CityNews – February 17th, the husband of Suree On-sanit, 46-year-old owner of Jasmine Thai massage and spa, has been arrested for her murder and mutilation. The body of Suree was found on Feb 14th, cut into six pieces and wrapped in slightly burned plastic.
On the February 15th, police found the victim’s husband at a dhamma retreat in San Sai district and questioned him. After questioning Phipat Kantima,42-year-old, he admitted to and confessed that he murdered his wife. He said that he went to Turkey for five months to work and sent money home to his wife regularly. He returned occasionally but didn’t realise that his wife had invested all of their savings into a spa. He had been back for one month and was alerted to his wife’s phone’s Line chat message while his wife was in the shower and saw that she was having a romantic correspondence with another man. As their argument escalated, he said, he slapped her and she grabbed a knife and threatened to kill him. He was defending himself and accidentally stabbed her to death in the stomach, he also sustained injuries to his hands during the struggle.
He said that he was so shocked after her death that he decided to follow a news report of a recent Bangkok mutilation and murder and cut her into pieces, intending to dump her in the Ping River. As it turned out the injuries he sustained during their final fight prevented him from cutting her into smaller pieces and in a panic, as he had no mode of transport to move her body, he decided to camouflage the murder by fire. He set six potential fires, using a system of wicks to connect them, then positioned her body parts onto the bed to fool the authorities into thinking that she had died by fire consumption. He then ran off after lighting the fire, not realising that it burned out before it could do any damage. After hiding in a meditation centre for ten days he thought he was in the clear, but when police came to find him they also discovered that he had hidden bloodied clothes under a Buddha statute, the discovery as well as other evidence led him to confess.