‘I am not that evil monster’: Accused suitcase killer says he was target of Thai street hustle

Pattaya: The Australian man accused of murdering a teenage girl in Thailand believes he was the victim of a street hustle gone wrong, declaring he is no “evil monster”, offering a new account of the night that is strongly contested by Thai authorities.

Simon Peter Carman, 46, said he hadn’t had “a wink” of sleep since he was arrested and detained for allegedly attempting to flee to Australia after Thanchanok Donhomla, 17, died inside his $330-per-month Pattaya condominium in the early hours of June 25.

In a revealing in-person interview with this masthead inside the Pattaya Remand Prison, about 150 kilometres south of Bangkok, the former truck driver said he had good reasons for stuffing her body into a suitcase instead of calling police. He also said was “100 per cent certain” he did not restrict her airways, as alleged by Thai police.

“I could physically see her breathing,” he said through a telephone behind a large glass panel and bars in the prison’s visitor area. “She had, like, a floral dress on, and I could see her ribcage and stomach going up and down.”

Thai authorities fully vetted the transcript of Carman’s comments to this masthead and a draft of the article, as part of the conditions for approving the interview.

Carman pleaded not guilty in court to Thanchanok’s murder, claiming she threatened him with a pocket knife while demanding money, and that he restrained her in self-defence. He has, however, pleaded guilty to moving her body.

Pattaya police Colonel Anek Srathongyoo said the autopsy found Thanchanok died by suffocation and a brain injury. He added that she had no external head trauma.

Carman, who could face the death penalty if convicted, said the girl eventually “coughed once” and dropped the knife. “I flicked it aside and I could see she had stopped breathing,” he said.

Thanchanok was from a poor family in Thailand’s northeast, and had been in Pattaya for barely a week before she died in Carman’s ramshackle long-term rental. The city is famed for X-rated live shows and red-light districts heaving with sex workers and tourists.

But Thanchanok’s grieving family members, who called her “Cake”, said she was not a sex worker, and had only travelled to the city to visit friends and to see the beach.

Carman also claimed he did not indulge in Pattaya’s wild side. He lived in a quieter area called Jomtien, on the city’s outskirts.

“I never get a lady off the street. I’ve got morals and standards. I’m a good person,” he said.

“And even though the media portrays me as an absolute evil monster – and I don’t blame people outside actually thinking that now, because it’s how I’ve been portrayed – I am not that evil monster.”

Police and Carman agree that Thanchanok was with two friends during the fateful meeting about 3am near the Jomtien beach.

“I cannot remember which one I was talking to out of the three, it might have been all three of them, it might have been one. It was very brief,” Carman said.

“ I just want to go back to my condo to sleep, and I was back on my way.”

Camera phone footage taken by one of Thanchanok’s friends, however, showed the pair walking off holding hands. Security footage from the lobby of Carman’s condominium complex – the same camera that would later capture him wheeling out a large suitcase filled with Thanchanok’s body – showed they were also holding hands while approaching the elevator to his 15th storey room.

“I do not know if Cake followed me,” Carman said, admitting that he could not explain the footage.

“I know we were together in the lift. I can remember that. And I hadn’t had anything to drink. People have come up with all sorts of assumptions.

“I don’t normally drink anyway. I might have one or two beers with dinner and that’s it – might, not all the time. I’ve been drunk once in my life, that was when I was 19.”

Carman says Thanchanok told him she had her period and could not have sex with him.

“I said, ‘Well, good. No problem’. I don’t know if she understood my English,” he said. “I said, ‘You’re welcome to ... go back to your friends’.”

But he said he could not remember why, if he just wanted to go to bed, he brought Thanchanok into his accommodation in the first place. “It would have been an opportunity to use Google Translate and talk, and that’s about all I can say that’s going to be accurate now,” he said.

He said Thanchanok got a message on her phone, calling for her to leave.

“I said, ‘No problem’. Then she said the word ‘money’. I thought, ‘All right, whatever, I’ll give her money, I’d rather you go home happy’. I opened my wallet. I had approximately 25,000 baht ($1077) in there. I gave her 500 baht,” he said.

“In the condo there’s a basic kitchen and I had a table where I had an air fryer … and I had a pocket knife on there. She picked up the knife and she put it up to my throat and said, ‘More money’.

“From then on, I was obviously in a lot of shock and there was a lot of adrenaline going through me. I was obviously scared for my life. I didn’t know what was going on. All I knew was that I had a knife [pointed at me].”

He claimed he grabbed Thanchanok’s right arm, the one holding the knife, with his left hand, while also holding her left shoulder with his right hand.

After getting Thanchanok on the floor, she bit him on the hand, he said, prompting him to take her jaw in a “pistol grip” so she could not do it again.

“She could still lift her head off the tile floor,” he said. “I didn’t have much weight on her at all, just enough to restrain her… She was trying to knee me in the back, but it didn’t hurt because she was just hitting muscle… again, I was repeatedly saying, ‘Drop the knife, drop the knife’, and she didn’t.

“She eventually said ‘OK’, but she didn’t end up dropping the knife. I said, ‘OK what?’… All that time she was using all her strength to press up towards me with the knife.

“People have said I’m a big guy, you know, body weight difference. [But] my body weight wasn’t on her… just enough to hold her down.”

Srathongyoo, the Thai police colonel, said it was “nonsense” that a 40-kilogram teenage girl would attempt to threaten a man as large as Carman for money.

Then came the small cough, and she went limp, Carman said. After finding no pulse, he moved her body into one of his suitcases, storing it in the bathroom as he went about his ordinary business – ordering food, doing laundry – throughout the day, he said.

Carman said he did not call authorities because Thai police had previously extorted money from him. He recounted an incident in which he said police had set up a “fake” random breath test outside his condo complex and pinged him even though he had not any alcohol.

“It’s the red light, and they say, ’20,000 baht or a month in the monkey house’… you’ve got no choice but walk across to the 7-Eleven, go the ATM, get out 20,000 baht, and they share it around… it’s the corruption of police, and that’s the reason I did not call them. I do not trust them.”

Asked if he wished he had called police instead of moving her body, he said: “I don’t know if I would have done anything different, to be honest. I would be in the same situation as I am now.”

He said he believed the whole meeting with Thanchanok and her friends was an opportunistic set-up to extract money from him.

“And speaking to other inmates, not that I can believe anything that other inmates say, but it seems like a normal thing in Thailand. They just said, ‘Oh yeah, she was out to rob you’.”

Srathongyoo pushed back on this. “We do not believe Simon. And the other side is deceased and cannot give her side of the story,” he said.

Carman could not remember if he had been at the bars before meeting Thanchanok, or just out for a late-night walk because of another sleepless night due to chronic pain, for which he took prescription medicines.

“I’ve spent thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, over the last three, four, five years in [Perth] Australia, going through the phone book with neurosurgeons … to try and get these surgical clips removed,” he said.

One of the rules from Thai prison authorities for the interview was that Carman not discuss the conditions inside.

He has pleaded not guilty to murder and charges relating to taking a minor for indecent purposes. He will next appear in Pattaya court in December.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.