'I'VE NEVER SEEN anything like it, and I pray that I never have to again,' says police sergeant Niwat Siwantawong, taking a fierce pull on his cheroot. 'I mean, this is a pretty wild province - we're close to the Burmese border - and I've seen some things in my time. But nothing like this.' The wiry policeman, who sports a bejewelled pistol and two sets of handcuffs on his cowboy belt, oversees a small corner of Ratchaburi province's Damnoen Saduak district, three hours' drive west from Bangkok. It's a beautiful part of Thailand, home to the famously photogenic floating market, where women in big straw hats paddle small wooden boats laden with all manner of produce, about cool green canals. Dotted between the palm plantations are fruit and vegetable orchards, criss-crossed by irrigation ditches full of lotus flowers. The district is chiefly famous for having given Thailand one of its recent prime ministers: Chatichai 'No Problem' Choonhaven. That was until October 4, when a crime - so bloody, disturbing and bizarre that it would shock a nation - was perpetrated in the rural idyll. That afternoon began much like any other, Niwat says. It was warm and sunny, and life was unfolding at its usual lazy pace. 'There wasn't much happening. I was in the garage tinkering with my motorbike. That's when I got the call.' A man known in the district as Tong 'Bet' Jiamcharoen called police headquarters in Damnoen Saduak, shouting about human sacrifice and strange happenings in his mother's house in Bak Khlong Khut village. The village is about 10km from Niwat's outpost, so he was sent to check things out. 'I know the family, and I'd heard a few weird rumours,' he says. 'But I was thinking someone had probably drunk a bit too much lao khao [rice whiskey] and was having a bit of fun.' He arrived at the two-storey house and immediately felt something was wrong. 'It was quiet - strangely quiet,' he says. 'There were no birds singing, no dogs barking.' He called out for 'Bet', but there was no reply. 'I entered the house, and I'll never forget what I saw. Lying there on the marble floor, in a big pool of blood, was a young girl, completely naked, her throat slashed so badly that her head was half-way severed, and it looked like someone had cut her hair off in a hurry.' He looked in the kitchen, and saw several knives and meat cleavers, looking as if they'd just been washed. Heart hammering in his chest, Niwat tiptoed up the steps to the upper floor. In the middle of the room was a Buddhist altar. 'But something was different. Then I realised it was this ugly green god - some kind of Hindu thing. And there were huge pools of candle wax everywhere, and some big candles still burning.' He noticed a stronger burning smell, obviously not the candles. When he checked the landing, what appeared to be the remnants of the girl's clothes were still smouldering. In a tin washbasin, hanks of dark brown hair were floating. 'At that point, I started yelling, but there was no answer. There was one room upstairs that was locked. I had to break the door,' he says. On the floor sat four women, chanting in a 'foreign language', and apparently in some kind of trance. By this time, back-up had arrived, and the women were taken into custody. The slain girl was Prapasorn Jiamcharoen, 12, and the four women arrested were her mother, Kanchana Jiamcharoen, 29, two aunts, Anong and Charin, and the girl's grandmother, Saibua. Niwat says one of the aunts told him that Kanchana had supernatural powers and could summon the Hindu god Indra. She had killed her daughter, with the assistance of her sisters and mother, to rid the village of evil, and to appease Indra, in the hope that the god would bless the family's coconut farm and pomelo orchard. The four women remain in custody, in a psychiatric institution on the outskirts of Bangkok, pending investigation and an assessment of their mental health. According to Thaweesilp Visanuyothin, of the Mental Health Department, Kanchana and Anong are suffering from 'induced delusional disorder'. 'The psychiatrists can't communicate with them,' he says. 'We haven't reached a conclusion about whether the other two are mentally ill.' Police Lieutenant General Chatchawan Sangraksa, who's in charge of the case, says that, if the women are found to be insane, they may not stand trial. In an initial interview, Kanchana had been 'reasonably lucid' and had calmly admitted to killing her daughter. The ritual had included slashing her throat with a cleaver and soaking her hair in water. The women taped the ritual. 'There's a lot of screaming,' Chatchawan says. 'Her last words are 'Mum, mum, whatever you're doing to me, please, don't do it'. Since that interview, however, the women have become unco-operative. They veer from shouting abuse and threats to going into almost comatose states. I've never come across a case quite like this. Where they got these weird ideas about human sacrifice is anybody's guess.' It seems more than a little strange, in a country where 90 per cent of the inhabitants are Buddhist, and any kind of sacrifice is prohibited, to find an Indra cult. One of the chief deities of Hindu mythology, Indra is the god of storms and war. He's usually depicted as fierce, sometimes red and gold, sometimes green, carrying a thunderbolt in his right hand. In ancient times, he was offered animal and, on occasions, human sacrifices, to celebrate his slaying of the drought demon, Vritra, thus releasing the rains and ensuring a bountiful harvest. The case has caused a stir in Thailand, with local newspapers and magazines revelling in the story, splashing photos of Prapasorn's corpse over their front pages. It has prompted the Culture and Interior ministries, along with the Mental Health Department, to announce new measures to counter false beliefs in psychic powers, strange gods and superstition - including a revamp of the Shrine Monitoring Act to require anyone operating 'psychic or related activities' to be registered. It seemed plausible that one woman might go crazy, but less so that two, or even four, from the same family would all do so at once, let alone co-operate in so bloodthirsty and insane a venture as killing an innocent child. So it was that I found myself on the road to Ratchaburi. We follow Niwat along a maze of dirt tracks, some so thickly crowded with palm trees that they're eerily dark. When we arrive at the Jiamcharoen home, it looks anything but a house of horrors. It's spacious, clean and cool, with expensive-looking marble floors downstairs and an impressive teak upper storey. 'They certainly weren't poor,' says Niwat. A dozen dogs, in varying states of mange, yip and growl as we approach the front door. We're met by a smiling woman who introduces herself as Kingkarn. 'Yes, I'm one of the Jiamcharoen sisters,' she says, almost apologetically. We sit down, and Niwat points at the floor. 'That's where I found the body,' he says. 'I can almost still see it. It nearly gave me a heart attack at the time.' He says that reports in the Bangkok press that the women came after him with knives for interrupting their ritual were rubbish. Kingkarn wasn't living in the house at the time. She says she's come back to look after the house 'because someone has to'. She says she's still in a state of shock. 'I can't believe it,' she says. 'I saw Kanchana and my other sisters in August, at a family get-together, and they seemed perfectly fine. They certainly didn't seem to be obsessed by Indra or babbling any kind of Hindu nonsense. Were they crazy? Absolutely not. We talked about the farm, the weather, how Nong Noo [Prapasorn] was doing in school. And then, just a few months later ...' For a moment or two her smile gives way to tears. The marble floor has been swabbed clean, but under the stairs a couple of mops sit in buckets, still tinged with red. 'I don't really like living here,' she says. 'I've been sleeping downstairs, and at night, I keep hearing footsteps upstairs, even though there's nobody there. We've had the monks here, to perform a ceremony for Nong Noo, but after what happened, I wouldn't be surprised if her spirit is very angry.' We venture upstairs. There are still pools of yellow wax near the altar, but the statue of Indra is gone. 'Taken by the police, as evidence,' says Kingkarn. Outside on the landing, she shows me a burned spot on the concrete. 'I suppose that's where they burned her clothes.' She picks up a framed photograph of Prapasorn, and regards it for a moment. 'I shouldn't really tell you this, but she didn't have a father. Kanchana was raped, and she got pregnant. She seemed fine all these years, but I suppose something like that could make you a bit unbalanced. I know Kanchana was quite religious. She used to go to the temple a lot. When we were kids, she was very interested in the Ramayana story [an epic detailing the adventures of Hindu gods]. 'Nong Noo was a lovely kid. She didn't deserve anything like this. She played the flute in the orchestra at school. She had a lot of friends. She wanted to be a nurse when she grew up. It seems so evil to take all that away from an innocent child.' Kanchana was the seventh of eight children, and lived most of her life at the house, with her mother, two sisters and one brother. Two cousins are staying at the house now with Kingkarn. One of them, 'Toom', lives nearby, and says he'd noticed the sisters were becoming eccentric of late. 'Three or four months ago, she became convinced that the green god [Indra] could come into her body,' he says. 'She began talking about it around the village. Before long, she had about 20 followers. They would gather upstairs in front of the altar late at night, and chant some funny language. I didn't see them sacrifice anything, but there were rumours around the village that some pigs and chickens had gone missing. I went to some of these meditation meetings. She would sit up on the sofa, legs crossed, and go into a trance. She would say 'Indra is coming, Indra is coming' and then tell people things about their lives, advice from Indra.' The village leader, Boonsom Poonsin, is a squat, barrel-chested fellow with brilliantined hair like a 1950s movie star and a no-nonsense squint. He, too, says strange things went on at the Jiamcharoen house. 'I heard the rumours about missing animals,' he says. 'Then, three days before the murder, Anong and Charin came to my house around 3am, banging on my door, telling me to come quickly. I thought there was a burglar or something, so I grabbed my rifle and followed them to the house. 'When I arrived, they showed me upstairs, and there was Kanchana, wearing a white robe, sitting on the sofa with her eyes closed. There must have been 15 or 20 people sitting around on the floor, chanting. There was a statue of Pa-In [Indra] on the altar.' What happened next, he says, distinctly unnerved him. 'She ordered me to sit down, at her feet, and to shut my eyes. Well, I sat down, but there was no way I was going to shut my eyes. She did some weird chanting, then she opened her eyes, looked at me, and said that in a former life, I had killed Indra, and that she intended to sue me. I said, 'Well, sorry, I don't remember my last life.' Then, she gripped my wrist, and started chanting again, and then screaming, saying, 'Now, do you remember, god killer?' Well, I just got the hell out of there.' The next two nights, about the same time, the two sisters banged on his door again. 'I just ignored them until they went away,' he says. Boonsom's wife, Lumjiak, says she has just visited the women in the psychiatric hospital. 'They seemed to be totally nuts,' she says. 'They didn't know who I was, and were calling me names. It's weird. They all seemed perfectly normal until recently.' Boonsom says the episode has clearly been bad for the village. 'It's a tragedy - that poor little kid. She used to come over here and play with our dogs. I hope I never hear about this Indra again. We just want to forget about it, and get on with our lives.'
