UDON THANI — A murder suspect showed to police on Tuesday how he and a former policeman killed and burned a woman in a forest in Udon Thani where 23 piles of human bones were found.
The arrest of Boonna Thong-ngam supported the investigators' theory that the two could be linked to other bones found in the same area in Ban Pheu district. The problem is they have yet to gather enough evidence to substantiate it.
Their behaviours and the location pointed to that direction but "we don't have witnesses and forensic evidence to link them," said Pol Maj Gen Peerapong Wongsamarn, chief of the provincial police force.
At the same time, Thaworn Srimuang, a younger sister of Bang-orn Thong-orn, the murder victim, believed that there were more than two behind the killing.
Mr Boonna and Pramote Buppasri, a former police officer at Ban Phue police station, were identified by police as the murderers of Bang-orn. Pol Sr Sgt Maj Pramote is serving a life sentence at Khlong Phai in Nakhon Ratchasima in another murder case. He is under an arrest warrant.
The two did not know Bang-orn very well, Mrs Thaworn said on Tuesday. Bang-orn allegedly talked to someone on the phone before she went missing. She reportedly told that person: "Wait for me there. I'll leave right away." After that, she went to meet the caller on a motorcycle.
Mrs Thaworn was convinced the none of the two suspects was the person who called that day because judging from the conversation Bang-orn knew the caller well.
This happened on June 4, 2014, the day she was last seen. Her charred remains were found four days later in the forest by villagers in the area. The villagers reported to Ban Pheu police about the discovery.
As police were unable to find the killers since then, Bang-orn's family sought assistance from Channel 9 reporters, who travelled to the site on April 19 this year to work on the story and found burned human bones there, totalling 23 piles on April 21, the day police went to the scene after the crew alerted them.
The crime reenactment of Mr Boonna was conducted in four locations on Tuesday — in the forest where Bang-orn was burned, at a hut in the district where her neck was snapped, at a place where he and the former policeman met to receive the money after the murder, and at a school where the two dumped her motorcycle into a pond.
Mr Boonna told police during the crime reenactment that Pol Sr Sgt Maj Pramote was the person who burned her twice with three tyres.
