‘Everything about him was slow’: Inside the quiet Thai life of suitcase murder suspect

Warning: Graphic content

Jomtien, Thailand: News that Australian man Simon Peter Carman had been charged with murdering a Thai teenager and stuffing her body into a suitcase came as a shock to the people who knew him at the Jomtien condominium complex he had called home for months.

Not that he was always particularly easy, according to a woman who worked nearby and spoke with him regularly. “He was wanting his own way,” she said, asking to remain anonymous to speak freely.

“He seemed a bit abnormal to me because he speaks slowly and looks at things for a long time.

“But he lived like a normal expat here, going swimming, ordering food and eating out. I noticed that when he couldn’t sleep at night, he liked to go walking along the beach.”

Carman had been living at the Rimhad Jomtien, a 20-minute drive south of the busy metropolis of Pattaya, for about eight months, according to another woman, who spoke with him almost daily.

She said she never knew him to be particularly aggressive, though she would sometimes hear his stories about getting angry with drunk people making a fuss in the building.

“Drunk people can be very rude, so that [reaction] is just normal,” she said. “When I heard the news, I couldn’t believe it.”

Carman, 45, is accused of picking up Thanchanok Donhomla, 17, at about 3am on Thursday from the beach at Jomtien and taking her back to his room on the 15th floor. After speaking, “both parties agreed to engage in sexual services”, according to the official police report, seen by this masthead. Eighteen hours later, only one of them walked out, it said.

Police allege Carman put the teenager’s body into a suitcase before driving about 4 kilometres on a motorbike and dumping it in long grass. The grisly discovery of the suitcase was made in the early hours of Saturday, hours after Carman was apprehended at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport.

He faces three charges: murder, concealment of a body and moving or destroying a body, and taking a minor for indecent acts.

Police Lieutenant-Colonel Kanonnan Suksri told this masthead Carman had denied the charges and claimed to have acted in self-defence.

In a video captured after his arrest, Carman addressed the victim’s family, saying he felt “bad” about the incident.

“I feel bad for what happened to your daughter. It was out of my control,” he said. “I know you’ll be very sad, upset, same, same me. It shouldn’t happen, and I hope you’re OK. I know you’re not, but I hope, and please tell other girls … to be careful.”

In a separate video obtained by the ABC, Carman was asked by police whether he had killed the teenager, to which he replied on multiple occasions: “No.”

Thai sources said Carman was paying the equivalent of about $330 a month in rent at the Rimhad Jomtien. The condo complex is popular with foreigners who prefer a quieter life to living in Pattaya, which is about 150 kilometres east of Bangkok.

One person believed he lived in Perth. Another man, who lived on Carman’s floor and asked to remain anonymous, believed he was born in “Balla? Ballarat? Is that right?”

“I had never seen him with female company, but that’s not to say he didn’t. But what he was doing at the beach at 3.30 in the morning, I don’t know,” the man said.

The victim’s father, Thongchai Donhomla, spoke of his grief outside a police station in Pattaya.

“I am deeply saddened. My daughter had no mother because we’ve been divorced since she was two years old,” he said in an interview with Thailand’s TMN Cable TV Pattaya.

“She was a good kid. Whenever she wanted anything, she would find a way herself, and she always helped me, too. She never bothered me.”

Seated alongside the girl’s father, Oradee Bussarakum said: “I told the police I want him executed. As a stepmother, I don’t know what else to say. I just want him executed.”

In Thailand, a murder conviction can carry the death penalty or imprisonment of 15 to 20 years.

The room where Carman is alleged to have committed murder is locked. There is no crime scene tape on the door, or anything to suggest something awful happened there, just a bow that might be stuck on top of a present. Thanchanok’s friends performed a ritual there on Saturday to guide her spirit home.

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