The “Air Force Cousin” was here a few days ago. Yesterday he found his mother in their garden in Chalerm’s village in Lopburi province.
She was dead from multiple stabbings with a knife. The murderer had tried to hide the body with some tree branches.
The killer was her husband, the cousin’s stepfather. “She knew he was a bit crazy”, said Chalerm. The mother had said she wanted to break up with him, and the man killed her in jealous rage while she was tending the vegetables. He is in jail now.
Chalerm will go to Anyburi on Friday. He feels sorry for the Air Force Cousin, he says. I consider going with Chalerm but I don’t know what I would do there. Maybe this isn’t the right time for a visit.
Chalerm will stay one night and come back Saturday.
I never connected with this cousin but now he has my sympathy. I don’t think he is a real cousin, by the way, at least not a 1st cousin. These things are foggy. But if the murder victim was Chalerm’s aunt I would have known, and she wasn’t.
You might think the countryside in Thailand was a peaceful, idyllic place but it is not. I hear about a lot of violence and crime in the villages. Chalerm has warned me about “desperate people who think the farang is rich”.
Tags: crime, Lopburi, Thailand
May 8th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
SF, your sympathy for the Air Force Kid is a sign of a very good heart (if we did not already know) but I think Chalerm’s advice in this instance well considered (for one so young). Idyllic, maybe…but as Benjamin Franklin said of his poorer countrymen “It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright”. With murder in the air, the provinces may not be the place for our beloved correspondent!!!
May 8th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
People do what they have to do. Now, after years visiting Thailand, I do not fault anyone for thinking we are rich. As far as violence, alcoholism is problem heard round the world.