What's Next For The Aussie Charged With Murdering A Teen In Thailand?

It’s late June 2026, and police in Pattaya, Thailand, are retracing the movements of Australian man Simon Carman through hours of CCTV footage. At first, his day appears unremarkable. He eats breakfast, runs errands and returns to his accommodation before, just after 9pm, quietly leaving through a rear exit with a large suitcase. Security cameras capture Carman riding a rented scooter into the night, the suitcase still in tow, until the footage abruptly ends. When he later reappears on camera, the suitcase is gone. Hours later, police find the body of 17-year-old Tunchanok Donhomla inside the abandoned suitcase. Carman is arrested at the airport and charged with her murder. LINKS If any of the contents in this episode have caused distress, know that there is help available via Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636. Contact Full Stop Australia https://fullstop.org.au/ on 1800 385 578, 7 days, 24 hours. GET IN TOUCH Follow us on Instagram and TikTok @truecrimeconversations https://www.instagram.com/truecrimeconversations/?hl=en Want us to cover a case on the podcast? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] or send us a voice note. https://help.mamamia.com.au/en-US/send-a-podcast-voice-note-467960 Make sure to leave us a rating and review on Apple & Spotify to let us know how you're liking the episodes. CREDITS Guests: SMH South-East Asia correspondent, Zach Hope https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0533976/Host: Gemma Bath https://www.linkedin.com/in/gemmabath/?originalSubdomain=au Senior Producer: Tahli Blackman https://www.linkedin.com/in/tahli-blackman-205a891b7/?originalSubdomain=au Group Executive Producer: Ilaria Brophy Video Editor: Julian Rosario Audio Designer: Tegan Salder Mamamia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast. Become a Mamamia subscriber: https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  It's a Friday in late June 2026 and police in the city of Pattaya, Thailand are scouring through CCTV footage. They're watching an Australian man going about his Thursday. He's eating breakfast, buying groceries, doing his laundry, ordinary daily happenings. But at 9pm, they see him leave his unit under the cover of darkness, wheeling a suitcase behind him. Instead of going through the front entrance of the accommodation he's staying at, he exits through a back door. He rents a scooter and footage captures him driving through the streets with the luggage in tow. Suddenly, the vision cuts out. There are no more cameras on that stretch of road.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  When the man reappears, driving back towards his hotel, the suitcase is gone.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  I'm Gemma Bath and you're listening to True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. The man in the footage was Australian-born Simon Peter Carmen, and later that Friday, he was arrested at the airport about to board a flight. Because in a suitcase on the side of the road, investigators found the body of a teenage girl. Her belongings had been jammed in beside her. Her name was Tunchanok Donhomla, and Carmen has been charged with her murder. This is a story that made international headlines, outrageing people in Thailand and Australia

• 1:37Speaker 00

  alike, and we're only at the start of it. Carmen is about to face a lengthy, highly-publicised court process, while the family of the girl he allegedly murdered share their grief with the world. Zach Hope is the Sydney Morning Herald's South East Asia correspondent and has been following this story closely. He joins us now.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Zach, thanks for joining us on True Crime Conversations. Can you tell me about how you first heard about this story and what it meant for you as a correspondent on that side of the world?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it was a weekend. I was out with my family and an email and a couple of texts started to come through. And straight away, I knew that it would probably be a big one. Anytime an Australian is in trouble overseas in this part of the world, I'm often on a plane. You know, I don't think we knew at that time, sort of, the full... Well, we didn't have maybe a comprehension of the full, sort of, horrors of this story, the backstories and the grisliness behind it. But yeah, I was on a plane. I was in Pattaya the next day, I believe.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  It's been a really big, a really big couple of weeks as the correspondent in this part of the world. And, I mean, just from a sort of a work perspective, some of the challenges of filing against really tight deadlines in time zones that are not very complimentary and, you know, language barriers and, you know, access to the right people and this sort of thing. So these are just all parts, part of the challenges of this role.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Let's start with Simon Peter-Carmen. What do we know about him and his backstory and why he was in Thailand in the first place?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  There's still a lot that we don't actually know about this fellow. He was born in Ballarat, 45 years old. He appears to have lived much of his life in Western Australia. He was a truck driver for a time. He seems to have been a guy who spent a lot of time in Thailand. So he wasn't just a tourist there for a few days or for a week. He seems to have lived there, sort of, on and off for quite some time. His neighbours in the condominium where he lived said that he'd been in that particular unit for about the last eight months. So he was a long-term kind of guy in that condominium complex. It's a multi-tower.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Sort of thing, it's the costume, the equivalent of three hundred and thirty Australian dollars a month to live there, so pretty cheap. Lots of, lots of expats there, lots of, lots of older Europeans who have, who have gone there to, to retire.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting, the, the, the area where he lived is called Jomtien. That's about twenty minutes drive south of Pattaya. Jomtien is a, a much quieter, calmer sort of place. That's often where people go to live to get away from the wild scene of, of Pattaya. And, and that's also where this, this, this, this alleged murder has also taken place in his condominium in Jomtien.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Well, to move over to Pattaya and to, to tell that story a little bit, it's known as the sex capital of the world, isn't it?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I, I, and I could, I absolutely couldn't disagree. I'd never actually been there before until this story. But we stayed in, in Jomtien when we were there and before going to Pattaya. And of course, it's all part of the same ecosystem, right? You could call Jomtien Pattaya if you like. It's sort of a neighbouring suburb or satellite kind of neighbourhood or something, you know. But anyway, before going to Pattaya, I was in a pub talking to some old grizzled Englishmen and they, they sort of said, we've, you know, we've done Pattaya. We've, you know, this is more our speed now. It's the kind of place where you can go for a little while, but you have to check out pretty quickly because it's so full on. So I was sort of prepared for it, but yeah, it's a really, really wild scene.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  We went down, a lot of your listeners and viewers would have been to Walking Street in Pattaya, I'm sure. And the neon lights, the blaring music, the rows of girls, the, the, the men holding little cards for ping pong shows and God knows what other shows trying to get you into their establishments. And then not too far away is Soy Six, which means Street Six. And, and I think that was even wilder still. There must have been at least a thousand young women in, in bikinis and lingerie, sort of dancing at the front of the bars, trying to entice guys in for a drink and, and whatever was to follow after that, that drink.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  And, you know, this was the, this was the, the low season as well.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  You know, I can just imagine what it's like on a weekend in the high season too.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  What is the situation with sex services in Thailand? Is it legal, illegal? Are there kind of things that they are allowed to do, not allowed to do?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Well, it's a real, it's a real grey zone. So brothels strictly outlawed, pimping strictly outlawed. Prostitution in and of itself is a little bit more complicated. The way it was explained to me by a Thai legal expert is that that it's not in it, in and of itself, it's not actually outlawed. And if you go to look at the laws, there are no offences for prostitution in and of itself, but there are offences for doing it openly, shamelessly or creating a nuisance. And I think that creates a lot of grey zone. I mean, for example, what does openly mean? Um, you know, does that mean just someone coming up and talking to someone on the street, approaching someone on the street?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Does openly mean, you know, wearing skimpy clothes and clearly presenting as a sex worker, you know? So I think that's where the grey zone comes in. But most people just would just say that it's illegal essentially. Um, just because of this grey zone, but that doesn't stop the industry at all. In fact, it is just absolutely rampant. Everyone knows it's rampant. There's some estimates that there might be in Pattaya alone as many as 50,000 sex workers in the high season there. Um, so, you know, if it is illegal, then it's certainly not being policed.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Do people go to this area of Thailand for things other than sex? Is it a popular tourist spot for, you know, families or anyone else?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's been trying to, it's been trying to rebrand itself as a spot for families and there's a nice beach and it's beautiful weather and all this stuff. And yeah, we, I saw a lot of families, even on Walking Street. Now, I wasn't there at two or three o'clock in the morning. It was sort of more around 10, 11 at night and I saw families there, um, taking it in and the parents were probably a little bit regretful that they'd taken their, taken their, taken their kids there. Um, but as for other people, you know, Quite funny because everyone you speak to, they're not there for the girls, they'll tell you.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  So we spoke to a lot of men and none of them were there for the girls. They're, they're, you know, they're all there for the, the clubs and the drinks and the, um, and the beach and the good times. So anyway, there, there are a lot of other things to do there. Uh, but certainly, um, sex is what is its brand, is what it's known for. And that's, that's what brings in the dollars, I believe, to Pattaya.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Do we know if Carmen had been paying for sex services before this incident?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  There, there has been some reports about communication and, and sort of attempts and, and chats that he's had with girls, but nothing official like that is, has come from police. Um. Um, but yeah, there certainly is re- reporting to that end. We spoke to one of his neighbours, said that he'd never seen, um, you know, he'd been living next to Carmen this whole time, um, or living down the, down the hallway from Carmen this whole time and, uh, saw him quite a bit, had never seen him with a girl. Um, but he also said, that's not to say it wasn't happening, you know, they didn't really mix. Carmen didn't seem to really mix very closely with many of the neighbours, at least the ones that we spoke to. Um, so a bit hard to tell.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Were those neighbours that had had interactions able to kind of paint a picture of who this guy was in terms of behaviour or what he was like to live around?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  It sounds so cliche to say this, but this is just what they said to us and they were, they were very shocked when this news came out. Uh, and that's not to say that he was sort of a, you know, came across as a lovely guy or anything like that. They said he could be a little bit difficult at times. He was the kind of guy who wanted his own way. Um, but he never caused any trouble at the condominium. Um, he could sometimes get a bit frustrated at drunk people. Um, but one lady, as she said to us, that's just, that's just normal to get frustrated at drunk people if they're making a nuisance in your, in your room. The, the most striking thing that, uh, about him, they told us was

• 11:02Speaker 01

  his slow manner of speaking, his slow manner of walking, his slow manner of staring at things. Um, he's, he does have a, a scar on the back of his head. One of his neighbours. Actually, a couple of people there thought that he'd had a tumour at some point and had an operation on the back of his head. You know, there's been other reports though about maybe an accident that he had at some point. No one knows for sure. And or, you know, maybe he was just a natural sort of slow talker and slow walker. I guess all that sort of information will come out more fulsomely once the court process begins, we hope.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Let's bring in Tungjanok here. What do we know about her and her kind of story?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  I spent an evening and a morning with her family. It's in the province of Kalasun in the North East, in a pretty small, ordinary town called Bumbow. She has a pretty large, extended family. We know that her mother left the family when she was still a baby. Her father and her great aunts raised her. What her father told us and is a source of

• 12:25Speaker 01

  immense sort of shame and grief and regret on his part is that he was jailed from 2019 to 2023 for drug offences. He was caught with some with pills on him, which he says was for personal use, but he got put away from prison for having a trafficable amount. But those years were in Tanajook Don Homlows, you know, formative years. And this is a really poor family. And her father was the principal breadwinner. So when he was in prison, they really struggled. They were really destitute. And even once he came out, he's not earning very much money at all. He's a freelance farmhand essentially.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  And while his income fluctuates, it averages to about the equivalent of 250 Australian dollars a month. So that's not very much. And Tanajook, she did used to go to school, but her family says that she was bullied and teased at school because, in part, because her mother had gone and her father was in prison. So you can maybe imagine some of the cruel kind of things that were said to her in the playground. Whether she was still attending schools was a little bit harder to get to. The family say she hadn't left school, but she was doing a different curriculum that didn't require her to be on person at the school premises all the time.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  So still a little bit of uncertainty about that. She didn't have many friends. And her father said that he didn't necessarily approve of her latest batch of friends. He didn't specify why. But he wasn't going to step in and get in the way of those friendships because she didn't have others. And so when one of those friends proposed a trip to Pattaya, Tanahchook wanted to go. And her father, feeling this intense grief and shame and wanting to give everything that he possibly could to his daughter, said she could go and gave her the equivalent of about

• 14:38Speaker 01

  forty dollars to help her on her way. She was only supposed to go for a short time, he said. And he said that the reason that she'd given was for a holiday to Pattaya and she wanted to see the beach.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  And as far as they knew, they didn't know that she would be involved in sex services?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely not, no, they're still very uncomfortable about that detail. It's in the, it's in the police report that, that she and Simon Carmen had agreed to sexual services. They're very uncomfortable about that. They, they're still wrapping their heads around it. Of course, they're gonna try and defend their daughter, but they say that wasn't what she was doing back home. She wasn't into drugs. And, and her father was, you know, said to me, what sort of father would allow her to, to do that kind of work? So whether it was an opportunistic thing, whether she was taken advantage of in, in some way, that's still to play out.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  After the break, Zach tells me what happened at 3am on the morning of June 25, when Tangenok met Simon Carmen.

• 15:54Speaker 00

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• 16:30Speaker 00

  Can you talk us through what we know happened? Because the pair, we know, met at about 3am. And a lot of this story, I guess, is captured on CCTV camera. We can kind of see their movements.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they, yeah, they met at 3am on the 25th of June, at, near the beach, and Soy Seven in Jomtien. So not in Pataya, in Jomtien. One of the friends, that Cake, and that's what her friends called, that's what Tana Chuk's friends and family called her Cake. One of Cake's friends who was with her, then filmed the pair walking off. Not in a, not in a like, sort of a scared or, you know, worried kind of way filming. It seemed, you know, the friend even sort of made a bit of a, like a gesture sort of thing,

• 17:28Speaker 01

  almost like a celebratory gesture, off they go. So there were no red flags at that point. At about 3.30, they've arrived back at Carmen's condominium. And that's where the CCTV cameras capture them in the foyer. And it captures them disappearing up the elevator. They would have then got off at Carmen's 15th floor and walked to his room 20 building.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  What happens next, there's only one person alive to give their version of events. When Simon Carmen was first detained, he said that he didn't have anything to do with it. But later they started to present, the police started to present him with evidence. And that evidence is the same CCTV cameras in his condominium capturing him about 18 hours after they had first entered, leaving with a suitcase. And then less than an hour later, he returns without that suitcase. And now there's also other CCTV cameras around Pattaya and Jomtiem that have captured him

• 18:39Speaker 01

  driving on a motorbike with that suitcase strapped to the back. So, once they've started to present him with that, then he has, according to police, this is what police have told us, he then said, yes, this happened, but that he was acting in self-defense and that Cake had come at him with a knife.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  I want to get to those details in a minute, but first, I'm astounded by how quickly the police moved in this because, you know, he was at an airport by Friday night. How did they clue into this and get him so quickly?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  It was extremely, extremely quick. The police colonel said that it had, as soon as this woman, as soon as Cake was reported missing, and that a foreigner was involved, he said that he had a bad feeling about this because this sort of thing has happened before. So, rather than just doing the usual missing person report and waiting for then that missing person to, you know, give him a couple of days to turn up again, they've immediately cracked into gear. So, the Cake's friends knew where Cake had gone and police were then able to go and look at that CCTV footage. So, they whizzed through the whole thing.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  So, they saw the suitcase coming down, they saw Carmen returning without the suitcase. And then they've moved, they've then seen CCTV of him leaving with another suitcase, presumably going to the airport. So, they've moved really quickly from there. They've notified immigration authorities who have picked him up at Bangkok Silvana Bumi Airport, just minutes before he was about to get on a flight.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  A flight back to Australia, right?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  That's right, yes.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  And if he'd made that flight, would the Thai authorities been able to get him back?

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Well, that would have been an interesting one. They would have wanted him back, no doubt. Thailand, of course, has the death penalty. So Australia would not extradite someone if the death penalty was on the table. So I think what would have happened then, there would have been a negotiation between the governments. Maybe they would have agreed to take that off the table. And then maybe he would have been extradited back to Thailand to face court. But that's, I guess that's a hypothetical now.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, they detained him, arrested him, and they immediately noticed that he had injuries on his body. Can you tell us about that?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, he had what appeared to be scratch marks. And even some of the published photos that police have released just of him being detained. If you look closely, you can see some of these scratch marks, alleged scratch marks on his body. What the police told us was that when the immigration authorities at the airport noticed those and asked what they were all about, Carmen then allegedly said that he'd been in a fight with one of his friends and that's what they were. But as I said, once they got him back to the police station and presented him with evidence,

• 21:51Speaker 01

  that's when his story started to change and he admitted that there had been a struggle with Kate and that he was protecting himself and that he had strangled her and didn't intend to kill her.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  He then moved her into the bathroom. And what he told his police was that when he realised that she was no longer alive, that's when he put her in the suitcase.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  So he has been charged with murder, concealment of a body and moving or destroying a body, and taking a minor for indecent acts. As you mentioned, the death penalty's on the table here.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  That's correct, that's correct. Depending on who you ask, the legal scholar that I spoke to seems to think that if convicted, it would be quite likely that he would receive the death penalty.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  Really?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  But the big caveat is that it's precedent for Thailand's king to commute people on death row. So there hasn't been an execution in Thailand since 2018.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Just last year, Amnesty International's report said, I believe it was 119 people were given death sentences in Thailand just last year. But it is precedent for the king to commute those sentences, the life imprisonment, and that often happens on, you know, celebration occasions, like his birthday or the Queen's birthday, this sort of thing. So what would happen then if his sentence would be commuted by the king, then he would probably be given life imprisonment, which would be a minimum of 15 years. And after 15 years, he could again petition the king to have his sentence commuted again. Of course, this is if he's

• 23:37Speaker 01

  convicted because, you know, he claims self-defense. So we'll just have to see what the court decides in that matter, the Thai court.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  We do have two videos that are circulating from the airport after his arrest where he kind of talks to the camera. Can you tell us about those? Because there's one in particular that angered me because he kind of makes, you know, a bit of a warning to other girls or other sex workers.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know what that's about. I've seen the videos that you're talking about. And he appears to sort of speak in a clipped, almost Thai, like he's taking on a bit of sort of a Thai style of speech in it. Yeah, look, I have seen, I have seen what you're talking about. When he apologizes to the family, he says that it shouldn't have happened. Yeah, and you're right, he does say that it should be a warning to her. You know, what he means, what was beneath those words, I guess only he and maybe the police sort of know at this point. At last check, he still didn't actually have a lawyer.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Really?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  So there's still quite a lot that isn't actually known about this case.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  What he said for listeners is, "I feel bad for what happened to your daughter. It was out of my control. It shouldn't happen. Please tell other girls just to be careful."

• 25:07Speaker 00

  And you know, we've got an alleged murderer here and he is still going to go through the court processes, but please tell other girls just to be careful. Like, come on. I know that Cake's family have spoken to the media quite a lot and they've been quite, um, graphic in their descriptions that they want him to be executed and, and kind of their anger, haven't they?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  They have, they have. They, they, they want, they want justice to be dealt to him fairly. And if convicted, then yes, they want him to get the, the, the death sentence. And what they said explicitly to me was a, a life for a life. And, um, the, you know, they, they're,

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Cake was a very much loved member of their family, a very valuable member of their family. Not only have they been robbed of, of her, but they've also, you know, this is a poor family. They've also been robbed of, um, her earning potential in the future. And, you know, sure, this is secondary to, to the love of the person, but the, but these are, these are sort of real factors in, in, in poor parts of, of Southeast Asia in the world. Um, who's going to look after the, her great aunts, you know, who are starting to get very old now? Who's going to look after her father? Um, who's going to look after her baby cousin who she

• 26:31Speaker 01

  looked after? Um, um, you know, when, when the baby's parents were, were at work and, and doing things like that. So there, there's all sorts of repercussions like this for, for a family that, that comes from these poor, poor areas.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Where is Carmen currently being held? What, what are the prison kind of conditions that he would be living in?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Well, he's being held in the prison at Pataya. No one has been able to get inside and uh and speak to him or see him, as I said at last. At at my last county, still didn't actually have a lawyer. I don't I don't believe the prison, uh well, I haven't seen inside, so I can't I can't say. But I don't think it will be as bad as prison in Bangkok, if that's where he ends up, put it that way.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Um which which would probably be his likely destination if convicted.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  It's not going to be like an Australian cell, though. It's going to be a a lot more kind of destitute than that, isn't it?

• 27:36Speaker 01

  I I believe so. The Bangkok Hilton is quite famous.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Is it? Why?

• 27:41Speaker 01

  It is one of the one of the shocking prisons of the of the world. It's um uh a place a place of of misery. Um it is a place of real punishment.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  Do you know much about what we can expect from here? Is the court processes that Carmen is going to go up against, are they going to take? Weeks, months, years? Is it like the system back here where someone might sit in prison for a long time before they see a judge?

• 28:09Speaker 01

  It could happen that way, but you would think that the Thai or given the given the global attention on this case. Um given how quickly the police move, I think the Thais would wanna would wanna get moving on this. There isn't a court date set for him yet. The Thai investigators are still putting the investigation together. They have close to three months, a bit under three months, I believe, from the time of his arrest to be able to um to finalize the investigation and and and put it to prosecutors. So there still is a bit of time up his sleeve. But it it wouldn't surprise me if they do wanna get moving on this.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Is there any other evidence that we have been privy to at the moment? I I know an autopsy was undertaken?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, there there was an autopsy done in Bangkok and what the police told us about that was that she died by strangulation and there weren't any major assault injuries elsewhere on her body. Um and that, and this is a a little bit grisly, but um but that that, you know, she there were no her bones didn't need to be to be broken to be able to get her inside the suitcase either.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  It's a seventeen year old girl we're talking about here.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Very petite, very petite, small seventeen year old girl. And Simon Carmen, most people listening to this, watching this have probably seen his photos. He's a pretty big guy.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  In one of your articles, I was interested to read about one of her aunties attending the crime scene to prompt the spirit home. Can you tell us about that?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm certainly no expert on Buddhism and associated beliefs. But the family and, yeah, members of the family did attend room twenty, Simon Carmen's unit. They weren't given very long, but the landlord let them in to do a short ritual, a short ceremony. And the idea is that doing so sends the spirit back home to where they came from, to where they grew up. So it didn't linger in that place any longer. And that's my understanding of the purpose of that.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  She also had some descriptions of the room itself, didn't she?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  She said, yeah, well, I mean, her exact quote was, he's a very dirty man. When she went in there, there were piles of clothes, there were piles of dishes. A real squalor, a real slovenly kind of place.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Before I bring this next question up, I do want to reiterate to listeners that there has been no suggestion that Carmen is involved. But there have been two other cases of young women found in suitcases in the general vicinity fairly recently, haven't there, Zach?

• 31:03Speaker 01

  There have been. One of the developments, though, I understand that police have actually ruled him out of those cases now. I couldn't tell you that definitively, but that's my understanding that he's been ruled out of those cases. But yes, there were some similar ones, not in the immediate neighbourhood or anything like that, but in the area.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  Up next, we explore the lasting impact this case has had on Thailand's sex work industry and the women at its centre. What has this meant for the women and just the residents of Pattaya? Are they scared? Are they angry? What's the vibe there?

• 31:52Speaker 01

  I think scared and angry is probably a good way to put it. When we went out onto Walking Street in Pattaya and surrounds, we spoke to some women working openly as sex workers. And neither of them, or any of them, needed any prompting. I quoted two people in the story, but none of the people that we spoke to needed any prompting about this story. You know, I would pull up my phone with the photo and I said, have you heard about her? And straight away, they knew the details. It was something that they had all been talking about. It's something that frightens them, but it's also something that pops up from time to time.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  It's more of a risk to the sex workers who work independently. So on Walking Street and Soy Six, most of the girls there are attached to bars. Now, those bars have some pretty heavy-duty sort of people working behind the scenes, I think, right? So there's more security for these sort of girls. So ones who are working independently, you then have to make the choice about, well, where do they go with a client? If the client wants to go back to their condominium, do they go? Do they take that risk for that money? Or do they knock it back? So one sex worker told us that she's a veteran of the game. She said she would never go to someone's condominium.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  She has some hotels that know her, that she would go to use. But it's really sent a ripple through the industry. But as I said, these things do happen from time to time. One woman, as soon as we started talking about this, sort of listed, you know, another recent one from last year involving a woman who was mutilated very badly by a foreign client and found dead. So all these stories are in these women's minds and thoughts as they go about their business.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Well, that's devastating to hear that the murders of young sex workers is com- like relatively common in this part of the world and that they're not overly surprised.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, how do you say it? Maybe shocked but not surprised.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Might be the way to put it, you know, they're shocked, shocked at the details, um shocked that it could happen, but also not necessarily surprised because these things do pop up from time to time. And I don't think it's like a, you know, in every, in every week or every, even every month or that, or even every few months kind of things, but they do pop up. And I believe any woman who's been in the industry there for a long time would, would have a bit of a, a, a list of, um, uh, not just things that have made the news, but, but things that have happened and never made the news that, uh, that have happened to maybe her colleagues or friends or coworkers and it might not necessarily involve someone ending up dead, but just awful experiences with, with clients.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Um, you know, that said, the workers that we spoke to said that overwhelmingly every, all of their clients have been really nice to them as well. And then these are, they're mostly foreign men.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Um, and that, that overwhelmingly, the majority are, are, are very nice and respectful. So that's just worth, worth putting out there too. I, I, I don't think it's necessarily a, you know, a, a magnet for degenerates, although of course in that sort of crowd, the, the degenerates will be lurking in the midst.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  So where are we at now? And are Australian authorities involved at all? Or is this purely in the Thai police kind of camp now?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  As far as the, the, the criminal case goes, that's completely in the Thai camp. Though the Australian government will absolutely be on the scene um, in the form of the, the embassy, um, and the diplomats in Thailand. Just as a matter of course, they would, um, they, they would provide that service to any Australian who finds themselves, um, in trouble or overseas. It's a bit hard to know exactly what they do. They're a pretty secretive mob, D fat, especially, um. Especially when it comes to their activities overseas, but they would, they would, they would be involved in this as well.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  I know you're back in Singapore now, which is where you're based, but is this a story you're expecting to cover on the ground more as it unfolds?

• 36:25Speaker 01

  I imagine I can see myself in Pattaya again in a not too distant future, I'm sure. I think once this thing starts to move through the courts, what's, once we start to, to learn more, you know, it's just such a, it's just sort of such a shocking, a shocking case, isn't it, these two worlds colliding in a place where a lot of Australians have, might have been on a holiday.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  And, and the, the circumstances in which she was allegedly murdered have, have shocked Thailand and shocked Australia. And the fact that she was also just seventeen years old. So I, I think the, um, the interest and the public interest in this, this story is, is uh, is going to continue until, until the case reaches its conclusion.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Thank you to Zach for joining us on this episode. Make sure you're following our show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify for updates on this story and all the stories we cover. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation.