Thailand's authorities recently closed an investigation on the most notorious serial killer in the country's history: Sararat Rangsiwuthaporn, commonly called "Am Cyanide," poisoned more than 14 people in a murder spree that left local police baffled -- until they learned the full story.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They called me Ben.
We're joined with our super producer Ball mission controlled decands. Most importantly, you are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Brought to you by four people who have never been to Thailand. Tonight's tale is a strange one and may not be appropriate for all audiences due to the at times graphic descriptions of violence involved. Earlier in Strange News, we shared an ongoing story that rocked the nation of Thailand to the core. We're returning to this tale tonight. Here are the facts.
How do you know I haven't been to Thailand.
I asked you a few years back to something change.
He's just presumptive of you, sir, okay.
All right, Well, not to put you in a box, Matt. So three people who have not been to Thailand and one person who does.
Either confirm or can I right, Yeah, I've been there in my mind and in my heart. I really like Thai food. That doesn't count. No, I have not been to Thailand, Ben, I can confirm, Matt, that's up to you. Do what you will.
You're You're not the only mysterious one over here.
Ben, I've never been to Thailand.
That that is definitely, that's definitely on record, and everybody, everybody is a mystery, right.
We can tay multitudes.
As Whitman said, speaking of multitudes, there are gonna be a lot of Thai names and places in tonight's show. We are not native speakers. Maybe that's the first thing, so please bear with us. But we can't say, like any country, Thailand's home to stunning beauty, innovation, and some very troubling imperfections. Have you guys heard you know one of the one of the monikers of Thailand is the land of smiles.
I have not heard that, But I'm a big fan of the history of Thai like electronic music and like disco and stuff. You know that band Krang Been. They are not native Thai individuals, but they take a lot of influence from that sound. If you're into that. There's some really cool deep cut kind of records you can find from Thai artists from the sixties and seventies really cool, kind of psychedelic, jazzy sort of dance music. Pretty cool stuff.
Yeah, I've been getting really into Turkish psychedelic music from the same time period too, But yeah, krongben is perfect. It's nice writing studying music. It's very low, fine and chill, and krongbin is a Thai phrase or Thai word. But I think for a lot of folks who haven't been to Thailand, it's easy to forget that, like any other country, there's a lot more at play beneath the surface.
Right.
It is a different culture, it is a different part of the world. We're talking about this a little bit off air. Their government is extremely different from the West, especially in their practice of helping with the French pronunciation here the Les mageste or Les majeste the rights of the king.
Gessie for a silent s there. But that's my only critique. I think the rest was perfect, But who's to say. I'm not sure I think you nailed it. So what is this idea? Right?
It's like, if you in any way are seen defaming or insulting or threatening the monarchy, you can be locked up in jail for three to fifteen years.
Jeez, it's not very smiley behavior. That's the pretty frowning stuff right there. That's a good point.
I mean, it's not the main topic of our conversation, but it is baffling because it affects freedom of the press. It is broadly enforced. Like one example would be you can go to jail for three years if you step on a newspaper that has a picture of the king on it, or if you like a social media comment, you can be prosecuted.
Do you think you could call a witness to say that it was an accident that you stepped on that newspaper featuring the king and like get out of it.
Or his majesty, the King of Thailand does not care if it was an axident.
There are no accidents when it comes to defaming the king, right, yeah.
I imagine you can mitigate it and say something like, hey, I'm just I'm a foreigner, I'm a fullong, I didn't know I was just walking in a hurry, right. But but it is it is weaponized to persecute political opponents and activists. I mean, it's it's not the topic of our conversation today, but It's a good example of how people can stereotype, exoticize, or simplify images of another place without realizing that there's a complicated reality for the people actually living there. I mean that goes back to, you know, the perception of Thailand as like a party city country, not the store, but like a country where people go to party and do drugs.
And well, the drug laws are really strict, right you already mentioned that, but I mean no, I don't think so. They're like very draconian. Yes, yes, sir, you to mess around. Absolutely not, No, absolutely not. And foreign sex tourism is a thing. Human trafficking is a problem. One thing I didn't know much about that plays a role in our show tonight. Consumer debt is out of control in Thailand. It's like ninety something percent of the total GDP. People have all kinds of debt. And there's also a complicated relationship with gambling. It as just like the drug laws.
They have very very strict gambled laws, but it's not stopping anything.
Yeah, I'd love to explore this a little more, but I'm familiar with the term, I think from the Big Lebowski tie stick, and it referred to a really like powerful strain of marijuana and even like a way that it was like bundled up and sold. And I just looked it up and it's totally a thing like there was in the sixties and seventies. Thailand was responsible for some of the highest quality marijuana out there in the seventies, grown by the hill tribes of Thailand, and they use these like silk lines to tie these buds on, literally tie them to a stick. I wonder if that is part of the complicated, you know, relationship with drugs, is that it had this you know, reputation, and the government decided we don't want that to be part of our legacy or whatever, so they got nasty about it. But also maybe it's okay to export but not for the citizens to use. I'm curious. I'm sorry, I'm just bring a bunch of questions. Those are great questions.
Yeah, I mean, you could we could see that as a react because you know, the recreational drug use is heavily vilified right in all of Southeast Asia. We're not kidding, do not do drugs in Thailand. But it makes sense what you're saying, No, that it could be a reaction even if it's not like a moral imperative to stop people from smoking cannabis. Maybe it's more of something like we need to prove we need to deny drug cartel's income streams for sure.
And last thing on this, because I know it's not really the topic today, but I'm just seeing in an article that I found that at the time in the seventies it was largely run by surfers, by Tai surfers, and surfers as a culture at the time in the seventies were considered draft dodgers because they were like shiftless layabouts who were trying to avoid military service, and they were responsible for these very complex smuggling operations that led to the stuff being available in the States. So I don't know, Sorry, this is interest to me, but maybe worth the exploration down the line.
Oh yeah, and check out the hippie trail through the fifties and seventies. That's another big piece of history here.
And if you find yourself in Thailand, one of the things you have to do is get a little religious, or at least go to the religious sites that are out there. Buddhists, some of the Hindu temple.
Shrines, and the.
Dude well, some of the watts, some of them that are not. Some of them, like the Sanctuary of Truth, which is the largest wooden building that's entirely magical place it does. If you see it, you would think it's even more magical than the name implies. There's so many there's so many sites in Thailand that are just they defy the imagination, I think when it comes to their architecture, in the detailing.
And the jungles, just I mean the absolute lushness of their kind. I guess you call them rainforest kind of, but there there's certainly a lot of really absolutely spectacular you know forests and you know country side things like that.
Biodiversity is huge as well, and it's important that we mention these really positive things that are unique to Thailand that not every country has. But the gambling laws themselves. To get back to this, this is a setup the gambling laws themselves, because gambling is so heavily regulated. There are only two exceptions to gambling laws in Thailand. The first is horse racing and the second is the state supported lottery, and anything other than that is illegal. However, Yeah, however, like more than fifty seven percent of the population is into online gambling in some way, and these a lot of these gambling outfits are run by shadowy cartels like you remember Specter from the James Bond series. Of course, there's like a Specter basically for some of this online gambling. A transnational group named the Outlaws, not the most creative name, but they get other stuff doing going on. Another thing that the West doesn't really talk about when it comes to Thailand is the number of serial killers that have been active at some point there. And part of that goes back to what you're talking about with ty stick or the drug trade, the hippie trayal these vulnerable populations were targeted by people who leveraged the criminal underground to get away with crimes that would not be reported right or would be ignored because powerful people weren't getting targeted. That's where our story starts tonight because recently last year, Thai authorities, now it's something new and disturbing, they'd caught what they were calling the most notorious known serial killer in the entire history of the country. A woman in her thirties named Saurat Wrongsiwuthapun good Job, wore on to her friends.
That was impressive and I'm not blown Smoke's barely started with that. That was very well well.
Apologies, apologies again to all Native Tie speakers. She was known as AHM to her friends. That's what we're going to call her tonight. At least her friends called her that until she murdered them allegedly.
Cool. Here's where it gets crazy.
While we while we are not Native Tie speakers, we can speak to previous research on the phenomenon of serial killers, right, guys, It's much more rare than perceived in fiction. And there's a kind of demographic of serial killers who tend to get apprehended, right.
The dumb ones, now I'm just shooking. I'm the ones, the ones that, yeah, the ones that escalate too quickly.
The ones that get caught tend to overwhelmingly be male or male identifying, and they have a lot of behaviors conforming to the controversial McDonald triad theory, which I no, I think in previous episodes we've talked about this, but the more I look into it, there's not a ton of there's not a ton of later research validating this theory.
No, that's this is like the behavioral sciences at quantico kind of thinking, you know, early on, but you know there's there's weird stuff in there, especially harming animals early on. That that, to me is one of the biggest the whole bed winning thing. I don't know, I don't know how much water that holds. He But what's the third one?
Arson, Yeah, or fascination with fire. I mean fire is fascinating.
Though, Yeah, like a harming something else that is living with a perceived callousness, right, and then watching like viewing destruction, watching it occur with the fire, and then at like having some kind of uncontrollable part of your physical body.
I always thought, Yeah, that's a better way to phrase it. I always wondered whether the persistent bed wedding thing was a psyop meant to like get in the heads of the criminals being hunted.
Maybe.
So anyway, if you are looking at news about this person, you will you will run into the name Sauraat, But you are more likely to run into the ghoulish nickname the media gave her, which is om Cyanide.
And we don't know a whole heck of a lot about her early life, but the court documents in reporting do give us some basic information. Am who how we're going to refer to her, because I don't think it either matter. I could nearly as good a job as Ben did on that pronunciation, but am as a graduate of Nakhon pathom oh geez I said that now I have to say this Rajabat University, which is west of Bangkok, and her some of her teachers lectures profits seemed to have a similar sense of her personality, And it's kind of stuff we hear often about serial killers that nothing out of the ordinary about her looks or behavior, just you know, kind of kept to herself, you know, not really anything to write home about. She did major in public relations and graduated in two thousand and nine.
Yeah, that's an interesting thing, right, the interior lives of everybody. It does seem like when you get when you hear that about someone that stands out like this as someone who's done a lot of harm and has kind of a secret life that they're living, it is this weird like there's not a big outward show of anything because so much is going on in the background, the stuff that nobody else gets to see. It is a pretty common thing.
Agree, what's that old lying lives of quiet desperation.
Right.
We know that she was married and divorced with a guy named reported sometimes as Vitune or witun Rang Siopon. He was a senior police official in their province, Rachabury. He is no longer a police official, and although their marriage was dissolved, they continued to see each other and live together. It's very again, like you're saying the complicated stories, right. Everybody has stuff they don't want you to know.
Well, and it's going to come in later. Just her connection to the police department, which is really fishy to me, I think everybody else. It's just it's a little weird because she did have two children with that person, right, But then she also has this other thing going on, a common law husband.
And then we'll see that two police officers also die in the course of this. So fast forward to the arrest. Police arrest Am on Tuesday, April twenty fifth. It's twenty twenty three, and they arrest her after a friend of hers collapses on a road trip earlier that month, April fourteenth, Om was traveling with her friend, a thirty two year old businesswoman named Syrpan Quan Wong, and they were west of Bangkok. They took part in a pretty common thing, a Buddhist protection ritual, which sounds pretty cool. They went to a place called Banpong Pier and they were releasing fish into the river. And that feels like a wholesome hangout time to me. Sure until you see the CCTV footage where Am is the last person seeing with Kwang Wong before she faints and she dies.
That's sorry. This was a detail that really stuck out to me. I think in the initial reporting that we looked at, you know, when this case kind of came full circle. Yeah, and she was. She was initially just charged with stealing and the death was believed to have been of natural causes, but later charges began to really pile up, and according to Deputy National Police Commissioner General uh Sura, shot big joke, Hawkparn big joke. I don't know, okay, Maybe maybe it's cultural difference. This is like a sort of a dis nickname. Maybe he just got a good sense of humor. But there was a later autopsy that then found traces of cyanide in Sirah Porn's system.
Yeah, the victim's mother is part of the reason. How is part of the reason that Am gets caught at all. So the mother's name is Thong Piniri and files a police report. She says, I don't believe that these are natural causes, right, and I demand that there'd be an autopsy done because my daughter's money and jewelry have gone missing. I suspect murder and I'm pretty sure that AHM did it. And if you look at that footage, the CCTV footage, which you can find easily on YouTube or wherever you look for videos, you see that Coi Cooi is the familiar, familiar name people use for kwand Wong. So kwand Wong goes to the pier where she's going to release the fish, and Om goes apparently to the restroom. When Am comes back, she sees her friend has collapsed. She waves bystanders over to come help, but then she leaves the scene and she takes her friend's cash, her friend's mobile phone, and design her handbag.
It runs away.
Yeah, she doesn't stick around at all to help her friend that you know she was on that trip with, right, which is very strange, sus Af. Yeah, and it's also it's the moment you're talking about there, Ben, where the two of them separate and Koy goes down to the water, which is where they're headed and what they're going to do. And it gets even weirder when you start here where this is only one case out of a bunch of them we're going to talk about. But there's something similar here with like sharing something that is ingestible. It can be many one of many things, but sharing something or taking something to drink or eat, it's.
The same kind of red flag that we saw around that Australian case that you brought initially, Matt, I believe with the mushrooms and the was it like a beef Wellington or something like. It was some you know again shared food items that and then all of a sudden people are falling ill or dying, you know. I mean that was obviously one situation, but this is many. But yeah, I think that was what initially caught our attention about that story too, or as hmmm, something funny is going on here.
What we're going to find in this is it like I didn't I didn't even think about possibly giving somebody a pill and telling them, hey, this is a vitamin, yeah, supplement.
Also, yeah, don't take pills from people no, unless it's in a package, right, and that is clearly be Hey, by the way, folks, we are just because we might be paranoid doesn't mean we're wrong. And guys, I did buy the three the three pack of fire extinguishers. Yeah, yeah, So so the next time we hang out, they should be here. And it has nothing to do with anything unless you've heard at earlier conversation.
We had about this. Anyway, Yes, it goes, it goes deeper, and I think you're right. No, there are similarities. There are similarities that Australian case stood out to me as well. The mother has some juice. The mother Cooy's mom has some juice. She knows people, know people, so she is able to get the case directly to the Deputy Police Chief General Surachat Big Joe Kuckball, and she says, look, I'm afraid that if this goes to the local Ratchaburi police it'll be buried or it'll be ignored because she knows this family and she knows that sauraat or AM's former husband was at the time the deputy superintendent at the local police station. So wheels within wheels, you know, and you have to wonder like what kind of vibe did the mom get that made her escalate it like this?
You know, Yeah, well I wonder that a lot. I think just I think just the fact that this supposed friend definitely took money and belongings. Right, And then when you hear I don't, I wonder if she had any contact with any of the other victims, like families, because there is a pattern, and I think if those victims' families or relatives were talking amongst themselves, you would start to see that pattern emerging.
That's true pretty quickly too, right. So that's a good point.
So a when question denies any involvement in the theft, like you said, Nol, she's originally arrested for stealing, which is not a hard thing to apprehend her for because she does rut off with these belongings.
It's on video. It's not a deep fake. It happened.
But then, like you said, Matt, investigators start putting together pieces of a puzzle, a puzzle that seems to only grow larger and more disturbing with each new discovery. Here's one, they fight a bottle of side Eyed at ALM's house during her arrest.
Yeah, the bit of a red flag not really a standard household item.
Don't think it's not a staple spice in the spice rack.
Yeah.
Yeah, Well, and the big question that we've had in guys, I went ahead and sacrifice to my Google search, say where where do I where? How can I procure cyanide? How could I make cyanide? You know, like it's over for me? But yeah, I'm not actually interested in that. If anyone's out to.
Late, that's exactly what someone would say.
Dang it, it's funny.
I put that later some of our notes because I was I was having a similar feeling. Is researching some of this over the over the past few weeks, and yeah, I thought, I was like, damn, look at what Look at what I'm doing. I'm doing bought to dollar conversions. I'm checking on side eyed regulation and Thailand. I'm checking on flights to Thailand. I'm looking up Google maps, you know, and.
How do I set up a post office box and another name? Exactly?
Isn't that crazy though, because it'll it's all controlled by an algorithm that just sees those as points on a map. And then it's like, oh, I see where this guy's going.
Our search histories are the digital version of egregious faced at.
This point, you know what I mean.
But the big question remains, how did how did she get a bottle of cyanide?
Right right?
What kind of parties does she go to? Well, investigators say her, oh, she also claimed later she would go on to claim, look, I had nothing to do with my friend's death, but she probably took illegal drugs that were laced with side eye sort of an accidental fetanyl overdose argument totally by the way, Yeah, her. It turns out that's sister in law owns a pharmacy also in Ratchaburi, where police found what they called a collection of suspicious capsules.
Wait, so is she implicated in this now too, or was it maybe just a case of her not knowing and sort of taking advantage of that relationship?
Open open ended at this point, We're not sure, or at least the police have not specifically stated this.
We that they have been.
They have been since twenty twenty three doing the thing where they're trying to track down all possible sources of cyanide in the country, like where you know where you could buy where you could buy this stuff or where you could make it. You know the number isn't number isn't certain yet, and also the number of victims isn't certain yet. People like other families are coming forward, and it seemed multiple people connected with Ahm at some point that also died under eerily similar mysterious circumstances. It went from like eight victims to ten victims, then at least twelve, the number rows to fourteen, and then fifteen is what is in the courts right now. But the number speculated unproven has gone to eighteen, possibly twenty to this day, no one's sure.
Well the big deal. It's almost like with Zodiac killer some of these other major serial killers, trying to find that first victim date, right, and then you start there and then you move that number rises as you move towards present day. But then if you start to go back a little further, you're like, oh, wait a second, there actually might be more this time in Riverside or whatever. That's just like the way these things go. And I wouldn't be surprised if there are twenty people.
I mean, yeah, that first date victim is one of the big questions, Like it says, it's tough to answer, is it twenty fifteen? Like ty authoritieser said, is it two thousand and five, because we're going to have to discuss a little bit about the science of autopsies and the bureaucracy and just the chemical nom the group name cyanide.
Right, maybe the big question is when what was the inciting incident that made that escalation to of the first poisoning, Like when what is that thing that pushed her there?
Right?
If she is in fact the serial killer that's killing people with cyanide, because I was just trying to I was thinking back because she graduated in two thousand and nine, right, right, so if it started at college, that would kind of match up, right, two thousand and five date.
Yeah, if the two thousand and five date is is our date? You know?
Yeah? Anyway, this is fun. Would I would I would want to go as deep as possling down as rabbit hole.
But okay, yes, for sure, and we will go at least as far as the information we have currently leads us. After a quick word from our sponsor and we have returned.
Other families are coming forward, other civilians coming forward as soon as the news of suspected cyanide poisoning breaks, and a lot of these people are saying a lot of these people are saying, you know, we have a loved one, a family member who died and died the same way, and the last person who kicked it with them was omb There's another thing we mentioned right before the break that I think we also have to point out, which is in cases like this or like Zodiac, when things escalate, there are also going to be some false positives. Just logically. There are people who lost a loved one in a way that might seem similar, and they they will rightly ask, is my loved one's death part of it? And the answer is not always yes. But that's why there's sometimes a fog of war and speculation around the numbers. We do know, however, that in at least one case, OM allegedly tried to kill someone who survived.
Yeah, And that's something that you do see from time to time and hunts for serial killers. Is the one that got away, that makes some report or something that tends to trigger things, or maybe isn't even a red flag until after the fact, and then it's used as a way of kind of backtracking and finding more about the person's m O.
Right right, like the like a serial assaulter or killer who inexplicably at some point kidnaps someone and lets them go, or chases them but or tries to shoot them but doesn't shoot them fatally.
Well, like at the time, it might not match a pattern, so the report might not set off any you know, alarm bells. But then after their suspicion and then maybe cross reference for that type of report, you know, then you see, oh what about this, It's in the right area. Let's go talk to that person. I'm not saying that happen in this case, but it certainly could have been a break.
Yeah, and there definitely is that kind of that break in the in the case here when after this initial reporting, a thirty six year old woman at the time named Katima Passeyard known as Plaw to her friends, she comes to the police and she says, I was poisoned in twenty twenty, but I made it to a hospital where doctors resuscitated me. She was at a mall and she got a pill offered to her by her friend Om, and they parted ways. She felt a tightness in her chest, she lost feeling in her hands. She was calling Om. The story goes to pick her up, but Om got lost and so someone contacted emergency services and they were able to keep her alive.
Well, yeah, the way I've read the story was that she was trying to call an am was kept like canceling the phone call basically, you know what I mean, Like someone sees there's an incoming call, just hits decline. That's what she was saying. Happy, but she got through to there's a hotline number sixteen sixty nine there that she called and was able to get through, which thank goodness. But she at the beginning, she was unsure that it was poisoning. She thought, oh, well, something is just wrong and I'm having a medical emergency. Sure, and then she sees some of the reporting and other events occurring and thinks, oh wait a second.
Yeah, she didn't put it together. She thought she just had a close call, you know, and got lucky. She also told the police as she is putting these pieces together, that she loaned two hundred and fifty thousand bought to earlier. Bought is the currency of Thailand, that is right now, that's probably it's a little bit north of seven thousand dollars US seven forty eight dollars and change. So there was a financial incentive, it appeared.
So we're thinking that it would be a tap. If I'm on I'm taking money from someone, I'm barring that money. Then I'm killing that person, so I don't owe her anymore, right, She's some.
Seems like a plan that could go awry really quickly. I am shocked, frankly that it went on as long as it did. Agreed.
I mean, and let's pause here as as we set up previously to talk a little bit about the nature of cyanide and have a moment of silence for our search histories. Paul, could you hit some sad music.
There we go, you know the I think this is an area where in our initial conversations about this, we all had questions about like how cinide acts on the body, what kind of traces does it leave behind, how long does the stick around in the body? So this is I think exciting for all of us to kind of get to the bottom of it. I think we're on the fly kind of answered some of those questions at the time, but this is a much deeper dive here. So this is very cool.
I mean, it's not cool, it's well, we're talking about sources of cinide poising first, right, so how does it actually get in your system? I think we've probably heard that cigarettes can often contain cyanide. We've heard that, but often I think it's it's like, how much of that is the anti smoking I don't I don't want to say propaganda, but it's the anti smoking message.
Right, like saying it contains jet fuel or whatever.
You know, we know there are additives to cigarettes, but I think sinide is just one of those, like, oh wow, okay, that's scary, but I've heard that.
We also know there are allowable levels of mercury and fish that people can consume.
So yeah, anyway, yeah, mercury doesn't like kill you.
Well, that's the thing, right.
Like in fiction and in those atrocious spy novels and all that stuff, cyanide is often portrayed as this super secret, fast acting thing only am I, six no and Nazis know about it or whatever. But to your point, Matt, it might be surprising for love or fellow conspiracy realists to know that you can be exposed to this toxin from everyday chemicals and even common food stuff like lima beans, yucca, cassavas, almonds, apple seeds, burning plastic spoil from a house fire.
Yeah, is that one of those things where you is m of beans is one of those things where you can cook it down in a certain way and get an extract some bad things from it, like the breaking bad thing with the whatever the ricin brought to you by the Anarchist cookbook.
I see, Okay, God, I knew about pits right in some fruit right specifically cherry, the stones and cherries, and how dangerous that's. Yeah, but I've heard that's really dangerous, But I never really understood. I guess that you could weaponize it in a way. I thought it would just be careful with it. Oh man, quick cursory Google. Most cooking research related to sinide removal has been conducted on cassava. Boiling in water for long periods of time greater than thirty minutes in a large excess of water is the most effective method for reducing sinide. Eighty percent of the original SIGNI.
Will be removed. So that's extraction in terms of making it safe to eat. But I guess what do you do with the extract? Man?
You know?
But is that like with all root vegetables where it absorbed like they absorb things in the ground or are we saying cassava and like yuka, it just has that in it.
Yeah, yeah, they got that dog in them man. But the also, your own dry beans is something you got to be a little bit careful about. Like if you're not using jarred or whatever canned beans that are pre cooked, if you're doing it from the raw beans, soaking them and stuff, you do have to be thoughtful about that because you can't accidentally not do it right. Yeah.
And and one common misconception that the fictional stories miss is that cyanide in general refers to any chemical that contains a carbon nitrogen bond. The issue is that lots of stuff contains cyanide, but they're not automatically deadly poisons as a results.
So we're not trying to also be alarmist about beans. Just it's just to put that out there. No one needs to be scared about eat eating their vegetables, right, Oh you should.
You should follow the directions though, Yeah. Sure, we don't take vegetables for strangers. Don't take vegetables or pills from strangers. If someone says, hey, you want a pill and you say no, and they say, hey, do you want this handful of lina beans also say no.
It sounds like a jack in the beanstock kind of scenario. Exactly, it really does.
Yeah, So like sodium cyanide, potassium cyanide, hydrogen cyanide, these kind of things are they all have that carbon nitrogen bond, and those things can be lethal. But there are a bunch of other compounds called nitrils. You've probably ingested them. That's the stuff in the cassava, the almonds and so on. If you do have a case of sinaide poisoning and acute sinai poisoning, it does kill people quickly.
It works.
It doesn't like two to five minutes and then they're dead heart failure. But it's not a silent killer. That's that's why it's it's weird for it to be so commonplace in espionage fiction because if you are a medical professional, you know what you're looking for. It is pretty much impossible to hide sinai poisoning in a legal dose. That stuff is readily apparent in a corpse for several months after death.
That's what you mean by silent Caroll like you undetectable? I guess right, Okay, Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, And it's also a very painful death, right, I mean, so it's an effective poison if you want someone out of the picture, but it's not something you would realistically use if you want to avoid getting caught. So it's kind of amateur hour to use it.
Well, unless it's in your fake tooth, right and you're getting tortured or you're.
Killing yourself, right, Yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly, which also I don't know. Apparently it's something that chemists have used historically when they commit suicide. But the reason they do it is not because it's painless. It's because it's one of the most certain ways to do it, like to end your life. It's just an ugly thing to think about.
Unfortunately, Well I feel better, Yeah, so fun at parties.
Okay, let's get back to the investigation though. So that's a little bit of cyanide science, right, that's a little bit why this is unusual. One of the first questions we could all have is, Okay, so guys, you're saying this kind of poisoning is readily apparent in an autopsy of people know what they're looking for. So how did someone do this for so long?
Right?
Or with so many people we'll get to that towards the end, but right now, maybe we talk a little bit about about the the unfolding of the investigation. Authorities said, hey, owed a lot of these victims' money, she also had started businesses with them or kind of lows.
Yeah, that's is interesting because it's not like you would necessarily turn that up from say a credit check or something like so to oh individuals, multiple individuals money. To find that out takes a little detective work, you know. I mean, that's you got to give props there for them to figuring out that that particular pattern because it is in a way kind of smart because it's not something that there's just like a uniform record of necessarily. Some of the business is sure, but you know, in general, just like taking out a loan from an individual, she must have ingratiated herself to a lot of these people to even be in a position where they would have done that for her. You know, it's very interesting the manipulation. The levels of manipulation really start to kind of you know, show through here. I think public relations degree. Right, Oh yes, you're.
Right, Ben, tell me correct me if I'm wrong here. I had read that there are even instances where it wasn't like a formal loaning of money to on but just meeting with somebody that I guess she assumed is going to have a lot of money on them and then taking them or attempting to take them out, or allegedly attempting to poison them, like at a restaurant or at an outing kind of like she did when they were feeding the fish, things like that, Like did you find that too or was it all like loans?
Yeah, a lot of thanks to the National out of Thailand for some great, great reporting on this, and of course the public statements of Big Joke, and we have a bit of an epilogue about Big Joke at the end of this. But yeah, you're on the money there, because she would target people, according to prosecutors hashtag allegedly allegedly allegedly, she would befriend people she perceived as wealthy, earn their trust, and then say, you know, like, hey, we should hang out more often, classic manipulation moves, and then get them to consume food, drinks, or herbs, and then search them for money or to deprive them of possessions. And then it goes to the idea of accomplices, because if you are, if you are moving hard cash below a certain amount, not that difficult to move. Possessions, especially bespoke things or relatively rare things like very high end designer autrement, that's a little bit tougher, right if you're if they're only x amount of you know, just for example, they're only x amount of uh Erme's bags in this town, right, then the people have those bags know who else has the bags, so it's all harder to sell it.
Can we talk about one specific case that happen in twenty fifteen without chivid too far ahead?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, So there's this one case where OM well, a person died who was close to AM, and then OMS seemed to swoop in to try and take over the finances of this person that died sketch Monta tepe Cowen or something like that. This person who was who had left Thailand for quite a while, like I think, got married somewhere and then came back and when she arrived back died very soon after, and saraat Om jumped in to like handle all the post death finances for this person, which is really weird.
Yeah, let me handle this in your time of grieving, and unfortunately con artists do that all the world round. You know, you find somebody at the worst moment in their life, having lost a loved one, You're a rock for them to lean on, your purported safe space, and dangerous things can happen there if people have ill intent.
We know that.
A week after that initial arrest, when all this stuff has started to come together, the authorities also arrest Ahm's ex husband, the senior police official, and he gets charged. This is okay, this is still confusing to me. He gets charged with fraud and embezzlement, both related to and not related to the deaths.
Yeah, but because I think there's more going on there, And again why I brought up the common law husband that she had. And then also do we mention that she was four months pregnant when she was picked up when she was arrested.
We haven't, We haven't she and it is and I'm glad you brought that up because that is crucial to other events in the story. She was it's the term of her pregnancy gets reported at different months to pay on where you look. But she was definitely She's definitely pregnant at the time of Houoy's death.
Well, and so it just for me, it brings up this issue of interpersonal pressures. So if you think about on pressuring potential victims, alleged victims to you know, do what she wants to end up getting things from them for her, I wonder if she has or has had people in her life that are pressuring her to do things right as well, because often it's not just a lone wolf actor doing something like this, right, So I don't know, I wonder, like, whose father who fathered that child? Is it the ex is it the common law? Is it somebody else? And what are those relationships like, right?
And did she have accomplices? Spoiler?
The Thai courts concluded, yes she does or the type police did.
We already kind of red flagged her sister in law a little bit with that, you know, pharmacy. Yeah, well the pharmacy suspicious capsules or whatever. And so police say that this gentleman who's now I'm not going to try to pronounce because you've already done such a great job, turned himself into police after authorities issued a warrant. He's just like here I am. The couple though they were divorced were actually still living together, and police said that mister rangsa utha porn it's not too bad, was most likely involved in the alleged murder of an ex boyfriend by the name of Suthi Sak Pun Kwan, Yes, and that he also helped destroy evidence of Kwan Wang's murder. Dude, that's quite yea quite yeah.
Yeah, but we didn't even really talk about that that this is the common law husband, the pun Quan. This suitisak that you just said. So this person died March twelfth, I think, twenty twenty three. But this person was potentially a poisoning victim. Well, at least the reporting that I was reading in May of last year, twenty twenty three, they kept saying potentially another one of the victims. I think it's I think it's pretty certain at this point that this person was a victim. But they're also reporting we're talking about the husband, the ex husband now who was just arrested. That we mentioned this person I saw as a lieutenant colonel. But this is also like the what did you call him, ben or his title at the police station.
Oh, I just used a senior police official because he had he had he was a high level police officer at one point, and it gets a little confusing for us because Thai police is the Tai police are a little bit more militarized than Yes police.
That's why I was so confused when I saw lieutenant colonel okay, interesting, I wonder what that actually means. And then was used in a different like he was given a different standing in another piece of reporting I saw, but I didn't know, and it didn't say if he was still an officer employed at the time when he turned himself or if he had like retired.
No, he was still an officer. He got he got fired.
Got it?
He got fired for this or a life He's like in very shortcuver of that, you know, because you can't have you know. It's like, yes, yes, statistically there are more arsenists in the fire department than there are in other jobs. But if they find out you're an arsonist, then you're out of a job, right, They just can't.
That's not very nice. Just think about how much they love that job.
Are you looking at? Why are you taking the side of the arsonists.
I'm just saying it, like that's like dream job for.
Why Another disturbing statistic from a while back when people still went to breaking mortar stores, something like twelve percent of shoe store employees are working entirely because they have a foot fetish.
Sick jeers speaking of I saw an Instagram video earlier today where a fan met Quentin Tarantino on the street in la and asked him to sign her foot and also to rate her foot. Did he do it? He didn't. He refused to rate the foot, but you could tell he got a kick out of him. There we go, it's worth it.
So this is going to lead us to other people who charged his accomplices. Her lawyer, ALM's lawyer gets accused. They say the lawyer knowingly helped destroy or conceal evidence. They're saying she couldn't have gotten away with it for as long as she did. But they also discovered something very important about the motive. And we're going to take a quick break for word from our sponsors in return will break it down. We're back in May of twenty twenty three. Police discover what they believed to be the primary motive. We danced around it a little bit earlier. Here money again the great reporting that the nation shows us that police these stats are astonishing that police discovered was in possession of seventy eight million bots. That's almost two point two million dollars spread over Get this, one hundred and eighty separate bank accounts.
No, she had a system because think about how many times that Maybe maybe they're all set up online, but I mean that the passwords.
Alone, WHOA and Ben. I think you did a great job of teasing it and really not quite getting to what it was about. We were talking at the beginning of the show about the laws in Thailand and about the cultural issue with gambling and Thailand, and it was apparently a lot of these accounts, or many of them, maybe most of them, had been linked to various gambling sites and accounts. Do you want to do that?
That quote from Big Joke. Sorry, we know he has a real title, it's just the name.
It's hard. It's hard to shake a nickname like that. That is wild Man before Luke, I just wanted to say to ask, is it sick that in my mind? I'm like, well, money, that's boring. I want my serial killers to only kill for abject pleasure or divine Yeah, I'm joking, but it is the way we've been conditioned to think about serial killers, you know, and this is basically an elaborate and deadly grift, you know, series of them. If if everything is as it's as it's said here, so big joke had this to say. She was gambling to the tune of about one million bot per day. The investigators also found that these accounts received money that had been transferred from directly from some of the victim's accounts.
Oh what, what's that? Translated to one million bots?
That's out twenty eight nine dollars A y go. Do we know what kind of this matters? Do we know what kind of games she was playing?
Like?
What? Like?
As you said, no, I don't know, because you had said that there's a lot of very specific guidelines or guardrails around gambling, with horse racing being one of the only like physical versions.
I just wonder if there are similarly guardrails around what kind of you know, virtual games are allowed to be played online.
Gambling is illegal, but it's just it's impossible to see, it's impossible to stop it.
I see.
Do we think she was laundering money for someone? Don't know, because if you're spending that much money a day, pushing it through various whatever gambling sites, casinos, whatever it is. I imagine that you're actually moving that money for somebody.
It just seems like a risky way to move money. Though, if you're because you got to place bets, you know, I mean, like you can lose it. You would be.
Well, why would you have one hundred and eighty accounts? Like, what is the reason for one hundred and eighty accounts?
Just maybe just maybe they're under different names to obscure how much money you have by spreading it around.
Maybe there's a limit that one online outlet has allow you.
To do per day, that's per account. And also, you gotta wonder too, it seemed like she was really keen on quote unquote taking over people's accounts and finances. You gotta wonder if she maybe just did that too with someone I don't know.
I mean, that's true, that's possible, right because what they they they're not they're saying that the accounts belonged to her, But that's not quite the same thing as saying that she used her real name on all of these And this leads to two other big issues in Thai society. This online gambling thing that we've mentioned Uh, it doesn't seem to have the same sort of in practice regulation they'd be familiar with in other countries. It is apparently an open secret that a significant portion of these operations are touched by, or indeed run by transnational crime cartels like Spector Level stuff, possibly with the assistance from corrupt government officials. In twenty twenty two alone, the one we have the most recent numbers for fifteen hundred people were arrested for some version of fraud and online gambling.
Good.
It really makes you think about the you know, the folks on this side of the pond who cheat at multiplayer games, right, little hacker guys on Call of Duty or whatever.
I can't remember.
Yeah, sure, what if one of them is what if one of them is working for an international crime ring and they're just in the test case where they have to try out, try it out and see whether there's money to be made cheating a Call of Duty or Tech and eight which just came out and slaps and it's fun and everyone should play it.
I don't believe that you're playing Tech and eight for a second, Ben, you do not have time to be playing Tech and eight.
Trust Come on, I'll tell you what I got recently, just to light in them a little bit. I think it's street Fighter five Championship Edition, which gives you all of the street Fighter games up to five and has like intense online capabilities. Really fun. Those games are so fun still and hold up really beautifully to this day.
Does they have street Fighter Alpha?
I think it does. Yeah. I mean, I think it's got all the ITAs leading up to five if I'm not mistaken, but I haven't really exported, but it's pretty big package. That's so crazy.
Why did it take street Fighter ten, like more than ten years to learn to count to three?
You know what I mean? It's unfortunate, but.
Well because they had better words like turbo, you know.
Well, I guess it's one of those things sort of like with Mario Kart eight. You know where we've been on Rock and Mario Kart eight for going on a decade now, and they just keep kind of upgrading the game because they don't need to release another iteration if the previous one's still killing it. That was the case with street Fighter too. It was just like blockbuster game for Capcom, you.
Know, yeah, and these blockbuster games, like gaming makes a lot of money spoiler. Folks, you can probably tell we're gearing up for some episodes on gaming in the future, I think.
Especially with everything that's going on in China. We got a email recently. I listened to mail kind of breaking down some of that stuff about the regulations of online gaming and how it actually pertains to another cultural seeming cultural issue with you know, this kind of stuff. I mean, I don't know, it's hard to say, like we certainly have that here too, but I think it's different. I think it varies from culture to culture, the relationship with gambling and even with just like screens and stuff, you know.
And then there's also the question of whether prohibition works and if so, degree right, the biggest question. Yeah, So this in twenty twenty two alone, fifteen hundred people arrested for some sort of online gambling thing. Did a little bit of digging and found that there's a group called International out Laws who are known for their work in online gambling in Thailand. Their other work includes human trafficking and the drug trade. So this is like when the cartels got involved in avocados, you know what I mean, they count an income stream. And the second thing this triggers in Thailand, which is going on today still is a national concern among the Taie public. Concern that we share here, which is how easy is it to get cyanide or make cyanide?
How easy? Why does it.
Seem so easy for the average person to use it repeatedly in a multi year killing spree? Why didn't the coroner catch any of this stuff?
Right?
We don't even know how far back it went, So we have some things to return back to at the end here. First, the public was also horrified to learn that would not receive the death penalty. Thailand does have capital punishment, they do have a heart justice system. Again, never do drugs in Thailand. We cannot emphasize that enough. But the law there does not allow for the death penalty in the case of pregnancy.
In jew I would argue that's humane and appropriate. I would also question as to whether she knew that yeah, and acted accordingly. Wouldn't you say this is someone who lacks remorse if everything is as it's being alleged. This is like, you know, for people throw around the black widow. Maybe that's sexist. I don't know, It's just a term pop culture has sort of you know, thrown around for years the idea of someone using poison to kill people who are close to them, whether it be a spouse or you know, a loved one, or someone who's trust they've earned. But it seems to me this is someone who absolutely, whether feeding an addiction to gambling or just out of callousness and lack of remorse, is is doing this to people. You know, This is someone who is not not a good person.
Well, yeah, it's really weird to me that her ex husband lived and then her new common law husband died fight, which.
Maybe he didn't have any money, maybe he wasn't a worthwhile target, you know.
Well, and then she's allegedly still hanging out with her ex husband, so I you know, it just the fact that he's a police officer, that there was so much suspicion that there would be some kind of information leaking or you know, something fishy going on, if that local police department was involved in her prosecution or arrest and all that stuff. It does it just makes me wonder, like what was that relationship actually?
Like I have a hot, wild prediction, y'all. There's going to be a movie, probably a few varying degrees of quality.
It's also surprising, as we were talking about off here, it's also surprising just how little exploration this story has gotten, considering conservas.
Of mainstream media.
Yeah, I had to, like, I had to come of people who speak tay, you explain this to me just in general.
When it came up as a strange news it was almost like it was mega under the radar feeling, you know. I mean, there are stories about American technology malfunctioning that gets more press than this, right, and this is a huge story in Thailand.
Of course, we don't have there is more news. In June of twenty twenty three, al was sent to the Police General Hospital in Bangkok after prison officials failed to detect the heartbeat of her child. The child was lost. Medical staff performed the abortion, so she is no longer pregnant.
We don't know. Wait, what does that mean? Does that mean there can be a change on your zone?
No, okay, I mean in the penalty right, unknown and social media already in Thailand already had you know, quite an adverse reaction to the idea that this person was possibly going to escape the death penalty by virtue of carrying a child. So it has changed the conversation. We don't know the full updates. By the way, the reason we kept saying allegedly Alm has not been officially convinced.
She hasn't been sentenced, right, so then absolutely could change. It would change. I would think this would change everything in terms of what's on the table. I don't know how different the tie legal system is than ours, but you'd think there would be similar prosecutor type things seeking the death penalty.
You know, yeah, well, I mean we're talking about when the police concluded their investigation. She's going to trial for fourteen murders. But as happens often in the cases of alleged improven serial killers, those are only the murders they feel they can prove in court. That does not mean it's the entirety and she is. These murders occurred across eight different provinces. This creates a grand total of eighty separate charges. That is the highest for a single person in the entire history of Thailand.
Can we talk? Can we just how did that go on for so long? Guys?
Yeah, that's my question top of mind. I think for all of us throughout here.
How expensive is it and how time consuming is it to test for cyanide or poisoning in general. Right when you're when you're looking at a victim or someone who has died, right and they're going through the system, would it be that bad to just let's just test everybody's blood a little bit, just to see, just to see, right, Because I guess you wouldn't order a toxicology report for everybody, for everybody that you come upon, you know, in any provincial police department. But my goodness, maybe we just should do.
That right there are I mean there there should always be an autopsy, even when even when the cause of death seen is readily apparent. I believe under tie law, I was reading about this got my search history, guys, rip I was reading about Thie law for autopsies as well, right after searching for some specifics about cyanide and autopsies are supposed to be the standard operating procedure.
No matter what.
Okay, right, But the coroner's office had a lot of controversy with this because it goes back to what do we mean when we say autopsy? Does that include toxicology?
Right?
And then there are cases. The thing that stood out is the family relatives can request that an autopsy not be done and requests just automatic cremation instead. So some of the reason I think the murder count may be higher the alleged murder count account is because there were several people who apparently died under similar suspicious circumstances, but their bodies were cremated in accordance to their religious beliefs.
I think that goes on the suspicious list. The moment a family member says, no autopsy please go yeh, the police can.
Say, the police can say, with all due respect, sorry, man, you know you are you just.
Say okay, and then you go do the autopsy.
Right, But you know it's it's up to the discretion of them. It's like, you know, if you're standing by a burned down house with a can full of gas and a handful of matches, right.
So, yeah, you don't need to this is just a natural fire. Do you no need to look into this one?
Yeah? I think it was the wiring anyway.
Yeah, so this this leaves us with more questions. One of the last updates you can find in the West is that and Olm filed a defamation case against a guy who is a prominent coordinator for claims of the victims kind of an organizer for group statements from them or from their families. And that defamation suit. You know, Thailand again takes those very seriously, even if you're not the king. But that defamation suit was dismissed by the courts about four months ago, so things are moving forward. There's a huge concern in Thailand overall about autopsy procedures and that big question how did one person, a troubled civilian with no training, get away with these horrendous acts so often for so long? Perhaps most troubling, is it possible someone else could be doing the same.
Well, I mean, nothing really indicated this along the way, but it does make me wonder if there is an inside person with law enforcement, even you know, like someone helping cover the trail or whatever. I don't know. It just doesn't seem like it makes sense for this to be able to have gone on for so long.
Who was that seventy eight million bought four right? Who is it for? Why would she need to go and take more victims to get small amounts of cash like that because she didn't get huge amounts from every victim. What is she using that money to fuel? And who's benefiting from it. Besides her, that's the big question.
I think kind of like the kind of like the question about the various strings leading off from the story about the two Oklahoma guys who got busted for cannabis tracking. And we've received some excellent correspondence about that folks quite recently. So thank you for the letters. Keep them coming, give us new leads on different episode topics you think your fellow conspiracy realist would enjoy. Let us know what you think about this case, because again we're being fully transparent. We don't have all the answers here. This person has not been convicted in court, but there are deeply, profoundly disturbing things about this case, even aside from the headlines. So tell us where you think these puzzle pieces go. We can't wait to hear from you. We try to be easy to find online.
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