Executed Twice
The medical mystery of Thailand’s most hated woman
“The prisoners were very calm. You never know how they will react when it is their turn. When I used to escort the men from their cells to their death, I could almost smell the relief of those spared for another day. By the time I came to take them, the doomed convict would have already given away his stuff to the other inmates; all that was left to do was say his goodbyes.”
[Quote: Charuvet Jaruboon’s Autobiography ‘The Last Executioner’]
The late seventies found Thailand — affectionately dubbed the ‘Country of Smiles’ — in the full throes of bloom, awash with rich hippy-music and American soldiers still fresh from the Vietnam war. For the parents of a six-year-old little boy, it was to be the cusp of the most horrific decade in their lives.
Jitra and and Vichai Srijareonsukying were the owners of the popular Thai restaurant, Somboonpochana. While they busied themselves with running the affairs of their eatery, the couple hired a young woman to pick up their son after school and take care of him.
The young woman’s name: Ginggaew Lorsoongern.
Things went well at first, but as time passed Jitra and her husband found themselves less and less satisfied with Ginggaew’s child-care skills. By the end of 1978, the couple decided they’d had enough; they fired Ginggaew, leaving the woman jobless and out of money.
Finding herself furious and destitute, she wound up turning to her older, 28-year-old career-criminal boyfriend for help. Whispered secrets in the dark paved the way for the nauseating events that would follow. Though Ginggaew would later vociferously deny having been responsible for the tender loss of human life, she could nonetheless never take back what she’d done. In a case of either malicious serendipity or a cruel, knife-twisting deal of karma’s lot, Ginggaew would soon suffer from what any reasonable person might call a fate ‘worse than death’.
There were five other co-conspirators to Ginggaew’s crime: Thongmuan, Thongsuk, Suthi, Pin, and Gasem (the latter two would also be sentenced to death by the Prime Minister of Thailand).
On October 18, 1978, Ginggaew picked up the little boy from school as usual. This time, though, things would be woefully different. Instead of taking the child home, the spiteful nanny took him to a secret location in Nakhon Ratchasima Province, located in Isan. The plan she had orchestrated seemed simple on paper and infallible: she’d written and sent to the parents a ransom note the day prior, demanding 200,000 baht that was to be immediately deposited into a bag between Janteuk and Pakchong rail-stations. The wealthy Srijareonsukying family had been instructed to leave the bag at a spot where the kidnappers had planted a white flag. The ransom would be collected, the child returned, and Ginggaew would finally have the money she felt she deserved.
The plan was practically fool-proof, until it wasn’t.
Under the watchful eye of Thai police, the distraught family assembled the funds. Out of nervousness or panic — both of which entirely understandable given the situation — the pair failed to see the flag and left the money in the wrong location.
Ginggaew and her fellow kidnappers were furious. What she failed to anticipate, though, was her boy-friend’s reaction. In a so-called ‘unpredictable’ rage, he and his minions turned on the helpless boy and dragged him to a two-foot grave that had supposedly been dug without Ginggaew’s knowledge.
Once there, he was forced inside, with flowers shoved into his palms and white saisin thread wrapped around his wrists. The flowers and thread were a means of pacifying the young boy’s spirit, which they were terrified of, though they might have avoided the pesky problem of spirits (and saved their own lives) by letting the little boy go home to his parents. This they chose not to do, for reasons that only Ginggaew and her lover would ever know for sure.
The child was killed, and Ginggaew Lorsoongern and her 5-person crew found themselves promptly arrested.
“She was all over the news like some kind of film star,”
Chevuret Jaruboon would say later, while being interviewed for his biography ‘The Last Executioner’. No one could understand how such an attractive and seemingly-bright young woman like Ginggaew could be responsible for the death of a six-year-old. She did not even seem to understand her own responsibility for the crime.
She maintained tearfully that when the criminals dragged the boy to his grave, she jumped in front of him and pleaded for his life, only to be roughly shoved aside. Perhaps thinking that if she provided more information about the murder she would receive leniency, Ginggaew admitted that she could still hear the little boy crying for his parents after he was buried; this, noted Jaruboon solemnly, was confirmed when an autopsy showed that the child had soil inside of his lungs. Ginggaew did not appear to understand that if she had not kidnapped him to begin with, she would not have found herself on death row as only the second woman to be executed by gunfire in Thailand since Yai Sonthibumoong in 1942.
At 11:25 AM, Ginggaew, Gasem, and Pin arrived at Bong Kwan prison. By this time, it was 1979. Gasem and Pin appeared to look ‘pathetic and miserable’ in their ratty prison uniforms, Chevuret observed.
Ginggaew wore a single skirt, a long-sleeved blouse, and an absolutely petrified expression. She alternated between fainting, sobbing, and pleading for her life, several times needing to be revived with smelling salts. Her cries reached a fevered crescendo once the Bang Kwang Head of Custody began reading aloud the execution order at 4:20 PM that day.
Jaruboon tells us that Ginggaew begged pathetically:
“I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill the boy! Please don’t kill me! I didn’t kill him!”
At 5 PM, Jaruboon’s contemporaries hoisted Ms. Lorsoongern to her feet, only for the young woman to crumple to the floor in a flood of fresh tears. Ginggaew refused to walk. After a few moments of mulling over what could be done, it was decided that she would be ferried by van the 800 or so meters to the execution chamber.
Jaruboon described the grim business of securing Ginggaew to the execution ‘cross’, as it were, binding her at the waist, shoulders, and elbows. Most criminals, he explained, would stop their struggling once they were bound.
This was not the case with Ginggaew, however, who continued to whimper and struggle even as a floral bouquet was shoved between her own palms. Once she was secured, Jaruboon stepped out of the chamber and gave the order: at 5:40 PM, 10 bullets were pumped into Ginggaew’s body. She sagged immediately, and prison officials unbound her. The physician on staff checked her pupils and her heart and declared her dead. Other than the gruesome fact that the blood from Ginggaew’s chest seemed as if it would ‘never stop flowing’, everything else appeared to be in order, inasmuch as an execution can be. She was lifted, carried into a back-room, and laid gently upon the floor.
But that would not be the last that the world would hear of Ginggaew Lorsoongern. Unbelievably, Jaburoon and prison staff soon heard gasping and coughing. Back into the room they rushed, and the unthinkable was affirmed: because of an idiopathic disorder called situs inversis, which causes the heart and other important organs to be located on the opposite side of the body, Ginggaew was still alive and breathing.
In a flurry of activity, confused prison staff were spurred into action. One officer tried leaning on Ginggaw’s back in order to ‘help her die faster’; another guard actually wrapped his hands around the young woman’s neck and tried strangling her before being knocked aside by a disgusted Jaburoon.
But even in the throes of death, Ginggaew would have no mercy. Incredibly, she was hoisted up and strapped to the execution device yet again. This time, Jaburoon issued the order for 15 more bullets. This time, it worked. Ginggaew was dead. She would sob and breathe no more.
With Ginggaew’s case, Jaburoon opined that she was experiencing the results of heavy negative karma for having orchestrated the death of her 6-year-old charge. Just as the Srijareonsukying boy choked on the soil in his grave, Ginggaew too was choking, only in her case it was from her own blood, which was rapidly filling her chest cavity.
The reason why Ginggaew wasn’t shot again where she lay was both a simple and a chilling one.
Jaburoon claimed it was against regulations.
I still haven’t decided whether or not the poor woman’s crime was worth her punishment — which turned out to be even more cruel than the throes of death.
Sources: Executed Today, The Last Executioner, Wikipedia
