Who Will Be The Next Victim They Bury ?

[taxexile]

Bar girl and the expat: a killing foretold.

Every year hundreds of Britons leave the UK to marry Thai brides. The perils of such liaisons were revealed last week when retired engineer Ian Beeston was murdered by his wife and her lover. Ian MacKinnon and Andrew Drummond in Suwannaphum investigate a ruthless marriage market in which money can buy beauty but not necessarily love

Ian Mackinnon and Andrew Drummond

Sunday August 17 2008 The Observer , UK.

Andrew Herrington, a retired Birmingham lorry driver who now lives in Thailand, lowered his voice and turned to his companions: 'Well, you know, he married a bar girl. What did he expect?'

Sitting on the ground floor of his home - a two-storey house squatting in a rice paddy in Isan, north-east Thailand - Herrington, aged 51, was talking about his friend and neighbour, Ian Beeston, who was found murdered last weekend after predicting that his Thai wife would kill him.

Beeston, 69, a retired design engineer, had been beaten and stabbed in his house - police say he took seven hours to die. His wife, Wacheerawan, 42, and her Thai lover, Somchit Janong, 48, confessed and have been charged with murder. In bizarre and macabre fashion, Janong even re-enacted for police and photographers the manner in which he had clubbed Beeston to death.

This was no isolated romance that culminated in a tragedy. The British embassy in Bangkok processes the wedding documents of up to 70 couples each week. The requests are almost exclusively from older British men - among 860,000 UK tourists each year - hoping to marry younger Thai women. But for any British man hoping to follow in Beeston's footsteps and build a new better life in Thailand, his death was a stark reminder of how badly things can go wrong.

Three of the group of worried farangs - the Thai term for foreigners - who had gathered in Isan, have invested a hefty chunk of their life's savings building houses nearby on the fringes of Suwannaphum village, deep in Thailand's poorest province, Roi Et. Beeston's house, which swallowed up all of his £250,000 retirement nest egg, was described locally as 'palatial'. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the killing, a siege mentality has taken hold.

'Wanna' was indeed a bar girl, a prostitute. She met Beeston in a bar in Beach Road, Soi 2, in Pattaya, the garish beach resort in southern Thailand, when he was still coming to the country on holiday. The resort is notorious for go-go and hostess bars with a 'sin city' reputation that surpasses that of Bangkok. Eventually, his marriage having fallen apart, Beeston took early retirement from his job at the Ford motor plant in Dagenham, Essex, and moved to Thailand. In 1999 he married Wanna and paid for her two grown-up children to be put through university.

The good life hit the buffers when he discovered Wanna had secretly sold his Suwannaphum property. As foreigners are barred from owning land in Thailand, he had put everything in her name. All his savings from working as a design engineer, first at Perkins and then at Ford, had gone. Worse, the new owners of his house were agitating to move in. Four months ago a furious Beeston banished Wanna to a corrugated shack in the back garden. Friends feared then that he had signed his own death warrant.

In a letter left with lawyers, Beeston predicted his own grisly fate. 'It is just a matter of time now,' he wrote. 'I am in real fear for my own life.'

Beeston's romance, like so many others involving Western men escaping loneliness at home, began with a stroll down one of the hundreds of neon-lit strips in Thailand's tourist-friendly sex quarters. The ratio of male tourists to Thai women is almost two to one. Walk down Bangkok's Soi Cowboy or Patpong any evening and it is easy to see how masculine fantasy can take flight. Ageing, unprepossessing foreign men are fawned over by lithe young Thai women wearing broad smiles and revealing clothes. The prospective clients are beckoned through curtained doorways to a dimly lit world where bar girls dance suggestively on a tiny stage and strip.

Others chat up the punters in rudimentary English. The price of all this attention is just the cost of a drink for the girl, perhaps a tip. The often unspoken element is that the girl will go back and spend the night at his hotel. Cash is rarely mentioned, and there is no unseemly haggling, but the going rate is little more than a 'present' of £20.

'[The men] are often not the most handsome of all, they are usually in the latter years of their life, they are bald, unattractive and quite lonely in their own little society,' writes Thai anthropologist Dr Yos Santasombat in Hello My Big Big Honey!, an anthology of love letters penned to Bangkok bar girls. 'When they come to Patpong, they're struck with girls who are all over them.'

The appeal of easy, cheap sex is evident the next morning. The same men hold hands with their bar girls skipping down the pavements of Bangkok's tourist haunts. 'Often they extend their relationship for a number of days or weeks or even years,' writes Yos. 'Sometimes the farang himself ends up spending the entire vacation with one girl and sometimes comes back. Sometimes she becomes his mistress or even a wife.'

Romance with a Westerner in such circumstances can come perilously close to a game of mutual exploitation. Nearly all of the girls have flocked to the cities and resorts to escape their own prison: an impoverished existence in Thailand's rural expanses, whereas a night's takings from the city bar could sustain a family for a month. From Isan's desperately poor, rice farming villages, where hunger is the norm, the bars of Bangkok or Pattaya are a welcome escape. For girls with little education they provide an opportunity to shine and have the honour of providing for their families by sending new-found riches back home.

'They do it because it's an easy life,' said John Burdett, a British lawyer-turned-novelist who has interviewed hundreds of bar girls for books such as Bangkok Haunts. 'You don't want to be a subsistence rice farmer. It's very, very hard. Village life's claustrophobic. Bar girl work isn't dirty. It's not strenuous. They don't have dozens of partners; maybe one or two a week. The rest of the time they're getting men to buy drinks and existing on tips. In the village there's a kind of omertà, where no one talks about it. But they send money home to care for people, so they've big status.

'A bar girl in her early or mid-twenties has a 10-year window of opportunity to get out of poverty,' said Burdett. 'So if she spends time with a guy she is using up her chances. She sees that as an investment and she's entitled to something in return. The car and the house may be in her name. In the West we've lost our intuitive understanding of how poverty shapes thinking. So, if after 10 years together the foreigner decides to move out, leaving her with little to show for it, that's a problem. She's lost face and that's terribly important. Her image has been damaged and it might even lead people to kill.'

Stephen Treharne Jones, 63, was a former neighbour of Beeston. Jones met Lamyai, then 32, in a Pattaya bar and sought to 'rescue' her and send her home to Isan. 'When I met my wife, Lamyai , she had nothing,' said Jones. 'I paid her out of a sex bar in Pattaya and told her to go home. When I visited her home she was living in a room with her two children. There was no bathroom or toilet facilities, no doors, no tiles, no electricity, just a mattress and blankets on the floor. So I bought a big home for both of us and bought the land off her relatives.'

Jones's world collapsed when he asked his wife to sell a piece of land he had bought. Lamyai refused, saying it was impossible. Only when he went with a lawyer to the land registry did he discover he never owned it. He bought it from Lamyai's family, but allowed them to keep it in their names because of foreign ownership prohibitions. When challenged, Lamyai threw him out of their luxury villa in Kalasin, an hour from Suwannaphum. Penniless, he scuttled back to King's Lynn, Norfolk, two months ago. He now lives there in sheltered accommodation.

'Looking back now, I know my Thai wife had set me up from day one,' said Jones last week. 'In Kalasin I know of three other foreigners who were kicked out by their wives after they completed property purchases. They say there's no fool like an old fool. But I did genuinely love Lamyai. I was sold a dream, I guess. A quiet life in the country where food and drink was cheap, the women attentive and the weather warm. But that's not the reality. The reality is that one becomes a captive.'

Lamyai has a very different account of the breakdown in relations. 'If Stephen had been a good husband I would not have asked him to leave,' she said. 'But when he argued he called me a thief and a prostitute. We were quite happy for four years, even though he spent a lot of time going out drinking with his farang friends in the area. Stephen had a house he could have lived in all his life if he respected me as his wife, but at the end I was just his servant.'

As his own marriage became a bitter property dispute, Beeston saw trouble coming. Exiled to the garden shed, his wife had installed her lover, Janong, and they kept Beeston a virtual prisoner in his own home with taunts and attacks.

In a letter to his lawyers, Beeston told how his wife had started a money lending business - lending his money - and had paid off local police so she could run an illegal lottery. 'My wife threatened me with a gun,' he said in the letter, detailing a series of attacks on his house involving 'stones, lumps of wood, fireworks and even a tin of paint'. The house was also frequently burgled, he said.

Like so many Britons and other expatriates living in rural Thailand who are unable to converse in Thai, it appears Beeston may have been the unwitting victim of a sting his wife had been waiting for years to bring off. According to his friends, the whole town, even the police chief, knew but nobody said anything. 'I thought she loved me, but she only wanted my money after all,' Beeston had told his Australian neighbour, Bill Lamb.

'He told me he thought his wife was about to kill him,' said Lamb. 'My feeling is that Ian had been paying for Wanna's daughters from a previous marriage to go to university. This year they both graduated. I just don't think he was needed any more. She had it all. To be honest - the life of a foreigner isn't worth much around here.'

Back in Herrington's Suwannaphum house, fists were clenched as the group discussed a fitting revenge for the perpetrators of the callous act. The palpable sentiment was: 'It's them or us.' But the bitter consensus was also that after all the publicity had died down Beeston's wife would be granted bail and freed. 'She's got the money, and with money cases just get dropped,' said Herrington.

[mgjackson69]

> "...From Isan's desperately poor, rice farming villages, where hunger is the norm,..."

Maybe I am going to the "better" places in Isaan, but I have not seen anyone who does not have food. In many instances they do not have much by our Western standards, but not many are hungry.

The girls do not go to "the big city" to work to buy food...they go to be able to buy all of the things that they think everyone needs, from watching those dumbass Thai soap operas and the other garbage on television.

[xbusman]

Lets pin this in the newbie section. The only problems here is that they broke the law of Thailand:

NEVER INVEST MORE THAN YOU CAN WALK AWAY FROM

AND

Be smart enough to know when to walk........

[bergen]

I would indeed ask for trouble if I tried to banish my wife to a corrugated shack in the back garden!

[Gary A]

It's NOT likely I would ever be murdered. Being worth more dead than alive violates my rule number two for life in Thailand.

[Dave the Dude]

I would indeed ask for trouble if I tried to banish my wife to a corrugated shack in the back garden!

Why, who have you got in there that the wife should'nt see ?

[abdulrahman]

I would indeed ask for trouble if I tried to banish my wife to a corrugated shack in the back garden!

For sure I wouldn't survive 4 months,likely not more as 4 hours!

[Maestro]

I have deleted a post that contained modifications in the quoted text of another poster, making it appear as if that other poster had written it that way, and also deleted a post that quoted the post with that adulterated quote.

The correct way quote another post is to quote only the text that is relevant to one's reply, leave that quoted text unchanged and write one's own comment below the box of quoted text.

--

Maestro

[Chaimai]

For 16m Baht you buy most of Roi-et.

I saw one picture of the house on an earlier thread and at first glance you would get change out of 5m.

[farangconnection]

And that article was written in the Farang Connection last monday. But it was a shock when one of the reporters showed me who he was writing about and it turned out to be one of our customers. Poor sod.

[PhilHarries]

'Looking back now, I know my Thai wife had set me up from day one,' said Jones last week. 'In Kalasin I know of three other foreigners who were kicked out by their wives after they completed property purchases. They say there's no fool like an old fool. But I did genuinely love Lamyai. I was sold a dream, I guess. A quiet life in the country where food and drink was cheap, the women attentive and the weather warm. But that's not the reality. The reality is that one becomes a captive.'

Lamyai has a very different account of the breakdown in relations. 'If Stephen had been a good husband I would not have asked him to leave,' she said. 'But when he argued he called me a thief and a prostitute. We were quite happy for four years, even though he spent a lot of time going out drinking with his farang friends in the area. Stephen had a house he could have lived in all his life if he respected me as his wife, but at the end I was just his servant.'

Without commenting on the main subject of the article these two paragraphs illustrate that there are always two sides to a story. I'm not say who is right and who is wrong here but there are quite a few guys who marry ex bar girls and think it is okay for them to continue with their boozing and whoremongering because she is an ex ho and should be grateful for her rescue. To an extent these girls accept this provided it is kept discreet but in small villages everybody knows everything, just like village life back in the UK, and loss of face can be a big thing for these girls.

[Gary A]

There are always two sides to every story. I know guys who don't deserve a decent wife because they consider their wife as paid for property and treat her as a piece of property. On the other hand I know women who are busily taking everything they can get from their naive husbands. The naive husband will be the last to know. I do think age differences are a major problem and the old saying that there is no fool like an old fool rings very true in a lot of situations.

There is a local girl near us who is VERY attractive. She is funny, classy, intelligent and who looks to be a great catch. She is very well off at this point. Always a new vehicle, a beautiful home and a number of other properties. Everything she has came from naive farangs. The relationships seldom last more than a year. When her boyfriend starts to balk at her request to buy her things, she moves on. She is now about 40 years old and the next guy may be lucky because she is set for the rest of her life financially. She is now ready to relax and settle down.

It indeed pays to be a cynic regarding relationships. Being cynical has served me well.

[PhilHarries]

Too right Gary and Lamyai's side of the story may well be a pack of lies but usually farangs who get ripped off in Thailand blame everything and everybody but themselves.

As you say cynicism is the order of the day and if it looks too good to be true it generally is (and that applies to just about everything in life).

[farangconnection]

Two good replies there lads, although I did know the guy and to me he didn't seem to fall into that catogary. I was happily married for 10 years, ok we had our ups and downs. Six years ago in Pattaya my wife caught me with two girls, and she said that was my one and only chance. Last year it happened again (too drunk to do anything both times) and she walked. Went back to her childhood sweetheart. We now run the pub together on better terms than we have ever been. We still love each other, but she has her boyfriend and I have my girl. She says she could cut me off with nothing any time she wants, but she will not do it. Actually, when news of our split up reached the village, they all rallied round me to make sure she did treat me right. I felt kinda special then. I also know plenty of people who have a bit on the side whenever they can, in fact I get plenty of requests from married visitors as to where the massage parlours??? are in Surin.

[Dave the Dude]

I also know plenty of people who have a bit on the side whenever they can, in fact I get plenty of requests from married visitors as to where the massage parlours??? are in Surin.

I was in one last week (just for a beer) and all the girls were asking where Martin was?

[bergen]

I also know plenty of people who have a bit on the side whenever they can, in fact I get plenty of requests from married visitors as to where the massage parlours??? are in Surin.

I was in one last week (just for a beer) and all the girls were asking where Martin was?

[farangconnection]

I also know plenty of people who have a bit on the side whenever they can, in fact I get plenty of requests from married visitors as to where the massage parlours??? are in Surin.

I was in one last week (just for a beer) and all the girls were asking where Martin was?

I only go there for a <deleted>...........................nny you should say that

[Samuian]

Another sad, sad story, nevertheless there are always some "smart ass_s" around, until it hits them as well.... have seen horses puke!

However hope these terrible stories make their rounds in the pubs, bars and strip clubs.... be warned for every one, there is a story written, waiting to be enacted!

[roygsd]

Bar girl and the expat: a killing foretold.

Every year hundreds of Britons leave the UK to marry Thai brides. The perils of such liaisons were revealed last week when retired engineer Ian Beeston was murdered by his wife and her lover. Ian MacKinnon and Andrew Drummond in Suwannaphum investigate a ruthless marriage market in which money can buy beauty but not necessarily love

Ian Mackinnon and Andrew Drummond

Sunday August 17 2008 The Observer , UK.

Andrew Herrington, a retired Birmingham lorry driver who now lives in Thailand, lowered his voice and turned to his companions: 'Well, you know, he married a bar girl. What did he expect?'

Sitting on the ground floor of his home - a two-storey house squatting in a rice paddy in Isan, north-east Thailand - Herrington, aged 51, was talking about his friend and neighbour, Ian Beeston, who was found murdered last weekend after predicting that his Thai wife would kill him.

Beeston, 69, a retired design engineer, had been beaten and stabbed in his house - police say he took seven hours to die. His wife, Wacheerawan, 42, and her Thai lover, Somchit Janong, 48, confessed and have been charged with murder. In bizarre and macabre fashion, Janong even re-enacted for police and photographers the manner in which he had clubbed Beeston to death.

This was no isolated romance that culminated in a tragedy. The British embassy in Bangkok processes the wedding documents of up to 70 couples each week. The requests are almost exclusively from older British men - among 860,000 UK tourists each year - hoping to marry younger Thai women. But for any British man hoping to follow in Beeston's footsteps and build a new better life in Thailand, his death was a stark reminder of how badly things can go wrong.

Three of the group of worried farangs - the Thai term for foreigners - who had gathered in Isan, have invested a hefty chunk of their life's savings building houses nearby on the fringes of Suwannaphum village, deep in Thailand's poorest province, Roi Et. Beeston's house, which swallowed up all of his £250,000 retirement nest egg, was described locally as 'palatial'. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the killing, a siege mentality has taken hold.

'Wanna' was indeed a bar girl, a prostitute. She met Beeston in a bar in Beach Road, Soi 2, in Pattaya, the garish beach resort in southern Thailand, when he was still coming to the country on holiday. The resort is notorious for go-go and hostess bars with a 'sin city' reputation that surpasses that of Bangkok. Eventually, his marriage having fallen apart, Beeston took early retirement from his job at the Ford motor plant in Dagenham, Essex, and moved to Thailand. In 1999 he married Wanna and paid for her two grown-up children to be put through university.

The good life hit the buffers when he discovered Wanna had secretly sold his Suwannaphum property. As foreigners are barred from owning land in Thailand, he had put everything in her name. All his savings from working as a design engineer, first at Perkins and then at Ford, had gone. Worse, the new owners of his house were agitating to move in. Four months ago a furious Beeston banished Wanna to a corrugated shack in the back garden. Friends feared then that he had signed his own death warrant.

In a letter left with lawyers, Beeston predicted his own grisly fate. 'It is just a matter of time now,' he wrote. 'I am in real fear for my own life.'

Beeston's romance, like so many others involving Western men escaping loneliness at home, began with a stroll down one of the hundreds of neon-lit strips in Thailand's tourist-friendly sex quarters. The ratio of male tourists to Thai women is almost two to one. Walk down Bangkok's Soi Cowboy or Patpong any evening and it is easy to see how masculine fantasy can take flight. Ageing, unprepossessing foreign men are fawned over by lithe young Thai women wearing broad smiles and revealing clothes. The prospective clients are beckoned through curtained doorways to a dimly lit world where bar girls dance suggestively on a tiny stage and strip.

Others chat up the punters in rudimentary English. The price of all this attention is just the cost of a drink for the girl, perhaps a tip. The often unspoken element is that the girl will go back and spend the night at his hotel. Cash is rarely mentioned, and there is no unseemly haggling, but the going rate is little more than a 'present' of £20.

'[The men] are often not the most handsome of all, they are usually in the latter years of their life, they are bald, unattractive and quite lonely in their own little society,' writes Thai anthropologist Dr Yos Santasombat in Hello My Big Big Honey!, an anthology of love letters penned to Bangkok bar girls. 'When they come to Patpong, they're struck with girls who are all over them.'

The appeal of easy, cheap sex is evident the next morning. The same men hold hands with their bar girls skipping down the pavements of Bangkok's tourist haunts. 'Often they extend their relationship for a number of days or weeks or even years,' writes Yos. 'Sometimes the farang himself ends up spending the entire vacation with one girl and sometimes comes back. Sometimes she becomes his mistress or even a wife.'

Romance with a Westerner in such circumstances can come perilously close to a game of mutual exploitation. Nearly all of the girls have flocked to the cities and resorts to escape their own prison: an impoverished existence in Thailand's rural expanses, whereas a night's takings from the city bar could sustain a family for a month. From Isan's desperately poor, rice farming villages, where hunger is the norm, the bars of Bangkok or Pattaya are a welcome escape. For girls with little education they provide an opportunity to shine and have the honour of providing for their families by sending new-found riches back home.

'They do it because it's an easy life,' said John Burdett, a British lawyer-turned-novelist who has interviewed hundreds of bar girls for books such as Bangkok Haunts. 'You don't want to be a subsistence rice farmer. It's very, very hard. Village life's claustrophobic. Bar girl work isn't dirty. It's not strenuous. They don't have dozens of partners; maybe one or two a week. The rest of the time they're getting men to buy drinks and existing on tips. In the village there's a kind of omertà, where no one talks about it. But they send money home to care for people, so they've big status.

'A bar girl in her early or mid-twenties has a 10-year window of opportunity to get out of poverty,' said Burdett. 'So if she spends time with a guy she is using up her chances. She sees that as an investment and she's entitled to something in return. The car and the house may be in her name. In the West we've lost our intuitive understanding of how poverty shapes thinking. So, if after 10 years together the foreigner decides to move out, leaving her with little to show for it, that's a problem. She's lost face and that's terribly important. Her image has been damaged and it might even lead people to kill.'

Stephen Treharne Jones, 63, was a former neighbour of Beeston. Jones met Lamyai, then 32, in a Pattaya bar and sought to 'rescue' her and send her home to Isan. 'When I met my wife, Lamyai , she had nothing,' said Jones. 'I paid her out of a sex bar in Pattaya and told her to go home. When I visited her home she was living in a room with her two children. There was no bathroom or toilet facilities, no doors, no tiles, no electricity, just a mattress and blankets on the floor. So I bought a big home for both of us and bought the land off her relatives.'

Jones's world collapsed when he asked his wife to sell a piece of land he had bought. Lamyai refused, saying it was impossible. Only when he went with a lawyer to the land registry did he discover he never owned it. He bought it from Lamyai's family, but allowed them to keep it in their names because of foreign ownership prohibitions. When challenged, Lamyai threw him out of their luxury villa in Kalasin, an hour from Suwannaphum. Penniless, he scuttled back to King's Lynn, Norfolk, two months ago. He now lives there in sheltered accommodation.

'Looking back now, I know my Thai wife had set me up from day one,' said Jones last week. 'In Kalasin I know of three other foreigners who were kicked out by their wives after they completed property purchases. They say there's no fool like an old fool. But I did genuinely love Lamyai. I was sold a dream, I guess. A quiet life in the country where food and drink was cheap, the women attentive and the weather warm. But that's not the reality. The reality is that one becomes a captive.'

Lamyai has a very different account of the breakdown in relations. 'If Stephen had been a good husband I would not have asked him to leave,' she said. 'But when he argued he called me a thief and a prostitute. We were quite happy for four years, even though he spent a lot of time going out drinking with his farang friends in the area. Stephen had a house he could have lived in all his life if he respected me as his wife, but at the end I was just his servant.'

As his own marriage became a bitter property dispute, Beeston saw trouble coming. Exiled to the garden shed, his wife had installed her lover, Janong, and they kept Beeston a virtual prisoner in his own home with taunts and attacks.

In a letter to his lawyers, Beeston told how his wife had started a money lending business - lending his money - and had paid off local police so she could run an illegal lottery. 'My wife threatened me with a gun,' he said in the letter, detailing a series of attacks on his house involving 'stones, lumps of wood, fireworks and even a tin of paint'. The house was also frequently burgled, he said.

Like so many Britons and other expatriates living in rural Thailand who are unable to converse in Thai, it appears Beeston may have been the unwitting victim of a sting his wife had been waiting for years to bring off. According to his friends, the whole town, even the police chief, knew but nobody said anything. 'I thought she loved me, but she only wanted my money after all,' Beeston had told his Australian neighbour, Bill Lamb.

'He told me he thought his wife was about to kill him,' said Lamb. 'My feeling is that Ian had been paying for Wanna's daughters from a previous marriage to go to university. This year they both graduated. I just don't think he was needed any more. She had it all. To be honest - the life of a foreigner isn't worth much around here.'

Back in Herrington's Suwannaphum house, fists were clenched as the group discussed a fitting revenge for the perpetrators of the callous act. The palpable sentiment was: 'It's them or us.' But the bitter consensus was also that after all the publicity had died down Beeston's wife would be granted bail and freed. 'She's got the money, and with money cases just get dropped,' said Herrington.

Hi,

The reporter is simply promoting the sale of the paper, being economical with the truth is the best way to do that, they all do it and always will.

Tragic as this incident was, it is not exclusive to LOS, it happens everywhere in the world.

Much has been made about the age of the guys married to thai ladies, be sensible, given the choice would you chose a " old Wrinkly" or a "young Smoothy".

Silly question really as there are thousands of old wrinklies at home if that was there choice!

At the end of the day marriage is a big gamble, and most fail at home so why should it be any different in LOS?

Many men each year are murdered by their wives in the uk and other western countries but there the wife knows she only has to claim he has abused her and the legal system usually backs her up to the hilt, I am sure that there are far many cases of older guys getting tied up with ladies in the uk who take them to the cleaners than there is in LOS.

Again given the choice, would u rather marry an old wrinkly ( shudder!) in the uk who is just a likely to be after financial security or marry a younger lady who is equally after a secure future, the risk is just the same in my opinion.

The only difference is if it all goes tits up with an old bird from the uk it is likely he will only have memories of sleeping with an old bird to look back on, at least the older guy with the younger wife hs usually had some pleasure for a few years to look back on.

Cynical? Maybe, but not far from the truth for many I suspect.

By the way my wife is 20 years younger than me and up to date looks after me better than perhaps I deserve, but in all honesty I dont think this is unusual for farang/thai relationships in the main.

If only they came with a mute/volume control button for when she is on the phone to her family all would be perfect, why do they have to raise their voices? Is it just because they are so far away or what?.....................LOL

Dont worry chaps, I am sure your wife loves you too, you know it so bugger what anyone else thinks!

Roy gsd

[lampard10]

Hi,

The reporter is simply promoting the sale of the paper, being economical with the truth is the best way to do that, they all do it and always will.

Wrong..............................both reporters were freelance, out of Bangkok . I sat talking to them as they wrote the story.

[plachon]

> "...From Isan's desperately poor, rice farming villages, where hunger is the norm,..."

Maybe I am going to the "better" places in Isaan, but I have not seen anyone who does not have food. In many instances they do not have much by our Western standards, but not many are hungry.

The girls do not go to "the big city" to work to buy food...they go to be able to buy all of the things that they think everyone needs, from watching those dumbass Thai soap operas and the other garbage on television.

Yes, I saw that sentence and thought it let the article down. along with the notion that you can drive from Suwannaphum to Kalasin in an hour. Maybe in a Ferrari at 4.00 am averaging 160 km/hr it might just be possible?

But the general tone of the article is written as a stern warning to lonely old men in Britain to think twice before investing their life savings in the villages of their Thai sweethearts half their age with nothing legally in their own name, which seems common sensical, but as proven by the cases referred to, bears repeating.

[andylee]

I feel very sorry for the guy, bad situation and what happened is horrific.

There are bad people everywhere.

But that is not Thailand to me, my wife worked in a bar. Many people in the man's own village are quoted by the newspapers. The are obviously happy with life and their wives. Otherwise they would be leaving in droves. I am sure they are not.

It seems the British media is trying to get people to stay in England. Using stories of murder. I bet I can find a lot of murders in England. Does that mean people who live in England are stupid and just waiting to be murdered. I dont think so.

I had a few people in England email me, worried about this story. Why? (My wife assures me she wont kill me)

There are bad people in every country, Thailand is no different to England. I feel sorry that the bloke, he chose one of the real bad ones.

Hope she gets life in prison, but I know it only costs 500,000 bht to get out unfortunately.

[taxexile]

My wife assures me she wont kill me

is there a wife anywhere in the world who would say anything else ?

[andylee]

That was a sad attempt at a joke.

Sorry next time I will want you when there is a joke coming

[andylee]

I will warn you when there is a joke coming. WANT YOU that would be a joke.