Episode 143:
288 Bones in the Pond, The Horrifying Secret of Thailand's Ted Bundy
In October 2019, a desperate mother named Soksaporn walked into a Bangkok police station. Her 19-year-old daughter, Warinthorn, had moved to the city to earn money for their family and called home faithfully every month — until July 24, when all contact suddenly stopped. Soksaporn traveled to Bangkok herself, tracked her daughter to a district she'd since moved away from, and got bounced between police jurisdictions for months before finally filing a report in October, three months after the disappearance. Even then, police treated it as a likely runaway case and did little. It would take a completely unrelated drug raid, months later, to blow the case wide open.
Just after midnight on January 8, 2020, Bangkok's Narcotics Suppression Bureau arrested a 41-year-old drug dealer named Chalermchon during a citywide meth crackdown. Under pressure to name his supplier, he gave up a name that stunned investigators: Apichai Ongwisit, 40 years old, heir to a sprawling 8-acre estate and a family fortune — and the son of a man who had murdered and dismembered a 15-year-old girl back in 1983, only to bribe his way out of prison before being shot dead himself. Apichai had inherited everything as a small child, and had grown up violent, wealthy, and functionally untouchable.
A Killer's Inheritance
By the time he was an adult, Apichai never needed to work, spending his days in a drug-induced haze and firing his legally owned gun at neighbors whenever their noise irritated him. His criminal record only escalated: in 2008, high on drugs, he kidnapped a woman off the street, locked her up, and beat her so severely she suffered a fractured skull and four broken ribs. In 2012, he dragged a 17-year-old girl to his home and raped her, earning a five-year prison sentence. Rather than reforming him, prison connected him with career criminals — including Chalermchon, who stayed loyal to Apichai throughout his sentence and, after Apichai's release in 2017, moved into his mansion as a hired guard while the two built a drug operation together, funneling meth from a major syndicate into Bangkok's entertainment districts for three years before Chalermchon's arrest finally unraveled everything.
The Woman in the Box
Facing serious charges, Chalermchon offered police a bargaining chip: he knew about a murder. He confessed that in May 2019, Apichai had met a young sex worker known as "Kik" — Warinthorn's nickname — through the agency that sent her to a hotel where he was waiting as a client. Apichai pursued her aggressively, showed off his wealth, lured her to his mansion, and got her addicted to methamphetamine, using the drugs and his money to trap her completely. He alternated between affection and brutal violence, repeatedly beating her and locking her in a sealed metal box before apologizing and telling her he loved her. In early August 2019, after Apichai flew into a rage over her leaving food unfinished, he beat her with the steel pipe and locked her in the box for an entire night — turning up music to drown out her screams. By morning, she was dead. Apichai simply told Chalermchon to bury her in the yard. Cross-referencing missing person reports with the nickname "Kik," police identified the victim as Warinthorn, and confirmed it when they found the distinctive koi fish tattoo on her back — the same one her mother had described months earlier.
What the Pond Was Hiding
On January 9, 2020, a special forces team stormed Apichai's mansion after he refused to surrender; found hiding and high on drugs, he tried to shoot himself with a pistol that jammed at the critical moment, and was taken into custody. Searching the house, officers found surveillance monitors covering every room, a bullet-riddled ceiling, and the locked metal box itself, its interior scratched with fingernail marks and stained with blood. But the estate's massive pond held the real horror: divers found a sunken iron gate weighted down with stone, and beneath it, a human rib cage. A full search of the pond eventually turned up 288 bone fragments belonging to at least three different women in their late teens to early twenties, along with a second, smaller metal box also containing dismembered remains. The bones were too degraded for usable DNA, and with no missing-persons matches, prosecutors couldn't tie the remains to Apichai conclusively enough to bring murder charges over them.
Final Thoughts
At his January 2021 trial for Warinthorn's murder, Apichai repeatedly changed his story — first claiming she died from suffocation, then that a falling dumbbell had struck her chest by accident, a story that conveniently tried to explain the internal bleeding revealed by her autopsy. The court didn't buy it, convicting him of murder and sentencing him to life in prison, on top of 25 years for drug trafficking and 11 years for a separate sexual assault in which he'd kidnapped a woman at gunpoint and evaded punishment for months by bribing corrupt officers. He has continued denying involvement in the remains found in his pond, but a fellow inmate later reported overhearing him boast, "It wasn't only those four people that I killed — those stupid cops missed one," implicitly confessing to a fifth victim police still haven't identified. Because Warinthorn and the pond's unidentified victims were connected to Bangkok's sex work industry, investigators worry the full scope of Apichai's crimes — like his father's before him — may never be fully accounted for.
Apichai's wealth let him bribe his way out of a dismemberment-murder charge inherited from his father, evade punishment for a gunpoint kidnapping and assault in 2019, and stall the investigation into his missing girlfriend for months. Do you think the case would have been solved this slowly, or at all, if his victims and his own history hadn't been so easy for a corrupt system to look away from?
WE DOCUMENT.
YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
