A 45-year-old Australian man has been charged with the premeditated murder of a 17-year-old Thai girl whose body was discovered inside a suitcase abandoned near railway tracks in the resort city of Pattaya. Thai police say Simon Peter Carman was detained at Suvarnabhumi Airport on Saturday as he attempted to board a flight to Perth, hours after the victim, identified by local media as Tunchanok Donhomla, was reported missing by a friend.

According to investigators in Chonburi province, CCTV footage shows the teenager entering Carman’s condominium before he is later seen leaving alone with a large dark-coloured suitcase, loading it onto a motorcycle and returning without it roughly twenty minutes later. Police allege Carman told them he restrained the girl because “she got crazy” and claimed she threatened him with a knife, though he has formally denied all charges, which also include concealment of a body and abduction of a minor for indecent purposes. Western Australian Police Commissioner Col Blanch noted that had Carman succeeded in reaching Australia, any eventual death penalty would likely have been ruled out through intergovernmental negotiation, a practice he described as a “historical agreement” between Canberra and retentionist states.

Separately, a South Australian Supreme Court jury has heard that 51-year-old Johnathan Paul Parker strangled his housemate Krystal Marshall at her Aldinga Beach home in October 2023 before setting her body alight to destroy evidence. The prosecutor told the court Parker locked the bedroom door, spread petrol and lit five fires; a post-mortem determined Marshall was dead before the blaze. Parker has pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to destroying human remains.

In the United States, an Alabama district attorney has reported that a 44-year-old man died of a heart attack while attempting to conceal the body of his 47-year-old girlfriend, whom he is believed to have strangled. The pair were found dead in a wooded area in June, with an autopsy confirming the woman’s cause of death as strangulation. Investigations into all three cases remain active, with no court date yet set for Carman in Thailand.