AS PASSAPORN Boonkasemsanti set off to meet her estranged husband for lunch at a busy Japanese restaurant in Bangkok's swanky Siam Square, she could scarcely have thought it would be her last meal.
What the couple discussed is likely to remain forever a mystery. What seems certain, however, is that a grainy video of the pair leaving the restaurant on that February afternoon was the last anyone would see of Passaporn until 3.3 kilograms of her flesh and vital organs were dredged weeks later from the stinking cesspools of a hospital dormitory and a hotel.
It's a case that has shocked even the most jaded residents of Bangkok, a city largely inured to random violence and nourished by daily doses of tabloid gore, and one made all the more bizarre by its resemblance to another case of dismemberment in the same upmarket district three years ago.
Police allege Dr Wisut Boonk-asemsanti, one of Bangkok's top gynaecologists and a medic to the rich and famous, as well as a leader in in-vitro fertilisation techniques at prestigious Chulalongkorn Hospital, killed his wife in cold blood, then drawing on his medical knowledge, cut her body into tiny pieces and flushed them into the city's sewers.
Police were confident they had built an unassailable mass of circumstantial evidence when they handed the case over to the public prosecutor at the beginning of the month. It was not a view shared by the prosecutor, Sermkiat Woradit, who ordered Wisut released and the charges dropped. As the doctor led a procession of paparazzi back to his Ladphrao townhouse, senior police were already trading public blows with Sermkiat as Passa-porn's family howled with outrage.
'We have no body, no witnesses and no murder weapon,' said Sermkiat, refusing to commit Wisut to trial. 'Not touching on the fact that the death can only be presumed, we have been unable to ascertain whether Passaporn's demise resulted from a stab wound, gunshot wound, poisoning or asphyxiation. Without those details, we cannot prosecute a suspect.'
Deputy Police Commissioner General Sant Sarutanont, a fav-ourite in the race to become the next police commissioner, was quick to hit back. 'We gave them [the prosecutors] everything but a front-row witness to the murder,' he said. 'We reconstructed the suspect's every move before and after the murder and what we got strongly pointed at him as the prime suspect. Every jigsaw piece simply fits together.'
