He stood for his people, and vanished into the forest he tried to protect.
In 2014, Karen activist Porlajee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen was detained by park officials inside Thailand’s Kaeng Krachan National Park—and never came home.
What followed would expose the country’s deepest fault line: the fight between conservation, corruption, and the right to exist.
This episode traces Billy’s disappearance, the discovery of burned remains in a hidden oil drum, and a courtroom battle that redefined Thailand’s human-rights landscape.
🎧 This story contains references to disappearance and state violence. Listener discretion is advised.
Sources: Department of Special Investigation (DSI), Human Rights Watch, Bangkok Post, Khaosod English, The Nation Thailand, Amnesty International, and UN archives.
Follow @ShadowsOfSiam on Instagram for updates and visuals from each case.
#ShadowsOfSiam #PorlajeeRakchongcharoen #Thailand #KaengKrachan #TrueCrime #HumanRights #KarenPeople #DSI #Podcast
In October 2016, Bangkok woke to fear.
Three bodies in two days—bound, stabbed, and left in the dark corners of the city.
Police soon realized someone was hunting the homeless.
His name was “Jimmy,” a 20-year-old drifter from Myanmar whose quiet existence hid a brutal truth.
Across Bangkok and Pathum Thani, five people would die—four confirmed by DNA, one never officially named.
No motive. No confession. Only a trail of blood, a bicycle, and a city that barely noticed its own victims.
This episode follows the investigation that revealed one of Thailand’s most haunting modern crimes—when violence struck those already invisible.
🎧 Shadows of Siam tells the stories Thailand tries to forget—real cases of murder, mystery, and memory.
Sources:
Bangkok Post • Khaosod • MGR Online • Nation TV • Matichon Online • Royal Thai Police archives (2016).
Follow on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube for new episodes every Thursday.
Instagram: @shadowsofsiam
#ShadowsOfSiam #TrueCrimeThailand #Bangkok #PathumThani #JimmyTheSerialKiller #ThailandCrime #Unsolved #TrueCrimePodcasts
In 2004, hikers in the Yorkshire Dales discovered the body of a woman lying beneath the cold English sky.
No identification. No witnesses. No one who came forward to claim her.
For fifteen years, she was known only as The Lady of the Hills.
In 2019, a DNA match would finally reveal her name — Lamduan Armitage, a 33-year-old woman from Udon Thani, Thailand.
A wife. A mother. A daughter who vanished far from home.
This episode follows the investigation that crossed continents — from Lancashire to the fields of northeast Thailand — and the unanswered questions that still linger:
How did Lamduan end up seventy miles from home, barefoot in the moors?
And why did her silence last so long?
Sources:
BBC News, The Guardian, The Independent, Bangkok Post, Thai PBS, official statements from North Yorkshire Police, and Wikipedia – Death of Lamduan Armitage.
Hashtags:
#ShadowsOfSiam #TrueCrimeThailand #LamduanArmitage #LadyOfTheHills #UnsolvedMystery #TrueCrimePodcast #Thailand #UKMystery #ColdCase #MissingPersons
A six-year-old girl vanished from a concert near Bangkok’s BTS Bearing station.
Her name was Cartoon. The search that followed exposed one of Thailand’s darkest cases—a drifter named Nui who confessed to attacking at least ten children across several provinces.
This episode retraces the December 2013 killings that horrified the country, the police chase that ended in Nong Khai, and the questions that remain about how a convicted predator was ever free to roam again.
Listener discretion advised: contains descriptions of sexual assault and child homicide.
Sources spoken: Bangkok Post (Dec 15–19 2013; Mar 28 2014; Nov 2015; Jan 2016; Nov 2016); The Nation Thailand (Dec 16–18 2013); Thai PBS World (2014); Ministry of Justice court records; Bangkok Metropolitan Police press releases.
#ShadowsOfSiam #TrueCrimeThailand #ThaiCrime #NuiCase #ThailandPodcast #TrueCrimeAsia #MorLam #Bangkok #PrachinBuri #Loei #KhonKaen #Podcast #TrueCrimeCommunity #AsianTrueCrime #CriminalPsychology #JusticeInThailand
In 1918, a heavy iron chest washed ashore near Bangkok. Inside was the body of a young woman named Prik — and the beginning of one of Thailand’s darkest stories. Her killer, Boonpeng, was a monk who used black-magic rituals and love potions to seduce and destroy. Known today as Thailand’s first serial killer, he confessed to sealing his victims in iron chests and sending them into the river. His execution — Thailand’s last public beheading — marked the end of one era and the birth of a haunting legend.
Sources:
Historical records from Bangkok police and 1918 news reports; Expique Bangkok’s historical archives;
Executed Today’s documentation of Thailand’s final public beheading; and the Wikipedia entry on Boonpeng Heep Lek (The Iron Chest Killer).
Listen to Shadows of Siam on Spotify, Apple, or Amazon — where the land remembers what others try to forget.
#ShadowsOfSiam #ThailandTrueCrime #IronChestKiller #BoonpengHeepLek #BangkokHistory #TrueCrimePodcast #ThaiTrueCrime #AsianTrueCrime #DarkHistory #SoutheastAsiaCrime #OccultThailand #HistoricalCrime #BangkokMysteries
He wasn’t supposed to disappear. Not him. Not a monk whose life was built on presence. In June 1993, Luang Pi Anan entered Tham Luang Nang Non — the cave beneath the Sleeping Lady Mountain in Chiang Rai — carrying a candle, water, and a book of chants. He had gone there many times before on silent retreats. This time, he never returned.
No body. No robe. No signs of struggle. Just a candle stub, an empty flask, and silence.
For villagers, the cave had claimed him. For monks, he may have crossed into the great release — maha-vimutti. For others, he became part of the mountain’s living legend. Decades later, when the world watched the 2018 rescue of twelve boys and their coach from the same cave system, locals said it was no coincidence: the cave had once taken a life, and now it returned thirteen.
This episode retraces Luang Pi Anan’s story — his life, his devotion, and the enduring mystery of his disappearance. From whispered legends of naga guardians to the ritual candles still lit each June, this is a story where fact and faith, silence and presence, meet in the dark.
Sources: Chiang Rai oral history, testimony from monks and villagers, local newspaper archives, and coverage of the 2018 Tham Luang rescue. Our thanks to those who keep his memory alive and shared their accounts so this story could be retold.
#TrueCrime #Thailand #UnsolvedMystery #ThamLuang #LuangPiAnan #SleepingLadyMountain #ShadowsOfSiam #SpiritualMystery #BuddhistMonk #CaveMystery #ChiangRai #ThaiLegends
Between 2011 and 2012, Thailand’s southern highways carried more than just goods. They carried death—one poisoned cup of coffee at a time. Nirut Sonkhamhan, known as The Pickup Truck Killer, preyed on drivers, turning roadside rituals into traps. This episode unspools the method, the victims, and the poison trail he left in his wake, through the words of survivors, investigators, and the land itself.
This story draws from the reports of the Royal Thai Police, archival coverage in the Bangkok Post, Thai PBS, and Khaosod English, as well as local southern Thai press at the time. Survivor testimony from Montree Kalam, Charoen Daranoi, and Paitoon Pattalapho provided the most haunting details.
#TrueCrime #Thailand #SerialKiller #Poison #SurvivorStories #PickupTruckKiller #SouthernThailand #CriminalPsychology #ShadowsOfSiam
April 2023.
At a quiet river in Samut Songkhram, two friends release fish into the current, a Buddhist ritual meant to bring life and merit. But moments later, forty-four-year-old Siriporn Kanwong collapses. By the time medics arrive, she is gone.
At first, it looks like fate. A tragic heart attack during prayer. But the autopsy finds cyanide in her blood. And the bottles of poison discovered in her friend’s car reveal something darker.
Her name was Sararat Rangsiwuthaporn. But the world would come to know her as Am Cyanide.
Over nearly a decade, police tied her to fourteen deaths—friends, lovers, even a police officer—people who trusted her, lent her money, or stood too close. She borrowed. She smiled. And when the debts came due, she offered something else: a drink, a capsule, a bite of food.
In November 2024, a Thai court sentenced her to death in the first of fourteen trials. Pregnant when she was arrested, Am Cyanide shattered every expectation of what a killer in Thailand could look like.
This is her story—the betrayals, the poison, and the cultural shock that still lingers.
Our telling comes from reporting in The Bangkok Post, Thai PBS, ABC News, CBS News, People, The Guardian, The Sun, the New York Post, and archives gathered on Wikipedia’s Am Cyanide case.
#ShadowsOfSiam #AmCyanide #TrueCrime #ThailandCrime #SerialKillers #Poison #DarkHistory #CrimePodcast
Every Thai child grew up hearing the warning:
“If you misbehave, Si Quey will come. And he’ll eat your liver.”
For decades, Si Quey Sae-Ung was more than a name — he was Thailand’s bogeyman. A poor migrant from China accused of murdering children, condemned as a cannibal, and executed in 1959. His body was embalmed and displayed in a glass case at Siriraj Hospital for over sixty years, a permanent reminder that monsters walk among us.
But was Si Quey truly a killer who ate the organs of his victims? Or was he a scapegoat, caught in the fear and prejudice of Cold War–era Thailand?
In this episode, we step into the shadows of a story where fact and folklore blur. From the arrest in Rayong, to lurid tabloid headlines, to the museum case that turned him into a cultural warning for generations of Thai children — and finally, to the quiet cremation in 2020 that forced the country to reconsider the myth.
Some truths remain certain. Others remain disputed. And the warning still echoes today.
—
Sources for this episode include: Bangkok Post, Thai PBS, Khaosod English, Coconuts Bangkok, Associated Press, and South China Morning Post.
Follow Shadows of Siam on Spotify, Apple, and Amazon for new episodes every Tuesday at 7 AM Thailand time.
#ShadowsOfSiam #TrueCrimePodcast #ThailandTrueCrime #SiQuey #CannibalKiller #ThailandHistory #TrueCrimeCommunity #PodcastLife #ColdWarHistory #UrbanLegends
He was supposed to be gone forever.
Sentenced for the murders of five women in 2005, Somkid Pumpuang — known as Thailand’s Jack the Ripper — charmed his way into reduced sentences, convinced officials he was a model prisoner, and walked free in 2019.
Within six months, another woman was dead.
This is a remastered and retold version of our very first episode. With new research, updated production, and deeper storytelling, we revisit the case that shocked Thailand — and ask how a system meant to deliver justice instead handed a serial killer back his freedom.
Sources
Thai PBS
Bangkok Post
The Nation
Matichon
Archived police and court reports from 2005 and 2019
#ShadowsOfSiam #ThailandTrueCrime #ThaiCrimeStories #TrueCrimePodcast #SomkidPumpuang #JackTheRipperThailand #SerialKillerStories #TrueCrimeCommunity #CrimePodcast