CANADIAN Mounties, who are helping to investigate the Thai link in an international chain of brutal murders, believe a Canadian woman and her 21-year-old son drew a date with death when they were given seats next to escaped British convict John Martin Scripps on a flight to the holiday island of Phuket.
They suspect the 35-year-old Briton, now linked to five murders and two missing person reports in inquiries spanning three continents, befriended Sheila Damude and her son Darin on the one-hour Thai Airways flight from Bangkok early in March.
When the plane touched down they agreed to share a taxi and check in together at a hotel on Patong Beach.
The bodies of the Da-mudes, from Victoria on Vancouver Island in Canada, were identified last Thursday. They had been hacked apart and the pieces spread in undergrowth over a wide area of the Kathu district, near Patong.
Scripps, alias Simon Davis, alias Rupert Bola, was arrested on returning to Singapore, where he is accused of butchering South African chemical engineer Gerard Lowe the previous week. In his bags were the Damudes' passports.
Yesterday, Singapore police found a second decomposed body at the site where Lowe's body parts were retrieved.