Australian murder suspect shopped and did laundry while girl’s body sat in suitcase

Jomtien, Thailand: Australian Simon Peter Carman went about the ordinary business of shopping, eating out and doing his laundry as a teenage girl he is accused of murdering lay stuffed inside a suitcase for hours in his room in a coastal Thai town, police allege.

Fast detective work and a network of CCTV cameras that captured the 45-year-old’s seemingly casual comings and goings on Thursday led to Carman’s arrest at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport the following day, just minutes before he was to board a flight to Australia.

“When he was being detained by immigration officers at the airport, they noticed the [apparent scratch] injuries,” Pattaya City police colonel Anek Srathongyoo said on Monday.

“He explained that he’d been out for the night and had gotten into a fight with a friend, which was why he had those marks.

“It wasn’t until he was with us and we showed him the evidence, starting with the footage of him dragging the suitcase, loading it on the back of his motorbike and riding away for around 10 to 20 minutes – and then returning without the suitcase – that he began to admit what had happened.”

Carman, who was born in Ballarat and has lived in Western Australia, claims self-defence, police say.

He is accused of picking up 17-year-old Thanchanok Donhomla for sex at about 3am on Thursday and bringing her back to his unit in a multi-tower complex in Jomtien, a satellite area of Pattaya, about 150 kilometres south of Bangkok. People who know him said he had been living in the tower for at least eight months.

The pair is seen on CCTV footage holding hands in the foyer on their way up to the 15th floor at 3.34am. Nong Cake, as the victim was known to people close to her, was never seen exiting the complex.

She had travelled alone to Jomtien from Thailand’s north-east only a week earlier to meet friends, one of whom made a missing persons report on Friday when she failed to turn up.

“Normally, we would issue a missing-person alert. But in this case, something didn’t feel right to me,” Srathongyoo said.

“We’ve had cases before where a foreign suspect committed a crime and then rushed to catch a flight out of the country. So I told my team to check whether the missing-person report was genuine … and then decided to go back to where it all started with the CCTV footage [at the condo tower].”

Thanchanok may have already been dead for hours by the time one of Carman’s neighbours saw him eating breakfast at the complex. Cameras from his building capture him throughout the day doing mundane activities and speaking to people in the foyer.

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