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Simon Parry

David Chappell  knows the death of his son is a small tragedy compared to the cataclysm that engulfed Cambodia after Year Zero. 'You've got to remember all the people in Cambodia,' he said. 'It happens to them every day.

'That is the thing that gets forgotten. You forget that people are being kidnapped and killed even now, virtually every day, and nobody cares about them except for their families.'

However rational that perspective might be, the tragedy of Dominic is Mr Chappell's own, and one he has to live with. Eleven years after the 24-year-old was kidnapped and executed by the Khmer Rouge, the loss of a son is no easier to bear.

'It never gets any easier - I don't think it ever could,' said Mr Chappell, 66, at his home on Lamma Island, where he lives with his Hong Kong-born wife Rebecca.

'One's memories are fixed in time. Just occasionally something happens or you hear about something and you think 'It would be nice to tell Dom', and you can't. It never goes away.

'You find as you get older, memories drag themselves up. Suddenly you get a flash of somewhere or someone or an event totally out of the blue. Sometimes it just happens.

'It's not so much painful as sad. It is sad that it all happened that way. It is sad because it is such a tragic waste.'

Dominic and girlfriend Kellie Wilkinson,  24, lived on Lamma and worked as freelance models before they left to run a restaurant in Sihanoukville, in southern Cambodia, in 1993.

On April 11, 1994, the couple were driving back with a third westerner, Tina Dominy, 23, from Phnom Penh after buying supplies for their restaurant, the Cafe Rendezvous. They were stopped at a Khmer Rouge roadblock and kidnapped.

A two-month search involving diplomats, secret service agents, Scotland Yard detectives and a huge press corps ended with the discovery of the bones and other remains of Dominic, Kellie and Tina. They are believed to have been executed the day after being kidnapped.

Mr Chappell remembers the day he first received the news that his son had been kidnapped -  probably after the three had already been executed. 'I got back to my flat in Lamma on the afternoon of the following day, the 12th.

'There was a message on my answer phone from my ex-wife in England, Dominic's mother. She had heard on the BBC news that someone had been kidnapped. She said she had a nasty feeling about it, this hunch that it was Dominic.

'Shortly afterwards the whole world just imploded. I can't now remember the exact sequence. Somebody from a newspaper phoned me up and told me Dom had been kidnapped.

'The phone basically didn't stop ringing after that. At some point quite early on the ambassador in Phnom Penh called me and broke the news that Dominic had been kidnapped and said 'Don't talk to anybody'.'

Mr Chappell ignored the advice but was to remain in Hong Kong for two weeks before travelling to Cambodia to join the search for his son. 'I didn't see the point because I knew the communications were zero,' he said.

When he did go to Cambodia, he was to endure the insensitivity of officials and detectives who bustled around trying to keep him away from the press and to shield him from information they felt he should not know.

He is angry even now at the memory of being assured by Scotland Yard detectives that remains found were not those of his son - when he subsequently discovered that they were, and that the detectives knew as much at the time.

Those extraordinary, adrenaline-fuelled weeks in Cambodia left a library of memories of contrasting emotions and experiences, including moments of black humour.

'They took Dominic's bones back to London - a Scotland Yard guy just took them in his hand baggage,' he said.

'He just stuck them in his bag and flew them back to London. We had this black joke - we said we hoped that the plane didn't crash, because there will be one unaccounted-for body when they check the wreckage afterwards.'

Last Monday was the 11th anniversary of the kidnapping. Mr Chappell marked the event in the way he always does - with phone calls to his daughter in England and Kellie's mother Gabriel in Brisbane, Australia.

'I always phone Kellie's mother or she phones me,' he said. 'I always talk to my daughter - not always to my ex-wife. We have these key dates - Christmas, Kellie's birthday in January, the anniversary of the day they were kidnapped, Dominic's birthday on August 10.

'We have a long chat - up to an hour and a half. Kellie's mother tends to get more emotional than I do. It's just a way of remembering and saying 'It's that day again'.'

There is never any contact with Tina's family, however. 'Her family just didn't want to know,' Mr Chappell said. 'They were just devastated and they blanked it all out.'

Dominic lives on in his father's memory as the laid-back and gregarious young man who set up a sandwich business on the pier at Lamma with Kellie: the pair had spotted a business opportunity as people rushed to get the ferry to work without time for breakfast.

'He was a lovely guy,' Mr Chappell said. 'He was idle. He was charming. Everyone liked him. He got on well with people. He had this sunny disposition.

'He was always accident-prone, funnily enough. When he was quite young - he must have been two - he fell and hit himself just near his eye. When he was at prep school he fell 30 metres down a mountain in Switzerland.'

Mr Chappell says he was never a controlling father, either with Dominic or his daughter Gabriel. 'I had the attitude that whatever my kids wanted to do was up to them. It wasn't my role to say 'No, you can't do that'.

'I'd give them advice and I'd be a shoulder to cry on if they wanted it. But it was up to them to make their own way in life, whatever they wanted to do. We were friends.'

There was never any sense of guilt over allowing his son to go to Cambodia, Mr Chappell insists. Dominic's death did not change Mr Chappell's life but it did confirm some of his existing beliefs.

'I think my daughter described it best when she says that what happened to Dom made her believe we should live for the day.'



Life in the wake of a  Khmer Rouge atrocity