I got this link from Friskodude and had to check it out.
It’s a tragic story, but I agree wtih Friskodude that it runs against common perceptions of Thailand as something of a
technological backwater.
First the awful news. A 21-year-old Welsh
student named Katherine Horton was murdered near Lamai Beach in Thailand around the New Year. The murder seemed to
be a complete mystery, and at first there appeared to be few leads and no witnesses. But through some sophisticated
sleuthing, the Thai police, working with a British mobile phone operator, used the last call that Horton made on her
cell phone to track down her killers. The story is here, and it makes for a fascinating read.
Police said
that the last call Horton made was to her mother, who, when contacted said that she heard her daughter scream on the
other end of the line just before it went dead. They were able to determine the direction that Horton was heading
(West) based on what I would guess was a method triangulation used by most cell phone companies who can tell where a
call takes place over time. The night of the murder, there were, it was discovered, two fishing boats off the coast.
And when police interviewed crew members, they revealed that a pair of fishermen had gone carousing on shore to visit
prostitutes. After returning to their rusting trawler, the fishermen apparently boasted that they had just raped a
foreigner and described her as “very delicious”.
Ugh. Anyway, DNA samples taken from
Horton’s body matched those of the fishermen, who subsequently confessed. As I say, a horrible story, and not
necessarily a good ending, but one that at least seems to promise a measure of justice.