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Andrew Herrington, a retired lorry driver from Birmingham, central England, 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, northeast 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 (nicknamed "Wanna"), 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. Requests are almost exclusively from older British men _ among 860,000 UK tourists each year _ looking to marry younger Thai women. But for any British man hoping to follow in Beeston's footsteps and build a new 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 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 Rd, 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, southeast England, 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 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. I am in real fear for my own life."
Beeston's romance 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 and strip on a tiny stage. 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 $40.
"[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, 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 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.
"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 omerta, where no one talks about it. But they send money home, so they've big status.
"A bar girl in her early or mid-20s 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. 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. 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 the UK, 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 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. 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 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 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.
Then the conversation turned to the future and who was "next for the bullet". They agree they know the identity of the marked man. He lives about 30km away and is having some major problems with his Thai wife. "Yep," they chorus, "for sure."
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