers—Somjai and Somphong Bunyarit —who were believed to be the real killers. Thirteen days later, two more men—Samak Toopbuchakan and Peera Wongwaiwut—were arrested. They were said to be close friends of the Bunyarit brothers.
On November 1, 1995, Suvibol Patpongpanit, a wealthy businesswoman and a former lover of Winai, turned herself in to the police. She was later released on five-million baht bail. She was believed to be the mastermind of the murder and was portrayed as a jealous woman who had been bent on revenge.
The police concluded that Suvibol had hired the men to kill Sherry out of jealousy after she found out that Winai was cheating on her with the young girl. The Bunyarit brothers used to work for Winai and were acquainted with Sherry as they would drive her to school and their wives acted as minders when Winai was busy.
They later fell out with Winai and went to work for Suvibol. Given that they held a grudge against their former boss, the police believed it was easy for Suvibol to persuade them to commit the murder for her.
The police believed that Peera, who was a taxi driver, picked Sherry up from school with Somjai and Somphong. The men somehow persuaded her to get into the taxi, possibly with a ruse regarding Winai. Sherry eventually realised she was not on the usual route and tried to escape but was strangled to death. Then the men dropped her body at the deserted mangrove where the crab-seller couple found her two days later.
A Secret History of the Bangkok Hilton Page 8