Pattaya, Thailand: Walking Street is heaving with half-naked bodies and men flogging sex shows at cut-price rates just for you.
It is another realm. A freak show of vice. Mates on trips – Indians, Europeans and Australians – shuffle straight-faced, taking in the tumult of girls, lights and thumping music. Bewildered children wander with regretful parents who read only the official marketing. Packs of middle-aged Chinese follow the tour leader’s raised little flag.
Not far away on Soi (street) 6, possibly bawdier still, at least 1000 bikini and lingerie-wrapped young women pose in jiggling, fleshy rows, beckoning men into bars where unwritten menus hold more than drinks and nibbles. And this is the low season.
The curious come, and the degenerate. For the right price, which probably isn’t much, you can find just about anything a liquored-up and lustful heart desires. That’s why it’s the sex capital of the world.
“It doesn’t happen anywhere – only Thailand, and only Pattaya,” says Pankaj, from India, on his seventh trip.
A veteran Englishman summarises the scene as “just f—ing mad”.
It was into this that 17-year-old Thanchanok Donhomla arrived in mid-June, from 600 kilometres away in Thailand’s north-east. She came alone, police believe, possibly on a holiday, to meet friends.
Photos show a petite, pretty child, the only offspring of Thongchai Donhomla. He took his daughter’s body home on Monday. Cake, as she was known, was strangled and stuffed inside a suitcase found discarded in long grass by the railway.
Thai police claim the killer is an Australian: Ballarat-born Simon Peter Carman, 45.
Neighbours at his long-term accommodation describe him as slow-talking, slow-moving, slow-staring; amiable enough, but someone who liked his own way. He could be aggressive at drunks making nuisances of themselves in the building, but “drunk people can be very rude, so that [reaction] is just normal,” says a woman who spoke with him regularly.
His alleged crime has shocked Thailand, thrusting the nation’s rampant sex tourism industry and its grey laws into the spotlight. Pimping and brothels are illegal. Selling sex – so long as it is not “committed openly and shamelessly or causes nuisance to the public” – is not.
“The tragedy is that there are virtually no safeguards for people in that profession,” says Tunyawaj Kamolwongwat, a former member of parliament who now advocates for sex workers and other marginalised communities.
Kamolwongwat wants laws changed to allow safe spaces and accountability. “A worker’s workplace would be known, colleagues would know who they had left with, and there would be records showing where they had gone,” she says.
Cake’s individual circumstances remain unclear, but it is known that thousands of Thailand’s sex workers come from crushing poverty in the provinces or surrounding countries such as Cambodia and Laos. Kamolwongwat says studies have shown they are often a family’s main breadwinner.
“This case is especially heartbreaking because she was only 17, and it reflects the economic pressures facing many families, where poverty pushes young women into work that doesn’t just expose them to exploitation but can put their lives at risk,” she says.
It’s impossible to know how many of the 4.5 million foreigners who visited Chonburi province in the first half of this year indulged in paid Pattaya sex. Few will admit such a thing. Part of the lure is anonymity, the chance to buy sex far from neighbours and spouses as just another man in the crowd.
The metro area holds an estimated 50,000 sex workers, though. They are getting paid somehow.
“Englishmen,” says Lulu, 30, of her most common client profile, adding quickly, “But Aussies are good!” They are rarely old men, but in their 30s and early 40s, she says.
Lulu, which is not her real name, is a bar girl on Walking Street and employed ostensibly to keep guests company at the tables so they keep buying drinks. This is how bars circumvent legal entanglements. That and powerful, vested interests, according to Kamolwongwat.
Lulu takes clients into rooms on or near the premises of the bar, charging the equivalent of $130 for a session. With three or four clients a week, it is decent money, almost all of which she sends home to her family in Laos.
Lulu needs no explanation or details about the case of Cake and the Australian. All the girls are talking about it. “It’s so scary,” she says, briskly rubbing her bare shoulders, mimicking a chill.
“There was another one. A Chinese guy did it. He …”
She pauses, then swipes her fingers across her neck and pulls at imaginary intestines, unable or unwilling to put words to the violence.
“You know?”
Lulu is referring to the case of 42-year-old Chinese welder Fu Tongyuen, who, according to local reports, admitted to killing Thai transgender woman Woranun Pannacha inside a rented Pattaya room in April last year. She had supposedly pulled out of their sex deal, so Fu strangled her and cut out her breast implants and heart. Like Carman, he was arrested at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport attempting to leave the country.
“You just never know,” Lulu says. “But I’ve been lucky. Everyone has just been nice.”
Like most sex workers in Pattaya, she has the protection of her bar and its security. But those who work independently underneath the coconut trees by the beach, surveying the passing men, locking eyes, smiling, stroking chests like a familiar lover, have to fend for themselves.
“The people who get into trouble are usually the ones who go to condos,” says Annie, a 57-year-old transgender woman who self-identifies as a “lady boy”, a category of sex worker born male, but presenting outwardly as female.
“The hotels I go to know their regular customers. There can still be problems sometimes, but they’re rare. Usually, I’m there for no more than one or two hours. But going to a client’s own place is dangerous.”
Annie, also a pseudonym, has worked in Pattaya for 25 years, first as one of the bar girls, then, since the COVID-19 pandemic, when competing with the younger workers became too difficult, on her own. She has been robbed by clients several times, but never physically attacked.
“One reason is that I offer my services openly as a lady boy – I don’t pretend to be a woman,” she says.
“Some people who are lady boys tell clients they’re women, and they end up being assaulted because of that. If a man likes lady boys, he’ll come to me, and that’s fine. If he’s looking for a woman, then he should find a woman.”
Thanchanok, or Cake, was female and presented as such. It’s unclear if she came to Chonburi province intending to do sex work, or if, with the appearance of Carman at 3am, the opportunity for quick cash presented itself by chance.
According to the official police report, seen by this masthead, “both parties agreed to engage in sexual services”.
The meeting was near Soi 7 and the beach, at Jomtien, a 20-minute drive south from Walking Street and its surrounding alleys of vice. Though liberally sprinkled with bars, Jomtien is quieter and more family friendly than the city proper. It is not the natural stop for a girl from the provinces seeking a stint as a sex worker, nor for a sex tourist seeking options.
Carman lived a 30-minute walk, by his pace, from where he met Cake, in Jomtien. Video taken by her friend shows the pair walking off, hand in hand, in the direction of his squalid $ 330-a-month room at the Rimhad Jomtien, a multi-tower condominium where he had lived among scores of expats for about eight months.
Security cameras get the last images of Cake alive when the pair arrives, still holding hands, at the Rimhad foyer at 3.34am on Thursday. Then, they disappear into the elevator for the 15th floor.
Only one person is alive to give their version of what happens next.
At 9.16pm on Thursday – about 18 hours after bringing Cake home – Carman is seen leaving with a suitcase. At 9.58pm, he returns without it.
When Cake failed to show on Friday, her friend, who knew where she went and with whom, confronted Carman at his unit, later filing a report with Pattaya police and triggering a rapid review of CCTV. The big Australian was arrested at the airport only minutes before he was due to board a flight home.
“When he was being detained by immigration officers at the airport, they noticed the [apparent scratch] injuries,” Pattaya City Police Colonel Anek Srathongyoo says.
“He explained that he’d been out for the night and had gotten into a fight with a friend. It wasn’t until he was with us, and we showed him the evidence, starting with the footage of him dragging the suitcase, loading it on the back of his motorbike and riding away for around 10 to 20 minutes – and then returning without the suitcase – that he began to admit what had happened.”
Carman’s claim, according to Srathongyoo, is that Cake came at him with a knife in a dispute over money.
Thai media claims the amount to be the equivalent of just $20.
In Pattaya, life, like the sex, can be cheap.
Support is available at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).
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.
In Pattaya, sex and life come cheap. But the cost can be deadly
