Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (13 page)

The last refuge and support of a prisoner, religion is no comfort to them, but merely another source of misery. The Buddhist monks in the temple next door to Bang Kwang undertake no missionary activity, and the weekly Buddhist service given in the prison Meditation Hall exists solely for the penitent. No effort is made to reach out to the lost ones, much less to hard cases like the Samurai.

When they die, the neighboring temple cremates prisoners without the proper rituals to ensure a better incarnation in the next life, since this requires a fee which the prison does not pay. Hard cases or not, Thais are raised as Buddhists from birth, and
knowing
they will die without benefit of clergy engenders an ugly fatalism. Damned in this incarnation, and equally damned in the next, the Samurai are reduced to a painful, dirty, meaningless life, made more horrible by the prospect of its indefinite repetition. Death is no escape for a Samurai; only a doorway to further degradation and sorrow.

They are less an aberration than they are a natural outgrowth of the circumstances and attitudes that spawned them. They also made quite unpleasant neighbors.

Why Tim Went Mad

T
he fifteen of us, every American in Bang Kwang Prison, sat there stunned, speechless. The United States Embassy staff's behavior was the most shocking thing we had ever seen.

We sat in a building next to the main guard tower, a few steps distant from the visiting rooms. This square room was used to sort mail, and hand out parcels to prisoners. Twice a year, the “contact visits” were held here. It was located midway between the dorm buildings and the front gate. Old wooden desks ringed the walls, and mesh screens served as windows. Three WWII era propeller fans gave the place a film noir ambiance. Its light and air made it less oppressive than the rest of the prison. It was turned over to the powerful United States Embassy whenever they wanted it. That day, it was used for our meeting with a Federal Public Defender from Guam.

The lawyer spent an hour discussing the basics of the U.S.–Thai Prisoner Transfer Treaty. It was an annual ritual given to us as much for the morale boost as for the information. It emphasized the fact that eventually, if we survived, we would be taken back State-side. The Embassy people were
there—two women and a man—and it was their actions that shattered our façade of calm indifference.

Judy, the head of American Citizen Services and the liaison for U.S. prisoners, called out to Tim before the meeting broke up.

“Wait a minute, Tim. We have something to tell you.”

Tim stood up, six foot three, clean cut, and good-looking in a typically American way—perfect teeth, strong jaw, even features. He looked like a high school jock, except for the grey at his temples.

Without any preamble, or the least shred of privacy, she led Tim to a table less than ten feet away from where the rest of us sat in two rows of plastic chairs. Tim sat down, and the trio glared at him. The two aides flanked Judy, their expressions harsh, their body language screaming intimidation.

Loud enough for everyone to hear, her voice so cold and cruel she might have been addressing her deadly enemy, Judy said:

“Your sister is dead, Tim.” She stared hard at him, waiting expectantly for his response.

Tim froze, stricken. Judy quickly became impatient with his silence and said, “She was murdered in her hotel room. The police are trying to find out who did it. Do
you
have any ideas?”

Tim did not visibly react to her accusatory innuendo, though it was impossible for the rest of us to ignore. A minute or two passed, and she snorted her contempt. Her disgust with Tim was plain on her face.

“We’ll tell you more when we know something.” The silence in the room was profound. Tim seemed to be in a trance. He walked away as if no one else existed, his movement’s mechanical, the jerky gait of an automaton.

The Embassy trio and the attorney used our traumatized immobility to make their escape. Before we could recover sufficiently to start asking questions, they had left.

The mystery went unsolved for months. Several of us tried at our monthly meeting with Judy to ferret out what had happened, without success. The Embassy remained close-mouthed on the subject.

The mystery deepened a week after the event when Tim went mad. He had ranted for days, shouting at President Clinton and the CIA at all hours of the day and night, demanding they leave him alone. His cellmates lost two nights of sleep and demanded his removal. Tim was tied up, kicking and screaming, and carted off to the hospital, where they shot him up with tranquilizers.

What had driven him over the edge was an enigma, though the Embassy was roundly condemned by all of us for their inexplicable callousness. There the matter sat, until the press of normal existence relegated it to a forgotten corner of my mind.

Nearly a year later, tuberculosis reduced me to ninety-eight pounds before I admitted I needed to go to the hospital. I was more than a little fearful of what sort of “treatment” I would be given. The rumors about the place were dreadful, and I had never been there.

I was very lucky. The World Health Organization, part of the U.N., had just instituted a program to fight drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis in Thailand, particularly the prisons, which were fertile breeding grounds for the bugs. Their program saved my life. It was a long recovery, however, and I spent half a year in the hospital.

Within a month of starting the W.H.O. treatment regimen, I was able to walk around the hospital grounds. Near the hospital dormitory was a single-story concrete building of ten cells. Inmates who had gone crazy in violent ways were kept there. A heavy iron bolt was screwed into the cement floor in each cell, and inmates were chained to it, limiting their range of movement. It looked like some barbaric relic of the Middle Ages, the mentally ill chained to the floor like wild beasts.

One of these unfortunates was Tim.

We had never spoken to each other before, and as we lived in different buildings, had never spent any time together. There was no real solidarity between compatriots in the prison, but I began to help him whenever I could out of pity.

This took the form of convincing the guards to let him out of his cell an hour or two a day. I brought him a portion of edible food a few times a week, and tried to get Tim to stay grounded to reality.

As weeks went by, his lucid periods grew longer. His delusions were always present, but they were background noise to our conversations, not the dominant feature.

I never asked about his family or his past, preferring he talk about pleasant times and cheerful subjects. Tim opened up about himself without any prompting on my part.

He had been born and raised in the South, in a large family of Italian descent. Of his two brothers and two sisters he said little, beyond the fact the eldest child, his brother, was killed in Vietnam. Alcoholism was a family trait, and he had created a life based on substance abuse in his early teens.

Most of his adulthood was spent as an itinerant laborer, shifting constantly between menial jobs. His addiction to different drugs was the central focus of his existence.

Like so many other Westerners, Tim’s crime in Thailand was attempting to smuggle heroin to the United States. Drug abuse stories were his favorite diversion, and though they bored me silly, I let him talk.

Everyone in prison likes to pretend they were a prince on the streets. The lowliest beggar is always eager to tell how rich they were, and how great a life they had led. Never mind that they did not have a penny to their name. Tim was the same, though his fantasy past revolved around legendary parties and drug orgies.

During my second month in the hospital, Tim startled me with an abrupt change of topics.

“See that butterfly over there? That’s my sister, Patty.”

Tim’s matter-of-fact statement brooked no argument. The butterfly was a beautiful thing, thumbnail-sized, a rainbow of colors shimmering in its wings. It flitted around a bush a foot or two from where we sat next to a large pond.

I did not bother to respond to this latest non sequitur. Tim’s conversation was littered with allusions to phantom senses. The sudden “presence” of his mother’s perfume, his dead father’s cigar smoke, illusory sights and sounds abounded for him. He carried on psychic dialogue with public figures and caught glimpses of strange beings in his peripheral vision. These are the common components of schizophrenia, and I had grown used to them.

The new spectre proved to be unique, a way to purge some of his mental poison. Like lancing a boil or an infected wound, from that point onwards, Tim would talk a little more each day about his sister. Within a month, the story of what happened to his sister was revealed.

Afterwards, it was difficult for me to meet his gaze and not shun him. I kept telling myself: who are
you
to judge him? Are you so damn pure you can condemn him? I continued to help him, but it was with tremendous reluctance.

He described his little sister’s persona in the present tense: her character, her job, and other personal details. He showed me a picture of her, a lovely, gentle-looking young woman in her early twenties.

She was a medical technician at a clinic in Los Angeles, California. She had graduated from college with honors and had had a bright future ahead of her. Of the members of his family, Tim was closest to Patty.

It was natural for her to want to help her older brother when he reached out to her in desperate need. What pressures did he apply? What dark secrets did he share? These were things he did not, and perhaps
could not
, reveal. Tim asked her to do exactly what he told her, and Patty agreed.

Following her brother’s instructions, she took all her savings, maxed out her cash-advance balance on her credit cards, and borrowed what she could from her employer and friends.

Tim never said it in so many words, but it became obvious that Patty was under the impression she was buying her brother out of prison with a bribe. She managed to bring $10,000 in cash with her to Bangkok.

She checked into a suite at the Shangri-La Hotel, one of the pricier places in town. The suites were designed to afford privacy and they were spaced widely apart. Guests could throw loud parties without worrying that complaints would be made about the noise. Thick walls with sound-proofing were a feature. The cheapest room went for $150 a night, and suites started at $250.

Tim told Patty two Nigerian men would meet her in her room and would trade a backpack for her money. She was then supposed to drop off the bag with a Thai prison guard at an address in town. Tim swore he would get the money back to her in two or three days.

She blew up in anger over the fact that he had dragged her halfway around the world for something highly illegal, the same sort of drug deal that had landed him in prison.

Tim pleaded with her, swearing he’d be killed over his huge debt from drugs bought on credit if she did not do it.

Patty was not so naïve as to be blind to the dangers of the deal.

What precautions she took, though, were grossly inadequate.

What possible incentive lured her into agreeing to do it is hard to imagine, but agree she did. Family loyalty seems too slender a tie to ensnare an intelligent woman. Yet, she went ahead for the love of her brother for reasons that will remain forever unknown. Their visit was the last time Tim saw her alive.

Somkiet, a friendly Thai, got the truth for me from his brother—a lieutenant with the Thai police. At least two men, possibly more, had come to
Patty’s room, using a passkey to the service elevator, which explains why they chose the Shangri-La. Apparently, they had used this trick before. Thus, they entered the hotel unseen.

The defenseless woman, alone and with a bag of money, was like a gazelle tossed to a pride of lions.

At some point, they tied her up and raped her. Afterwards, they injected her with a massive overdose of heroin, leaving the needle in her arm so there would be no mistaking her cause of death. Then they left her to die.

As monstrous a crime as this was, it was not the only evil to come of it. When Tim’s mother got the news, she died of a massive stroke.

It took some time for the Embassy to locate Tim’s remaining brother and sister. When they heard of Patty’s death and the Embassy’s suspicions, they cut Tim out of their lives.

Tim had become a total outcast, the author of his own destruction. He had murdered his sister and mother by his stupidity, and had lost his family forever.

The burden of sorrow, guilt, and misery weighed heavily on him. In agony from heroin withdrawal, with a huge drug debt he could not repay, abandoned by his family and country, his mind disintegrated.

To this day he wanders the desolate landscape of madness as the years pass, unnumbered.