Englishman Murdered in Thailand - Are You Next?
Mad 'Greedy' Thai Wives
Retired Briton Murdered In Thailand
Police in Thailand are investigating the death of a 69-year-old
British man who had been living in a village in the north-east of the
country.
Ian Beeston, a retired design engineer at Ford's Dagenham plant in
east London, was found beaten and stabbed to death at his home on
Friday.
Local police said Mr Beeston's Thai wife and her male friend have been
arrested in connection with the case.
A Foreign Office spokeswoman confirmed that an investigation had
begun.
A spokeswoman said: "We can confirm a British national died in Roi Et,
north-east Thailand, on Friday August 8.
"The Royal Thai police are investigating."
--
When the money runs out your luck also runs out in that cesspool!
--
Sitting on the ground floor of his home - a two-storey house squatting
in a rice paddy in Isan, north-east Thailand - Herrington, aged 51,
was talking about his friend and neighbour, Ian Beeston, who was found
murdered last weekend after predicting that his Thai wife would kill
him.
--
Andy
Andrew Herrington, a retired Birmingham lorry driver who now lives in
Thailand, lowered his voice and turned to his companions: 'Well, you
know, he married a bar girl. What did he expect?'
Sitting on the ground floor of his home - a two-storey house squatting
in a rice paddy in Isan, north-east Thailand - Herrington, aged 51,
was talking about his friend and neighbour, Ian Beeston, who was found
murdered last weekend after predicting that his Thai wife would kill
him.
Beeston, 69, a retired design engineer, had been beaten and stabbed in
his house - police say he took seven hours to die. His wife,
Wacheerawan, 42, and her Thai lover, Somchit Janong, 48, confessed and
have been charged with murder. In bizarre and macabre fashion, Janong
even re-enacted for police and photographers the manner in which he
had clubbed Beeston to death.
This was no isolated romance that culminated in a tragedy. The British
embassy in Bangkok processes the wedding documents of up to 70 couples
each week. The requests are almost exclusively from older British men
- among 860,000 UK tourists each year - hoping to marry younger Thai
women. But for any British man hoping to follow in Beeston's footsteps
and build a new better life in Thailand, his death was a stark
reminder of how badly things can go wrong.
Three of the group of worried farangs - the Thai term for foreigners -
who had gathered in Isan, have invested a hefty chunk of their life's
savings building houses nearby on the fringes of Suwannaphum village,
deep in Thailand's poorest province, Roi Et. Beeston's house, which
swallowed up all of his £250,000 retirement nest egg, was described
locally as 'palatial'. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the killing, a
siege mentality has taken hold.
'Wanna' was indeed a bar girl, a prostitute. She met Beeston in a bar
in Beach Road, Soi 2, in Pattaya, the garish beach resort in southern
Thailand, when he was still coming to the country on holiday. The
resort is notorious for go-go and hostess bars with a 'sin city'
reputation that surpasses that of Bangkok. Eventually, his marriage
having fallen apart, Beeston took early retirement from his job at the
Ford motor plant in Dagenham, Essex, and moved to Thailand. In 1999 he
married Wanna and paid for her two grown-up children to be put through
university.
The good life hit the buffers when he discovered Wanna had secretly
sold his Suwannaphum property. As foreigners are barred from owning
land in Thailand, he had put everything in her name. All his savings
from working as a design engineer, first at Perkins and then at Ford,
had gone. Worse, the new owners of his house were agitating to move
in. Four months ago a furious Beeston banished Wanna to a corrugated
shack in the back garden. Friends feared then that he had signed his
own death warrant.
In a letter left with lawyers, Beeston predicted his own grisly fate.
'It is just a matter of time now,' he wrote. 'I am in real fear for my
own life.'
Beeston's romance, like so many others involving Western men escaping
loneliness at home, began with a stroll down one of the hundreds of
neon-lit strips in Thailand's tourist-friendly sex quarters. The ratio
of male tourists to Thai women is almost two to one. Walk down
Bangkok's Soi Cowboy or Patpong any evening and it is easy to see how
masculine fantasy can take flight. Ageing, unprepossessing foreign men
are fawned over by lithe young Thai women wearing broad smiles and
revealing clothes. The prospective clients are beckoned through
curtained doorways to a dimly lit world where bar girls dance
suggestively on a tiny stage and strip.
Others chat up the punters in rudimentary English. The price of all
this attention is just the cost of a drink for the girl, perhaps a
tip. The often unspoken element is that the girl will go back and
spend the night at his hotel. Cash is rarely mentioned, and there is
no unseemly haggling, but the going rate is little more than a
'present' of £20.
'[The men] are often not the most handsome of all, they are usually in
the latter years of their life, they are bald, unattractive and quite
lonely in their own little society,' writes Thai anthropologist Dr Yos
Santasombat in Hello My Big Big Honey!, an anthology of love letters
penned to Bangkok bar girls. 'When they come to Patpong, they're
struck with girls who are all over them.'
The appeal of easy, cheap sex is evident the next morning. The same
men hold hands with their bar girls skipping down the pavements of
Bangkok's tourist haunts. 'Often they extend their relationship for a
number of days or weeks or even years,' writes Yos. 'Sometimes the
farang himself ends up spending the entire vacation with one girl and
sometimes comes back. Sometimes she becomes his mistress or even a
wife.'
Romance with a Westerner in such circumstances can come perilously
close to a game of mutual exploitation. Nearly all of the girls have
flocked to the cities and resorts to escape their own prison: an
impoverished existence in Thailand's rural expanses, whereas a night's
takings from the city bar could sustain a family for a month. From
Isan's desperately poor, rice farming villages, where hunger is the
norm, the bars of Bangkok or Pattaya are a welcome escape. For girls
with little education they provide an opportunity to shine and have
the honour of providing for their families by sending new-found riches
back home.
'They do it because it's an easy life,' said John Burdett, a British
lawyer-turned-novelist who has interviewed hundreds of bar girls for
books such as Bangkok Haunts. 'You don't want to be a subsistence rice
farmer. It's very, very hard. Village life's claustrophobic. Bar girl
work isn't dirty. It's not strenuous. They don't have dozens of
partners; maybe one or two a week. The rest of the time they're
getting men to buy drinks and existing on tips. In the village there's
a kind of omertà, where no one talks about it. But they send money
home to care for people, so they've big status.
'A bar girl in her early or mid-twenties has a 10-year window of
opportunity to get out of poverty,' said Burdett. 'So if she spends
time with a guy she is using up her chances. She sees that as an
investment and she's entitled to something in return. The car and the
house may be in her name. In the West we've lost our intuitive
understanding of how poverty shapes thinking. So, if after 10 years
together the foreigner decides to move out, leaving her with little to
show for it, that's a problem. She's lost face and that's terribly
important. Her image has been damaged and it might even lead people to
kill.'
Stephen Treharne Jones, 63, was a former neighbour of Beeston. Jones
met Lamyai, then 32, in a Pattaya bar and sought to 'rescue' her and
send her home to Isan. 'When I met my wife, Lamyai , she had nothing,'
said Jones. 'I paid her out of a sex bar in Pattaya and told her to go
home. When I visited her home she was living in a room with her two
children. There was no bathroom or toilet facilities, no doors, no
tiles, no electricity, just a mattress and blankets on the floor. So I
bought a big home for both of us and bought the land off her
relatives.'
Jones's world collapsed when he asked his wife to sell a piece of land
he had bought. Lamyai refused, saying it was impossible. Only when he
went with a lawyer to the land registry did he discover he never owned
it. He bought it from Lamyai's family, but allowed them to keep it in
their names because of foreign ownership prohibitions. When
challenged, Lamyai threw him out of their luxury villa in Kalasin, an
hour from Suwannaphum. Penniless, he scuttled back to King's Lynn,
Norfolk, two months ago. He now lives there in sheltered
accommodation.
'Looking back now, I know my Thai wife had set me up from day one,'
said Jones last week. 'In Kalasin I know of three other foreigners who
were kicked out by their wives after they completed property
purchases. They say there's no fool like an old fool. But I did
genuinely love Lamyai. I was sold a dream, I guess. A quiet life in
the country where food and drink was cheap, the women attentive and
the weather warm. But that's not the reality. The reality is that one
becomes a captive.'
Lamyai has a very different account of the breakdown in relations. 'If
Stephen had been a good husband I would not have asked him to leave,'
she said. 'But when he argued he called me a thief and a prostitute.
We were quite happy for four years, even though he spent a lot of time
going out drinking with his farang friends in the area. Stephen had a
house he could have lived in all his life if he respected me as his
wife, but at the end I was just his servant.'
As his own marriage became a bitter property dispute, Beeston saw
trouble coming. Exiled to the garden shed, his wife had installed her
lover, Janong, and they kept Beeston a virtual prisoner in his own
home with taunts and attacks.
In a letter to his lawyers, Beeston told how his wife had started a
money lending business - lending his money - and had paid off local
police so she could run an illegal lottery. 'My wife threatened me
with a gun,' he said in the letter, detailing a series of attacks on
his house involving 'stones, lumps of wood, fireworks and even a tin
of paint'. The house was also frequently burgled, he said.
Like so many Britons and other expatriates living in rural Thailand
who are unable to converse in Thai, it appears Beeston may have been
the unwitting victim of a sting his wife had been waiting for years to
bring off. According to his friends, the whole town, even the police
chief, knew but nobody said anything. 'I thought she loved me, but she
only wanted my money after all,' Beeston had told his Australian
neighbour, Bill Lamb.
'He told me he thought his wife was about to kill him,' said Lamb. 'My
feeling is that Ian had been paying for Wanna's daughters from a
previous marriage to go to university. This year they both graduated.
I just don't think he was needed any more. She had it all. To be
honest - the life of a foreigner isn't worth much around here.'
Back in Herrington's Suwannaphum house, fists were clenched as the
group discussed a fitting revenge for the perpetrators of the callous
act. The palpable sentiment was: 'It's them or us.' But the bitter
consensus was also that after all the publicity had died down
Beeston's wife would be granted bail and freed. 'She's got the money,
and with money cases just get dropped,' said Herrington.
Then the conversation turned to the future and who was 'next for the
bullet'. They agree they know the identity of the marked man. He lives
about 20 miles away and is having some major problems with his Thai
wife. 'Yep,' they chorus, 'for sure.'
Andy
www.pattayadailynews.com/thai/showfeature.php?FeatureID=0000000897
Andy
Andy
http://www.julesodekerken.nl/jules.htm
Pattaya - Dutch murder trial concludes
Sentencing Hearing at Pattaya Court House following Dutch Murder
trial.
On Friday Morning we were given rare access to the Courtrooms at the
Pattaya Provincial Courthouse located on the Thappraya Road leading to
Jomtien Beach. A trial which begun on 27th March 2004 has now come to
a conclusion with the sentencing hearing. The case relates to the
murder of Mr. Jules Odekerken from the Netherlands, who was killed in
front of his Pattaya House on 17th November 2003. Mr. Odekerken was
married, at the time, to Khun Marisa and the couple had two children,
one of which was adopted by Mr. Odekerken. Two suspects emerged in the
case, one was the brother of Khun Marisa and the other was her lover
who fathered a child with Khun Marisa while she was married to
Mr.Odekerken. The apparent motive behind the murder was related to Mr.
Odekerken�s money and other assets. In the Courthouse, Khun Seksan,
the brother of Mr. Odekerken�s Wife, was sentenced to life in prison
without parole. His sentence was reduced because of his cooperation
with the Police. The second suspect, Khun Anupong, a former City
Councilor from Chumporn Province in the South of Thailand, was
sentenced in his absence because he was bailed following the charges
in 2004 and has been on the run ever since. He was sentenced to death
for his part in the murder. Supporters of Mr. Odekerken were in court
to hear the verdicts which were well received. Many spoke of a
satisfactory conclusion to this long running case.
The life of Jules
Jules was born on April 20th 1957 in 's-Hertogenbosch in the
Netherlands.
He spent his youth in Vught where he got his VWO-diploma at a
secondary
school called Maurick-college. Then he successfully studied business
at the
university of Eindhoven.
After his studies, he took care of various reorganizations for a
number of
companies. After this, he started a company dealing with computers and
software with two friends from university. Business went very well.
Expand his horizon
However, Jules wanted to expand his horizon and started traveling to
America,
China and the Far East. With his amiable character he easily made
friends.
He felt very much at ease in the Far East, particularly after he had
visited Java
with his mother and some other relatives. Jules� mother was born and
raised there.
Jules decided to start a new company: SATC, which was a bureau to
intermediate
between the Netherlands and the Far East.
Fell in love
On one of these business trips he met Marisa Prommana in Thailand and
he fell
in love with her. Marisa was a single mother with a 4-year old son
called Kawiphan.
Jules accepted him as his own son and they got along very well
together.
He married Marisa on april 4th 1997.
At first they lived in Vught where their daughter Massaya was born on
January 3rd 1998.
Because Marisa had difficulties in adjusting to the Dutch weather and
way of life,
they decided to move to Thailand at the end of 1998.
His mother, brothers and sisters (father had died in 1984) did not
like the idea very
much, but comforted themselves with the thought that Jules was happy
there.
Bangkok
Marisa did not want to live in Bangkok due to the airpollution over
there, so she lived
in Pattaya with the children. During the week Jules lived in Bangkok
and during the
weekend he joined his family in Pattaya.
He worked for the Rabobank in Bangkok and in 2001 he started his own
company
NewsToday.
Apart from this, he was also involved with various projects with SATC,
which would have
been very successful and profiting in the near future.
Sob Chai
On September 6th 2002 the youngest son of Marisa was born, named Sob
Chai.
After Jules� death Sob Chai appeared to be the son of Marisa and her
Thai lover,
Anuphong Sutthani. During his life in Thailand, Jules telephoned his
mother every week
and came to the Netherlands two or three times a year, often with his
entire family.
Murdered
The year before he was murdered his mother paid him a visit in
Thailand with some other
family members. We all had the impression that he was happy there.
In the last months before his death he was full of plans.
He was very busy with a new business company and he was just
completing the construction
of a new villa in Banglamung, near Pattaya.
Unfortunately, his love of Thailand proved to be fatal to him.
Andy
I am warning BRITISH MEN about the double-dealing and ghastly behaviour of Thai women who use dating and introductory/Marriage agencies.
All that these women want is your money. These women do not love you and never will.
It is all a big confidence trick.
The agencies are conning you.
The Thai girls are conning you.
Do not believe these evil scumbag women and Falang agency men, it is a conspiracy.
Once you have signed that marriage document all your money will disappear slowly.
The average divorce in the UK will cost you �15,000 and the rest (ancillary relief).
There are very few websites that warn (especially British men) from these evil doers.
Stickman Bangkok appears to be more truthful then others.
However be warned there are many UK VISA forum websites that encourage British men to marry and bring in foreign wives. Do not trust these biased forums as they are narrow-minded beyond belief.
DO NOT MARRY A THAI BRIDE
STOP PEOPLE TRAFFICKING THROUGH MARRIAGE
.....
Andy
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lHO5fUddZR0&feature=related
Prostitution in Thailand...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Thailand
Crime in Thailand...
http://www.nationmaster.com/country/th-thailand/cri-crime
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21670/Crime-Statistics-Murders
http://www.cdnn.info/news/travel/t061227.html
http://www.cdnn.info/news/travel/t061125.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4580268.stm
http://tropicalramblings.blogspot.com/2008/03/swedish-girl-murdered-in-a
ttempted.html
Would be good if someone could document the deaths of the 'innocent'
tourists to Thailand over the last 20 years or so.
CRIME:
Number of intentional homicides committed with a firearm that were
recorded in criminal (police) statistics (7th U.N. Survey of Crime
Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, 1998 - 2000):
Thailand ranked 3rd for the year 2000 among the 92 countries that
responded to the survey (behind #1 South Africa and #2 Colombia)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7557098.stm
http://www.andrew-drummond.com/tag/ian-beeston/
http://friskodude.blogspot.com/2008/01/britons-in-thailand-trouble-in-pa
radise.html
The news about foreigners murdered in Thailand over the last few years
has brought out some soul searching by journalists who believe that
the real risks are not being addressed by their governments. It's a
damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't situation. When foreign
governments post warnings about travel to foreign countries, many will
protest that the risks aren't any greater than back home and that
Thailand, for example, feels much safer than London or New York. But
what are the real risks? Should governments provide warnings or is
this just fear mongering? The author of Footprint Thailand reports.
With so many Britons murdered in Thailand, why does our Government not
warn of the dangers faced there? At least 17 Britons have been
murdered in Thailand since 2003 � including Toby Charnaud, brutally
slain by his Thai wife. Now, his family want to know why our
Government is so reluctant to warn that the 'Land of Smiles' is one of
the most dangerous places on earth for its British residents.
Thailand has one of the world's highest per-capita murder rates � when
the UN last counted it in 2000, it stood at 5,140 per year, though the
annual total is now speculated to be more than 6,000. In the years
2003 to 2006, 17 of these victims were UK nationals, according to the
FCO. These murders include a sexually motivated killing of a young
British woman; a Thai police officer executing two backpackers in a
crowded street; shootings, throat cuttings and two cases of other
Westerners murdering UK nationals; and, more pertinently, several
cases of Thai wives or their family members slaying British husbands.
On average, about 50 civilian UK nationals are murdered around the
world each year (excluding terrorist attacks). This means that almost
10 per cent of all murders of Britons abroad are committed in Thailand
� a chilling figure, given that Thailand comprises only 0.6 per cent
of all foreign travel from UK shores.
At present FCO information regarding deaths in Thailand is limited.
Andy Pearce, the deputy head of mission at the British Embassy in
Bangkok, admits that the murder rate of Britons resident in Thailand
is about the same as the domestic Thai rate � roughly five times
higher than in the UK � but adds that this is only an estimate. (There
are thought to be about 50,000 British resident in the country at
present.) "To create the kind of advice needed on murder rates would
require a greater statistical base and more research," he says.
In early 2006, just after the brutal rape and murder of the young
British backpacker Katherine Horton on a deserted Koh Samui beach, and
following an 18-month period in which nine Britons were murdered, the
FCO had a revealing internal debate about what safety advice they
should give to British nationals travelling to Thailand, as an email
obtained by the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act testifies:
"The trouble with [giving advice about the murder rate]... is that it
would effectively highlight the number of murders over the past year
or more here, which in the current circumstances could have a
disproportionate impact on Thailand's reputation and legitimate
commercial interests."
"Hello My Big Big Honey!"
http://streetsmartsukhumvit.multiply.com/reviews/item/13
http://www.lynnnews.co.uk/news/Fled-Thailand-fearing-for-his.4437579.jp
Andy
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=w9WJLvNZ1Cs&feature=related
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6YZfIuMgWyE
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jpWw8KSzSFs&feature=related
Lie detctor test...
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3wGBl2eoz_4&feature=related
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_52Xpk5dKAk
Some of the murdered...
Jules Odekerken...
http://www.julesodekerken.nl/jules.htm
Hanna Charlotta Backlund
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanna_Charlotta_Backlund_case
Katherine Horton
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4576688.stm
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1555556/posts
Adam Lloyd & Vanessa Arscott
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3722254.stm
Dale Henry
www.canada.com/calgaryherald/story.html?id=ab29e2b1-08af-40e9-9c94-eff1964c0d9f&k=63296
Mark Jay Keffer
http://www.cdnn.info/news/travel/t061227.html
Tatiana Tsimfer & Liubov Svirkova
http://www.cdnn.info/news/travel/t070301b.html
Toby Charnaud
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4512327.stm
Jon LaChappelle
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Thai_claims_American_hired_him_to_k_03122007.html
Michael Beavis
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20010129/ai_n9662065
Michael Witt
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/jan/29/thailand
Kirsty Jones
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/874551.stm
Murder of Kelvin Bourke and rape of his girlfriend Sheri McFarlane
http://www.travelmole.com/stories/1122060.php
Erikki Aal Tonen
www.pattayadailynews.com/shownews.php?IDNEWS=0000005460
Ivor Chandler
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tees/7289353.stm
www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/2122951.murdered_man_was_struck_with_machete/
Leo Del Pinto shot dead & Carly Reisig seriously wounded
http://www.andrew-drummond.com/index.php?tag=carly-reisig
Some of the many, are you next???
.....