Dude, Where’s My Wife?

A Tale of Missing Persons in Southeast Asia

To set the stage for missing persons cases in Southeast Asia, consider the story of Jim Thompson, the Silk King. A renowned entrepreneur and former intelligence officer, Thompson disappeared without a trace in 1967, sparking worldwide fascination with his case and numerous books and crackpot theories.

Asia is an excellent place to vanish, whether you plan to or not. But although many lower-profile and poignant disappearances go unsolved (such as the case of Ryan Chicovsky in Laos), most assignments are free of sinister overtones and resolved in short order.

Please join me for a virtual ride-along on one of the more common types of missing persons cases I’m hired to pursue.

Ready, Set…

We’ve gotten an inquiry from a Western client living offshore, and his request is a familiar one. His Thai wife—who usually lives with him abroad—has come back to Thailand to visit family, and he hasn’t heard from her recently.

She may have phoned from the airport in Bangkok to say she’d arrived and perhaps called a few times more while visiting folks in the capital. But she’s gotten on another plane or the overnight bus to go see her parents in a farming village up-country and has been out of touch for a week or more.

Our client’s emotional temperature hovers somewhere around “concerned.” He’s not usually frantic yet—and it’s our job to talk him off the ledge if so—but he’s well past dismissing her silence as jet-lag, settling in, or just catching up with people.

[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]We’ve exhausted what we can do from our desks. The only way forward is the tried and true measures—a trip up-country, legwork, and the Mark I Eyeball.[/quote]

We’ve exchanged a few emails with the client, and we’re satisfied that he isn’t some estranged spouse using a false pretext for a stalking-by-proxy job; nor is this a preliminary to a child snatch.

(Note that while Thailand is a signatory to some conventions on parental rights and child kidnapping, enforcement of foreign custody orders via the Thai courts is arthritic to say the least and rarely resolves in favor of the foreign parent.)

We’ve also tried calling the local mobile number the Thai wife should be using—with no luck. We’ve looked up the family name in the Thai-language directories for landlines without any useful results, and the client doesn’t have any contact information for someone who could pass a message.

We’ve exhausted what we can do from our desks. The only way forward is the tried and true measures—a trip up-country, legwork, and the Mark I Eyeball.

Go!

We’ve done our 04:00 wake-up and gotten to Don Meuang—Bangkok’s old international airport, now its domestic hub—for our flight up-country. That means a one-hour flight almost anywhere in Thailand. Although most of Thailand is farmland, this time we’re headed to the Isaan region (“ee-saahn“) in Thailand’s northeast.

This is a prototypical case. Because Isaan is a poor region, many village girls end up in the “entertainment palaces” of Bangkok, Pattaya, and Phuket. The upshot of this is that many Western men meet and marry former Thai working girls.

We delicately probed this possibility during client intake. It’s not unheard of for a former bar girl to cut short her visit to her home village, or even use it solely as pretext, and then end up back in her old bar with her old friends, spending her days and nights drinking…and (worst-case scenario) taking customers again. It’s surprising how many women find it difficult (or simply don’t wish) to leave the bar-girl life.

We touch down at the regional airport (in this case, Udon Thani) a few minutes before 08:00. We collect our day bag, cross the tarmac airside, and exit groundside. We’ll pause with the crowd for a respectful moment while the Thai national anthem plays at the top of the hour, as it does each morning.

Arriving-UTH-01

We catch the airport shuttle to the city of Nong Khai, on the Mekong River, just south of Laos. A few minutes’ walk to a hotel, and we’re ready to call our driver for pickup. It’s just after 09:00, and we’re on schedule.

This matters because our goal is to get a phone into the hands of the Thai wife while it’s still a reasonable hour in the client’s time zone. There’s no substitute for the professional satisfaction of telling a client in real time “I’ve got her right here, sir!” and no better way to get him the fulfillment he’s paid hard-earned money for. The client is expecting our call at around 11:00 ICT, so we have a couple of hours to travel to the village.

Not so fast!

Calling the driver from a hotel (even though we won’t be staying the night) bolsters our cover story; the client has been carefully coached that we’ll represent ourselves as a “friend of a friend from the internet” who just happens to be passing through and is in the right place at the right time to do this “favor.”

There are several reasons for this: We preserve operational flexibility both today and if the client ever needs us to return to the village; the client is insulated from any sense that he’s spying on his wife; our driver can’t slip and mention what he doesn’t know; and we know from experience that many Thais are deeply suspicious of authority figures and don’t much care for snoops.

Walking in as a private investigator is the wrong approach. Walking in as a bumbling and somewhat befuddled expat or tourist (with an air of wondering if this “favor” was worth the effort) is a far better choice. Getting oneself quickly and neatly filed away as Foreigner: Confused & Harmless is in everyone’s best interests.

Hiring a car and driver for the morning is a great deal; it’s only marginally more expensive than renting a car, but the upside of having a driver goes beyond the logistics of the assignment. For one thing, our target village is nearly an hour outside of Nong Khai via roads we don’t know.

[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]Walking in as a private investigator is the wrong approach. Walking in as a bumbling and somewhat befuddled expat or tourist…is a far better choice.[/quote]

If the driver has good English skills, he serves as a buffer. The investigator can dial back his apparent understanding of the Isaan dialect, making a few halting greetings but otherwise getting the driver to translate. This lets the investigator focus on the background chatter and do his secondary job of gathering intelligence.

It’s never “just a locate” unless the client explicitly says so. If there’s a young Thai man stumbling shirtless out of the family home and the Thai wife has no siblings or cousins…the client needs to know. If the client was asked to help the family farm by funding the purchase of a dozen cows, and only three are tied up under the house…the client needs to know. There are many potential indicators of even bigger problems, so we’ll keep our eyes peeled.

In many instances, the client has never seen the family’s village. Providing an overview of the apparent economic and social standing of the family can be valuable intelligence to him. When you marry a Thai woman, you marry her whole family and are expected to help financially. It’s nice to know a little more about whom you’ve married (and whom you’re helping).

The Home Stretch

As we roll into the village, we stop and get directions, sometimes from folks at the few small shops, sometimes from a farmer driving his water buffalo beside the road. Sometimes we stop at the house of the “poo yai baan” (the village head man) to pay our respects and ask for his help finding the family residence.

In preparing for the assignment, we identified which cellular carrier the Thai wife’s mobile number is assigned to. We’ve brought a SIM card for all three carriers, but we check hers first for signal strength and quality. If she tells the husband that the village has no signal but it does (say it with me now)…the client needs to know.

We’re at the family home, and the word is spreading that there’s a “farang” (a white Westerner) in the village. It may be only the second or third time in living memory that this has happened. Before long a few kids will be riding past on bikes and people will amble along the dusty road to check us out. We can be a bit freaked out or we can feel like rock stars. The latter is the right choice so long as you keep it humble and gracious; you need allies to complete the assignment. And it’s just the right thing to do.

We’ve dressed appropriately—golf shirt, pressed slacks and decent shoes. How we look and act here today reflects on the foreign husband, the Thai wife, and her family, and it will for some time to come—this unexpected interruption of village routine may be the most exciting thing that happens here all month.

Ducks-in-village-01

We’ve said hello, but we let the driver start the conversation. He explains the purpose of our visit and inquires about the subject of our search. The investigator is tracking that conversation in local lingo and making mental notes while waiting for the driver to translate.

If Mrs. X is at home just then it’s more or less job done. We call the client, ask him to hold, and put his wife on the line. If she’s absent, we don’t ask “Well, where is she?” but take a more indirect line: “Is she expected back soon?” More often than not she’s at the neighbor’s place or gone to the nearest township for awhile.

Getting someone from the family to call her back to the village is usually straightforward enough. They may send a kid down the road to fetch her or call her directly on a different phone number than the one supplied by the client. She’ll usually come back ASAP once she understands that someone made a special trip on behalf of her husband.

If we’re offered a bit of hospitality while sorting things out, we accept. We’ve learned to eat what the locals eat, be it the spiciest papaya salad, some choice insects, or a belt of the local rice whiskey (even though it’s not yet noon—one won’t do any harm).

We might take a few photos discretely or not so discretely depending on the comfort level of the locals. Playing the dumb foreigner who has never seen a stalk of rice before fits with the preconceptions of most villagers, and they’re often flattered that someone takes an interest in their way of life.

So…What Happened?

Often the “missing” wife simply had a telco issue. The village may have no signal from her cell carrier, or the signal may only be usable a few hours each day. I won’t hazard a guess as to what percentage of rural Thai villages have never gotten traditional phone lines installed; the mobile carriers have beaten the landline people to the punch.

Most cell coverage maps indicate service should be available in 98% of the country, but the keyword here is “should.” Many times the cell tower hasn’t seen service since ’06, or there’s a mountain blocking the signal to a village, or any number of telco faux pas.

Alternatively, her Thai SIM card may have died, and she’s neglected to actually call him from the new number with replacement SIM. If she lost or damaged her prior phone, the stored contacts may have gone with it. She may have no idea how to place an international call to her husband or may even have failed to write down his number.

There’s also the phenomenon of “Isaan Standard Time”—the tendency of one rural day to blend into another. The life of a Thai village doesn’t run day-to-day so much as season-to-season, with the planting and harvesting cycles broken only by holidays and observances. Mrs. X may well love her husband dearly but may fail to grasp that ten days have flown by without a call.

Occasionally there’s a more serious reason for her silence—a minor illness or brief hospitalization, say, with the odd motorbike accident thrown in for variety. Happily these have all resolved well in my experience.

In a very few cases we arrive at the village to discover that the husband has chosen his wife poorly. Sadly, we may learn that Mrs. X is a hardened, mercenary bargirl doing the bare minimum to keep Mr. X on a string and his money flowing to her and her family. These situations are rare, but it’s disheartening to see.

We’re So Outta Here!

We’ve had the wife on the phone with the husband or found solid leads that point to her location and have gotten the client’s OK to leave the village. We say our goodbyes and head back to Nong Khai, writing notes en route and doing an indirect debrief of the driver—he may have seen something the investigator missed. It never hurts to buy him lunch on the way, so we’ll stop at one of the larger towns on the way back to Nong Khai.

After-Action-01

Our driver drops us off in downtown Nong Khai, where we probably have a few hours to kill. We may wander and see the sights or head straight back to Udon Thani to renew some acquaintances before heading to the airport. We’ll check in, then have a snack while we structure our notes into a summary report, attaching photos we may have taken. We’ll send that just before we board the flight home.

With luck, we’re wheels down in Bangkok by 21:00 and back to the shack within an hour of that. It’s been a long but productive day, and it’s time for some shut-eye. One last check of email, and then it’s lights out.

Thanks for riding along.

 

About the Author:

Darryl Daugherty is a long-term expat in Thailand and well-traveled throughout mainland Southeast Asia. A contract private investigator and researcher, he also provides a full spectrum of discrete professional services and maintains a broad-reach IT consultancy.

Contact him by email at darryl@daugherty.asia, and you can find him on Twitter (@DarrylDaugherty)Facebook or LinkedIn.