When a nine-year-old boy was caught in the crossfire of the Thai government’s ‘War Against Drugs’ that resulted in more than 2,500 extrajudicial killings over three months in 2003, Dr. Porntip Rojanasunan investigated the shooting. When the tsunami laid waste to the Andaman coast in December 2004, the forensic doctor worked for 40 days straight to identify thousands of corpses. After Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, she and her team flew to Louisiana. During the political tumult of 2010, when a glitzy area of Bangkok was under siege and fire, the doctor’s department launched an investigation—mostly stymied by the powers-that-be—into the most contentious killings.
High-profile cases like these, constant run-ins with the Thai police and her unique Goth-punk image have made Dr. Porntip a celebrity and cover woman in Thailand. She has also been profiled in numerous women’s magazines around the world. But it was the Asian tsunami that first swept the Bangkok-born doctor into the global media’s searchlight following her interviews on CNN, the BBC and Fox News.
Dr. Porntip’s outspoken nature and run-ins with the police have created numerous bones of contention.
Not long after the ten metre-high waves slammed into the coastline of Thailand, Dr. Porntip and her team established a makeshift morgue on the grounds of Wat Yan Yao, a Buddhist temple in the most deluged province with the highest body count—Phangnga. Within days, thousands of corpses with salt water and bodily fluids leaking from their mouths were laid on the ground outside the temple. To keep the bodies from decomposing too quickly, the volunteers used blocks of dry ice, so an eerie mist drifted over the dead. The ice also prevented chickens from pecking at the maggots wriggling out of wounds and eye sockets. At times the volunteers would gasp and reel back in terror as the corpses moaned; they thought the dead were coming back to life. But, as Dr. Porntip explained, when gases escape from corpses, they wheeze past the vocal cords.
Kelly May, the original publisher of Thailand’s version of the celebrity scandal sheet OK!, was one of the volunteers assisting in identifying the deceased and doing translations for people looking for loved ones. She remembers walking into the temple grounds and being horror-struck. “There were limbs poking up everywhere, and these hideously deformed bodies so swollen and black that they didn’t even resemble humans but something out of a bad horror movie.
“Dr. Porntip stayed on the temple grounds, and although she was working from 7am until midnight for 40 days to help identify thousands of bodies, I never saw her lose her temper once. I just have so much respect for her. She came in, got down and dirty, and she always looked great. It was funny, but some of the volunteers even got their hair cut like hers.”
On an emotional level, how did the forensic specialist cope with such an unprecedented catastrophe? This was a question put to her by freelance photographer Steve Sandford as they stood in the middle of the temple, overwhelmed by the eye-watering stench of bodies putrefying in 35-degree heat—which soon made it difficult to tell whether they were male or female, Asian or Caucasian. “She told me, ‘We just have to do the best we can’, and it’s typical of her cool and professional manner,” said Steve. “I’ve photographed her doing an autopsy in her lab; she’s very quick and methodical. She sliced up the body of this guy who’d died in a motorcycle accident in about 30 minutes and removed the top of his head to show me some of the injuries that had caused his death. She also pulled out his liver and put that on the table to show me that he’d been an alcoholic. I think I skipped breakfast that day and stopped drinking for a while.”
***
At the Central Institute of Forensic Science (CIFS), Dr. Porntip sat on a black leather couch, the only concession to trendiness in her clutter-free, grey-carpeted office. She summed up her career with a grin, “I’m a lady of disaster.” That’s a typical example of her morbid sense of humour, colour-coordinated with a stylish black outfit, matching boots and a porcupine hairdo with quills of tinted red hair sticking out.
Speaking about the post-mortem identification of more than 5,000 bodies after the tsunami, the doctor gave more credit to her ad hoc team than herself. “It was the hardest work of my life, but we were happy to help them [the victim’s families]. Ninety per cent of my team were volunteers and they did a great job. From the tsunami, I think our government has learned a lot about Critical Incidents Management, before which we had no idea about.”
Still, she admitted that the situation was completely shambolic—trying to co-ordinate volunteers and experts from many different countries; dealing with frantic and grieving relatives; cutting away pieces of flesh to bag for DNA samples; examining mouths for dental work and bodies for scars and tattoos. She had to sleep in a van at night and lost three kilos during the first couple of weeks.
To make matters worse, Dr. Porntip was caught in the backwash of allegations from the forensic unit of the Thai police that she had wrongly identified some of the bodies. In retaliation, she accused them of trying to steal the credit from her team. But the general public remained firmly on her side. In surveys taken at the time, Dr. Porntip was second only to then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra as the country’s most popular non-royal. Having already received the regal title of khunying (the equivalent of dame), from His Majesty the King for her contributions to the country, she was promoted to the position of acting director of the CIFS in late 2005. Once again, rumours made the rounds that she would forsake forensics for a prominent position in the body politic.
“Many political parties have invited me to be a member, but I will not be a politician. No, never. I just want to be an ordinary person and establish the institute for the people, but I don’t want to be the director. But at this time, we don’t have anyone else to do the job.” Later she relented to public pressure, becoming the director in 2008.
Decades of dissecting cadavers and poring over the minutia of crime scenes have imbued the doctor with intense concentration. Whether speaking or listening, she made constant eye contact. Her stare was unnerving, partly because it’s so uncommon coming from a Thai woman. But in a justice system almost completely dominated by men, she has also seemed wary of acting too feminine or showing any signs of vulnerability. Any questions that missed the mark were immediately shot down with an impatient “No, no, no”, before she clarified the matter.
The forensics specialist was chatty and affable, but kept her professional distance. Personal questions received terse answers: her Thai husband is a bank manager; her teenage daughter spends five days a week at a boarding school; the doctor still listens to a lot of Western music “but only female singers”. Elaborations were not forthcoming.
What she relished talking about most was the science of death and the cases she has worked on. Khunying Porntip first became a household name in Thailand in 1998 when she was working at Bangkok’s Ramathibodi Hospital and Faculty of Medicine as a pathologist investigating unnatural deaths and as a consultant for medical students. When a female student disappeared for a week, the doctor theorised that her boyfriend, Serm, another medical student with very high grades, had killed her.
“The chief of the police forensic department knew that I had knowledge of DNA; it was the first time in Thailand that we used DNA testing on a case. There was blood in Serm’s car, so I asked the police to give the bloodstain to me to do the DNA test, but they told me they believed Serm’s statement that this was the blood of a fish because his mother worked in the market.”
The bloodstain matched the DNA of the missing woman, Janjira. So did another droplet of dried blood found in the bathroom of Serm’s apartment. These clues led to a ghastly discovery: the medical student had indeed killed his girlfriend and, with a surgeon’s skill, dissected her and flushed her remains down the toilet. Photos in local papers, and video footage on TV, showing Dr. Porntip trawling through the drains in search of the young woman’s remains became indelible images in the public eye, and soon led to a series of true-crime books about her cases, such as Sop Phut Dai (‘Corpses Can Speak’). All of them have been bestsellers in Thailand.
Ever since she showed up the notoriously corrupt police by providing the body of evidence for Serm’s conviction, Dr. Porntip has had numerous roadblocks put in front of her crime-scene investigations. “I don’t have a problem with the police, but they have a problem with me,” she said, smiling in a manner that seemed both mischievous and a little arrogant. “When they claim a man has committed suicide and then we find two bullets in his skull, what should we believe? That he was a bad shot?”
This was why, as the director of the CIFS, she wanted to set up mobile labs for crime-scene analyses so her department can conduct investigations that are independent from those of the police. Her motives for doing so were selfless; it’s not like she needs to win any more popularity contests in Thailand, where she was named the country’s ‘Most Trusted Person’ in a survey by the Asian edition of Reader’s Digest in 2010. “I’m already popular enough with the Thai public,” she said.
So it seems unlikely we’ll get to see her hosting any pop concerts or being captured by TV cameras dancing enthusiastically with her husband to the tunes of Thailand’s most enduring pop star, Thongchai ‘Bird’ McIntyre.
***
The doctor’s growing fame in the rest of Asia and the West, where she has been dubbed ‘Dr. Death’, is an outgrowth of forensic medicine’s rise from basement morgues to the mainstream media. Bestselling novels by Patricia Cornwall and Kathy Reichs, along with mega-popular TV shows like CSI, have proven that the first commandment of TV news producers, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’, has been a ‘blood bank’ for the makers and merchants of pop culture.
In late 2002, while she was doing a promotional tour for her gruesome thriller Grave Secrets, I interviewed Kathy Reichs in the plush Author’s Lounge of the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. As one of only 50 forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology at the time, Kathy Reichs toiled at ‘Ground Zero’ in the aftermath of the World Trade Center conflagration; testified at the United Nations Tribunal on Genocide in Rwanda, and sifted through the remains of Guatemalans butchered by government soldiers and buried in makeshift bone-yards. The latter experience inspired the first chapter in Grave Secrets.
Like Porntip, and like the heroine of Kathy’s novels (forensics expert Temperance Brennan), discussing the emotional hangover of the job is too close to the bone. “It’s hard... especially when what you’re digging up are women and children who were shot and macheted [in Guatemala]. Another colleague who was interviewed for a documentary down there had a very good answer when he was asked about this: ‘If you have to cry, you cry at night when you’re home alone. During the day, you have a job to do.’”
Kathy noted that people now have a better understanding of the world of forensic pathology than they did in the early 1980s, when she started out in the profession. But while the science of CSI is realistic, “one of the downsides of those shows is that there’s always an answer and an explanation, so unsophisticated viewers think that’s reality. CSI is also not realistic in the way that it shows crime-scene technicians doing all the work—at least not in the jurisdictions where I work.”
Dr. Porntip, on the other hand, is a fan of CSI, partly because she said it’s inspired many young Thais to consider taking up the career. At present, Thailand only has five forensic pathologists and 50 lab technicians. Most of them are women. Many Thais are afraid of working with the dead, she said, because they fear ghosts. Yet another disincentive is lousy pay.
But is CSI realistic?
“Thailand is so far behind the West in forensics that the question isn’t really important,” she said, a smile flickering across her face.
As a teenager, it was a different TV show that triggered her interest in crime-fighting: the 1970s detective series Colombo, starring Peter Falk as the cigar-smoking private investigator whose rumpled trench coat and rutted features made him look like a drunk coming off a three-day bender. At the time, her two favourite publications were National Geographic and the fashion magazine Glamour. So she was torn between becoming a doctor or an interior designer. Her father cajoled her into pursuing medicine.
“When I finished medical school, I was an intern in the northern part of Thailand, and I wanted to dress in this style and listen to the music I like. Thailand only had a few pathologists back then. I worked up north for ten years so I could stay away from my father and he couldn’t control me. I wanted to work independently from other people, because to work for the government in Thai society means you have no power. I can dress in this style because my office is in the autopsy room and no one will complain,” said the doctor, whose stylish appearance and high profile have made her a natural model for fashion shoots, such as when she dressed up as Cleopatra for the Thai-language magazine Image. The red-haired heroine in popular Thai thriller Body of Evidence also looks like a carbon copy of the doctor.
The country’s first lady of forensics has the slump-backed posture of a life-long academic. When seated, she slouched forward with her elbows on her knees, as if the deadweight of all those unsolved cases weighed constantly upon her shoulders. Or it may just be the constant weariness that comes with her workload, and her plans to establish a Missing Persons Bureau and another agency to investigate the thousands of unexplained deaths in Thailand each year.
During this interview, I mentioned an anecdote Kathy Reichs had told me. At one of her book signings in America, a fan showed up with a big plastic tub containing the bones of a deceased relative. She wanted the author and forensic anthropologist to pinpoint the exact cause of death.
Dr. Porntip smiled and nodded—she’s had many similar experiences. Every week, her office is called upon to perform autopsies for murder victims. Some have died under very suspicious circumstances—like the Buddhist monk-cum-environmental activist found dead during a land-development dispute, or the three young hilltribe men who allegedly hung themselves from the bars of a police cell with their own shoelaces. Often, she only has time to examine the bigger bones of contention. In 2004, for instance, she performed autopsies on 78 Muslim men in southern Thailand who died after being stacked on top of each other like cordwood—six deep for five hours in the back of army trucks, during the so-called ‘Tak Bai Massacre’. The soldiers had tied the victims’ hands behind their backs. Dr. Porntip’s autopsies revealed that the men died of suffocation so severe that they bled from their eyes.
Every weekend, Dr. Porntip still heads down to the three southernmost provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat, where several thousand civilians and soldiers have died since the beginning of 2004 in a spate of shootings, bombings, and arson attacks that the Thai government has blamed on everyone—from Muslim separatists to al-Queda terrorists to drug traffickers diverting attention away from their illicit dealings. As one of the few public figures trusted by the Southerners, the doctor tried to contact the former premier, Thaksin Shinawatra, a one-time policeman who earned a PhD in Criminal Justice from a Texas university, to tell him that the country must use forensic science to carry out proper investigations. “But the staff around him never allowed me to speak to him,” she said.
In the entire south of Thailand, she added, there are only two forensics specialists, both based in Hat Yai, who refuse to do field work because it’s too dangerous. The fractures between the Southerners and the government have only been compounded by the fact that Muslims bury their dead quickly and don’t like autopsies to be performed on them.
On her desk sat a copy of the book, Mass Fatality and Casualty Incidents: A Field Study. It’s a checklist for calamities, covering areas such as ‘Sustained Morgue Operations’, ‘Release of Deceased’ and ‘Coping with Response to Mass Death’. She picked it up on a trip to New Orleans, where she studied the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s rescue efforts in the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. She tries to read for at least an hour each day to keep up with the latest developments in her field, and publishes a few medical papers each month, as well as newspaper columns on subjects such as Buddhism and even astrology (the doctor is a Sagittarius).
Although she claims to have never had any nightmares and never been spooked by any ghosts, Dr. Porntip still believes in life after death in a Buddhist way and karma. “I believe that the spirits of the dead want me to help them, so we have to fight for justice. And when I’m faced with a problem, I will try to pray to the spirits of the dead to help me, or lead me in a good way. And every time they will help.”
Catching up with the doctor in mid-2010, after the political tumult on the streets of Bangkok left more than 80 people dead and at least 2,000 injured, was a chance to launch an investigation into her findings. On 19 May, soldiers overran the barricades of tires fortified with bamboo stakes and brambles of barbed wire erected by red-shirt protestors around the intersection of Rajprasong. Six bodies were found on the grounds of the Wat Pathum Wanaram Buddhist temple. The morning after, Dr. Porntip and her team from the CIFS were on the case. “We were doing an ‘external examination’ of the crime scene. Since the bodies were moved by the police, we had to examine and match the DNA from blood stains to get a clearer picture of what happened. It’s standard practise to check for gunpowder residue on hands to see if the victims had been armed. In this case, some people had claimed the victims were shot because they were armed, but we didn’t find any traces of gunpowder on their hands. Some of the victims were hit many times so it was difficult to tell the trajectory of those bullets, or find out the truth about stories of snipers from different sides.”
Yet, her team had no authority to pursue any further inquests or do the autopsies. Two weeks after the shootings, the forensics unit of the Royal Thai Police released the results of their post-mortem examinations. Among the six Thai victims at the temple, most in their 20s and 30s, there was only one female. Kamonkate Athart, a 25-year-old helping out as a volunteer nurse, and the sole rice-winner in a large, impoverished family, had been shot ten times. The autopsy report listed the cause of death as ‘damage to her brain stem. A trajectory study cannot be performed, because of excessive damage to muscles and bones’. Dr. Porntip was disappointed with these inconclusive results, referring to the police as ‘tomatoes’ (Thai slang for red-shirt sympathisers). “The police have much better equipment now [for autopsies and crime-scene investigations], but their guidelines and practices have not improved.” At the same time, she was just as disappointed with the government’s equally inconclusive probe into the shootings on once-hallowed ground. In doing a form of post-mortem on the major, multiple murders she has investigated, the doctor zeroed in on an unchanging miscarriage of justice. “It doesn’t matter whether it was the ‘war against drugs’ or the Tak Bai Massacre, or the killings during the political protests. Evidence disappears or is tampered with, so afterwards anybody can claim whatever they want. I hate to see politicians take advantage of this.”
Many of her brainchildren—such as the Missing Persons Bureau and establishing an independent body to serve as watchdogs and coroners—are stillborn, but she is still trying to reanimate them. “I’ve been fighting for these developments for ten years, but with no progress,” she said, smiling with a weary resignation tempered by steely resolve. As always, the doctor and author refused to play partisan politics or subscribe to any party lines. “In my work I still follow a Buddhist middle way. I might work for the government, but it doesn’t mean I have to believe everything they say.” In her case, facing death threats and constant obstructions from the powers-that-be (even having to defend herself against charges—later dropped—of ‘misappropriating state funds’ to bring her team to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina), it is remarkable that her idealism and defiant streak remain intact after a decades-long career. And still, she perseveres. “I want to change the justice system in this country permanently.”
In one corner of Dr. Porntip’s office is a shrine where she prays to a Buddha image depicting him ‘in the position of subduing evil’, imploring the spirits of the deceased to help her. Behind the doctor’s desk are statues of her other idol, King Naresuan the Great (1555–1605 AD), one of Siam’s most fabled monarchs and a phenomenal muay thai boxer who, legend has it, was captured by the Burmese but regained his freedom after beating their best fighter in a bout.
Perhaps these conflicting images sum up the extremities of her personality and career—a kindly sister of mercy who claims that her work, no matter how grisly, ‘is all about love’; and the hard-as-bullets crusader for justice who continues to combat the most powerful politicians, policemen, businesspeople, military officers and criminals.
It’s never easy to tell who’s who in the country