A Secret History of the Bangkok Hilton (8 page)

In general, foreign Asian inmates are obedient and don’t complain much. The majority of inmates from Burma, Laos and Cambodia are small-time drug-smugglers who come from poor backgrounds. Inmates of Chinese descent are perceived to be rich from running international drug rings. So they are welcomed by opportunistic guards and inmates alike. They can keep their wealth intact, unlike the Thais whose assets are confiscated unless they have been clever enough to get somebody to buy gold or diamonds.

Slowly they ask someone on the outside to sell these assets to fund their lives inside. They often receive help and support from their families in the form of money, parcels and visits. Their relatives also send in such traditional Chinese delicacies as shark’s fin, shiitake mushrooms, sea cucumber, fish maw and herbs. Sometimes food parcels arrive with roasted pork, grilled chicken or duck in vacuum bags. The Chinese inmates prepare dishes for the guards to win their approval. Given that they come from similar cultural backgrounds and because of their generosity, they get along well with Thai inmates and guards while westerners and Africans tend to stay within their own groups.

Spending too many years behind bars can cost inmates their sanity. Several have become mentally instable. One man attacked a guard with a broom until his head bled. Afterwards, he explained: ‘Last night I dreamt he hit me. So when I woke up this morning I decided to take revenge.’

Speaking of revenge, there are ways the inmates can get back at hated guards without them knowing. To them, the guards can be their saviour or a nightmare. Obviously, the guards who really listen to their problems and settle disputes between prisoners fairly are preferred and are rewarded by having their clothes washed for free or a massage.

The inmates conceal their resentment for those who make life harder for them. They will still be served coffee but it will have spit in it. A glass of cold water will get a good stir with a penis. Some guards who know that they are in inmates’ bad books take the precautions of ordering only hot water or carrying drinks to work in a thermos.

Thai prisoners are divided into groups according to where they come from: northerners, southerners, north-easterners. Those from the central region don’t seem to form an obvious group.

Other groups are based on the type of offence and some types of crime are associated with specific regions. Most drug offenders are northerners or north-easterners as both regions are routes through which narcotics are trafficked into Thailand from neighbouring countries. It is said that hitmen, killers and robbers tend to come from the central region while most of the murderers are from the south.

Religion also brings some together. The three major beliefs in Bang Kwang are Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Christian and Muslim inmates form obvious groups while the Buddhists don’t. Some Muslims once complained when some of their number converted to Christianity to receive donations, an affront to their faith.

When they get together, the inmates gain visibility and some protection against bullies, though clashes between different groups often result in injury.

Most Asian countries don’t have prisoner transfer treaties with Thailand. This results in their nationals having to stay behind bars much longer than western or African ones.

Control and limiting the rights of convicts are the main priorities in the Bangkok Hilton—after all it is a place of punishment for convicts. The idea of rehabilitation was introduced much later and seems to be bottom of the priority list. In fact, I sometimes wonder if inmates who have served time in the Bangkok Hilton leave as better people or as hardened criminals. Given the number of notorious gang leaders inside, every day is like a crime seminar in there.

The inmates range from a small-time thieves to crime bosses. All of them have one thing in common: long imprisonment. They have no freedom and are subject to a lot of rules.

We don’t allow them to use communication
equipment to contact outsiders. Most of them have no mattresses to sleep on, unless they buy their own. They each have to bid for the most lucrative spot in their respective cells—the farthest from the toilet that is. The toilet is just a three-sided knee-high wall that cannot contain the sound of someone breaking wind. They lie side by side.

Those who are awaiting trial on drug charges may have to sleep next to a serial killer. There is simply no privacy. There is access to treatment and medicine but don’t bet on getting it quickly. They are searched at least twice a day for ‘prohibited items’, the obvious ones being opium, cannabis, alcohol, alcohol substitutes, gambling apparatus, escape apparatus (which depends on your interpretation), weapons, perishable or intoxicating items, gasoline and explosives. That list is growing by the minute and the prison has a very straightforward way of adding to it. Say, for example, a guard finds a SIM card cleverly hidden in a pizza, then pizza will be banned. Our concern is that they would conduct drug dealing over mobile phones to get yaba into the prisons and sell it to the other prisoners. So the rest of the inmates who innocently crave it can forget about it.

In general, Thailand operates with a kind of caste system. Your surname, wealth, gender, age, skin colour, education and other factors will be taken into consideration by others. It is like we have a mental calculator to help us evaluate each other according to these criteria. Prison operates in pretty much in the same way even though all inmates more or less should be treated equally.

So the inmates have to find ways to better their position inside. The route to power is straightforward for Thais, though foreigners have a more complicated approach.

Generally the big legs use their connections to get their powerful friends to visit them. It is a subtle way to let guards and prisoners alike know they are somebody. After achieving a level of respect from the guards, they start to act as channels of communication between the prisoners and the prison in the regard to donations, complaints and reports from the prisoners. Ordinary inmates pin their hopes on them. When they resolve a problem, they get even more respect from their peers. Though we have taken their freedom they find ways to make life inside more bearable.

Some big legs who were crime bosses on the outside continue to run similar enterprises inside, offering credit, running gambling dens and selling drugs. Poorer inmates often offer to serve them in the hope that they might secure a dubious job or two at one of their businesses after they are released.

That’s not to say that Bang Kwang is a safe place. It comes under a lot of scrutiny, however, so violence is less common there than in other less known Thai detention centres such as the one in Pathumthani province.

In 2009, two siblings of a man who died there while being detained for a minor offence took their plight to the media. Their brother had been arrested for drunk driving. He was instructed to pay a fine of 3,000 baht but he had no money on him so he was sentenced to 15 days in a detention centre in Pathumthani province in late of October. On November 1, the centre called to his workplace to say that he was dead and his co-workers called his family.

The death certificate said he had suffered internal bleeding in his chest, his ribs were broken and both lungs were torn. Given the horrific injuries, his relatives visited officers at the detention centre to ask what had happened. They claimed he fell as he was walking to the bathroom and when they found him on the floor he was already dead.

A similar incident had happened at the same detention centre the previous January. A woman said her husband was beaten to death while in detention.

‘My husband was a taxi driver. He was charged with drunk-driving on January 15, 2009. The court gave him seven days in jail and he was sent to the central detention centre for men in Pathumthani. He arrived there on Friday, January 16 to spend his first weekend in jail. On Monday, I was informed by an officer that he had been hospitalised.’

When she asked what happened, the officer replied that he was found unconscious in the morning and sent to a nearby hospital. At the hospital, she found her husband covered in bruises. It appeared to her that he had been beaten about the head. She called to the centre again and this time the officer said her husband had fallen in the bathroom. Her husband was transferred to another hospital for an x-ray. The result confirmed her worst nightmare. They found huge haemorrhaging in his brain but the surgeon said his body was so badly injured he wouldn’t survive an operation. The doctor told her to prepare herself for the worst. On January 21, 2009, her husband died and the autopsy report revealed that extensive physical damage had been done to the heart, lungs and kidneys. The damage was far too severe to have been brought on by a simple fall.

I am confident that violence by the guards is a thing of the past at Bang Kwang since all eyes are on it due to its notoriety.

Chapter 6

Scapegoats

Many people have asked me whether I think I have ever executed an innocent person. It is a difficult question and one I feel would be more appropriate to direct to the authorities who went before me in handing down a death penalty. After all, I was just the last link in the chain of the Thai justice system.

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.