Murder victim Wanphen Pianjai, stabbed to death at the age of 33 last month.

This was the story in the Phuket Gazette on Sunday, July 18, 2010:

Wanphen Pienjai murder: American arrested in Phuket

PHUKET: Phuket Police last night arrested an American man for last month’s brutal stabbing murder of bar hostess Wanphen Pienjai.

Phuket City Police Superintendent Wanchai Ekpornpit this afternoon confirmed the identity of the suspect as 36-year-old Ronald Fanelli, a US citizen.

Mr Fanelli was arrested at his home in the Thanthong Village housing estate in Chalong at about 6pm last night.

Col Wanchai said police would hold a press conference at Phuket City Police Station tomorrow morning to announce the arrest and provide more details.

The arrest followed a lengthy and painstaking investigation that involved many hours of tracking the suspect’s movements.

Col Wanchai declined to go into detail about the motive, but said it appeared to have been related to the fact that Mr Fanelli’s sexual preference was for ladyboys and that Ms Wanphen may have been ‘tracking’ his efforts to find partners.

Mr Fanelli, described as a long-term tourist, had lived at a home in Chalong with a Thai woman until the woman and her son returned to her home in the northeastern province of Mahasarakham, Col Wanchai said.

The victim’s mother, 59-year-old Sa-ard Maliwan, told the Gazette from her home in Petchaboon province that she was informed of the arrest at about 9am today.

Ms Maliwan said she was overcome with rage when informed of the arrest and said she hoped the American gets capital punishment for his crime, if found guilty.

She said she was not requested by Phuket Police to come to the island and has no plans to do so.

One week later — Sunday, 25 July, 2010 – a retrospective British columnist by the name of Veronica Coren wrote the following article for the guardian.co.uk │The Observer about the American she had gotten to know in her country a few years earlier.  Veronica evidently “writes a weekly column on poker.”

Ron Fanelli was my friend. How did he go on to be a murderer?

Ron Fanelli was a poker player: loud, brash, rightwing, ex-US navy. Victoria Coren liked him. Then last week she learned that he had confessed to killing bar girl Wanphen Pienjai in Thailand and chopping up her body

‘Seemed like a normal guy to me.” That’s what the neighbours often say, isn’t it? “He was pretty quiet. Kept himself to himself.” Last week, I walked past the house in Brighton where police are digging for victims of the serial killer Peter Tobin. I felt sorry for the people next door. It’s bad enough to be woken by drills when someone’s getting cable TV.

I wondered if the neighbours had lived there when Tobin did, in the 1980s, and were now getting the opportunity to tell people he seemed like a normal guy to them.

My old poker friend Ron Fanelli never seemed “pretty quiet”. He was a noisy guy, opinionated. He broke all the rules of London poker etiquette by turning up at the casino, six or seven years ago, and sounding off right from the start. But I forgave him all the noise, because he was American. He was funny. I liked him.

When I hosted a series on the Poker Channel, a niche chatshow with poker players as guests, I invited Ron to take part in several episodes because he was entertaining and outspoken. One episode had the theme of “table manners”: what is and is not acceptable behaviour in a poker game. My opening question was: “Ron, what is the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

Ron replied: “Me? I’m an angel. I’ve never done anything bad. Well, I guess I’ve made a few people cry. I don’t like getting unlucky. There was that time I told everyone at the table I hoped they’d die of cancer. Other than that, I’ve never done anything bad.”

And he laughed. The other guests laughed.

Last Monday, Ron confessed to murdering a prostitute in Thailand, chopping up her body and disposing of it in a suitcase.

It is a staple of broadcast news, when a killer is identified, to ask personal acquaintances for clues from the past. The public is eager to help. Everyone has a story to sell about Raoul Moat. They saw it in him. They never saw it in him.

I was always sceptical of anecdotes about “strange eyes” or “a nervous manner”. All meaningless hindsight. Of course you can’t tell if the man next door is a potential murderer. If you could, you’d move house.

When I first heard that Ron had been arrested in Thailand for the brutal stabbing of Wanphen Pienjai, an employee of the Sweetheart Bar in Phuket, I assumed he had been fitted up. I was terrified for him. I automatically supposed that this had been a scandalous murder, there was pressure on local police to make an arrest and what better scapegoat than a noisy American immigrant who visited prostitutes? A good one to lock up, close the files and draw a line under the case.

When I heard he had confessed, I thought he must have been coerced into it. I knew he’d been offered a sick deal whereby he would be executed if found guilty, unless he confessed and accepted life imprisonment. If I were offered something like that in Thailand, I thought, I would probably confess to anything. And then I would sit in jail and wait to be rescued. There is no way this man, whom I knew and liked, had actually done it.

But then the police found the knife in Ron’s house. He gave them the shorts he was wearing at the time of the murder. They took away his mattress. He pleaded that he had been drunk at the time. He said it was an accident. He explained how he had put Wanphen’s dismembered remains into a suitcase, balanced it on the front of his motorbike, and ridden off to dump the poor, lost girl along the Chao Fa Thani road.

And then the thinking starts. You can’t help looking back on every encounter and wondering what it was you were supposed to notice. And then you notice things.

We called him “the Mad Yank”. That was his poker nickname. He was temperamental, but you don’t give someone a “mad” nickname if you mean it. It was just a joke. He loved it. I think the name might actually have been his own idea to begin with.

I had an argument with him once, when he first started dating Thai girls. He told me that western women were “strident feminists. Bossy and demanding. Asian women are docile, they understand what men want.”

I told him not to be so bloody silly. I told him that women are the same the world over, and not to be fooled by the clever tricks of one who might be angling for marriage. (He did end up marrying a Thai woman. They had a child, in Thailand, and a few months later she left him.)

Most poker players are lovable old sexists. Ron was a rightwing American who had served in the navy. I didn’t take the argument seriously. Looking back now, it takes on a sinister tone.

I have a photo of myself with the Mad Yank, from 2004. He was having a great time then: winning at poker, popular on internet forums, appearing on chatshows. He played it up, growing an exaggerated moustache and wearing sunglasses. I thought he looked funny in the picture. Staring back at it now, he looks like a killer.

If it were revealed that Ron had, for some reason, invented the whole detailed confession and was not guilty, he would stop looking like a killer. But that is what your brain does. Last Sunday night, I assumed Ron had been fitted up. Twenty four hours later, I had rethought everything in a new light, filled in the gaps, written a murder story in my head, and it made perfect sense.

By 2006, we all knew Ron had run out of money. His hot poker streak had fizzled out; he was kipping on friends’ floors and borrowing money. His pride was dented. He was no longer the big success story. He looked for occasional work as a croupier, dealing cards to people whose money he had once won. When he met a “docile” Thai girl, her deference boosted his damaged ego. The obvious move was to follow her to Thailand, living in “paradise” (as he described it on his blog) where everything was cheap and he felt important again.

But she left him. He married a different Thai girl, had a child, then she left him too. Ron was broke but still gambling. He was short-tempered. He demanded obedience. These women had no need of a difficult, impoverished husband in their own homeland. That wasn’t the deal. They grew tired of deferring, with only that in return. If he couldn’t be an old-fashioned provider, why be an old-fashioned housewife?

When his wife left, Ron felt fooled and betrayed. The women who were supposed to make him feel important had made him feel stupid. It had all been a con. The anger and shame ran deep. He still had little money and no job. At this point, Ron started to use prostitutes. It was a power thing. He used more and more of them. After a while, hiring them for sex was not enough to make Ron feel powerful. He made them do sicker and kinkier things.

He didn’t know what had gone wrong. He was a clever, articulate, former military man. He used to win money in glamorous poker tournaments. He had been an alpha male. Now, here he was, stuck in a foreign country where he had chased a woman who left him; another had taken his child away; he was unemployed, skint and using prostitutes. Ron knew he was a man to be reckoned with, even if nobody else could see it. Even if his wife couldn’t see it.

No amount of hookers, no manner of kinky activity, could fill the hole where Ron’s self-esteem used to be. He knew, now, that the women’s obliging, flattering manners were just a pretence. That’s just what women do to get what they want. He despised them for it. What he didn’t understand was that the more he degraded and punished the girls, the worse he felt about himself. And the further he had to go to feel masterful again. It was a dark, twisted cycle.

One day, he picked up a beautiful girl from the Sweethearts Bar, round the back of the Club Med resort in Kata on the island of Phuket. He took her home. And when she reached for him, with her obliging smile, telling him how lucky she felt to find such a handsome customer, he was revolted by the lie. He saw, suddenly, all the women in the world, every last bitch taking him for a fool. Ron would not be taken for a fool. He snapped.

That is the story I have written for Ron in my head. I know he ran out of money. I know his wife left him. I know he posted on internet forums about all the kinky things he was up to with Thai hookers. I know he has confessed to this murder. I don’t know anything else. I have no idea how he felt, or feels, about anything. There was a line in a news report from the Phuket Gazette that made me cry. It said:

“Asked if he were the same Ronald Fanelli who was a former professional poker player who gambled in tournaments under the name ‘Mad Yank’, he laughed briefly with a tone of bitter irony before replying, ‘Yes, but that was a long time ago.’”

But it wasn’t. It wasn’t a long time ago.

The fee for this article has been donated to Victim Support

The final article I want to offer is by blogger Bill Rini that he posted on Wednesday, August 18, 2010, on his Bill’s Poker Blog.

Fund Raiser for the Family of Wanphen Pienjai

I recently wrote about Ron Fanelli, The MadYank, and how he has admitted to stabbing and murdering a local Thai woman, Wanphen Pienjai, here in Thailand [view his confession]. The thing that really disturbed me about this whole incident was how Wanphen’s family was being impacted. In Thailand there is no real social safety-net. There is no real pension system. There is no unemployment insurance. There is no disability insurance. Nothing.

Wanphen was the breadwinner for her family. She supported her partially disabled mother and her two young children. By killing Wanphen, Ron Fenelli didn’t just destroy one life but the lives of Wanphen’s mother and her two children.

Being a poker player the story struck a nerve with me. I talked with my partner in Thailand Friends and said “We need to do something.” He agreed. So we’ve been working on putting together a charity event to try and raise money which we’ll distribute to the family.

I contacted a local journalist that had spoken with the family and told him our intentions and he forwarded on contact details for Saard, Wanphen’s mother. Since the family is from the same upcountry town as my girlfriend, Ked, I asked her if she could go visit Saard when she went to visit her own grandmother for Mother’s Day (which, in Thailand, is celebrated on Aug 12, the Queen’s birthday).

Ked was finally able to reach Saard and travelled out to a remote part of town where the family lived. Their home is quite modest but that is not unusual for the area.

Inside the home they sleep on mats on the floor. There’s no air conditioning so close to the floor is often the coolest spot.

Ked said that she found Saard to be a very sincere woman who seems to be trying to the best that she can with what she has. She told Ked that with Wanphen being an only child (and the father having left her when she was still pregnant with Wanphen) she was all that she had in this world. If it wasn’t for Farm and Iang (Wanphen’s two children), Wanphen’s death would have probably killed her. She said she felt blessed that she had left her with something.

Like many young women burdened with taking care of their parents and their own children Wanphen was struggling to make ends meet. She had heard that she could make good money working in Pattaya so she went down there. She came home a few months later because she didn’t like it there. She had heard that Phuket was much better so she took a chance and went down to Phuket to see if she could find some work. A few months later she was back home again. She didn’t like the work in Phuket either but she had mouths to feed so after exhausting all her options she decided to give Phuket another chance.

Unfortunately, that would be the last her family ever saw of her.

I had asked Ked to ask about what Saard had to say about Ron Fanelli. The only thing she could say was “Why?” She couldn’t imagine what would drive someone to murder her daughter and then throw her away like garbage.

We’ve arranged to do an event on Oct 9th. Our goal is to raise 100,000 baht. That’s a little over $3,200 USD. Not a lot but it’s a lot here. And it’s a sizable amount to someone living out in the rural areas of Thailand.

We’ve decided that what we’ll do is distribute it out in monthly payments so it’s not like a big lottery check coming in. Too many sad tales of money disappearing as fast as it was won. We figure this is a much more responsible way since this is intended more as a helping hand rather than a straight handout.

Everything will be done transparently on the Thailand Friends website. We’ve started a message board thread that is sticky and locked so only updated about what’s going on can be posted. All cash in and out will be recorded there so everyone can see where the money is going. And there’s no management overhead or anything. Anytime we head up to visit it is on our dime so 100% of what we raise goes directly to the family.

Many people in the poker community have asked how they might help and this is one way. If you would like to make a contribution to Wanphen’s family you can either PayPal it to me (ping me for my info) or transfer it to me on Stars or Tilt (Stars: billrini / Tilt: billytwoguns).

And if you can help spread the word on message boards and such it is very much appreciated. The amount we’re trying to raise is rather modest so even $10 or so would really, really help.

Anyway, thanks in advance to everyone who contributes and hopefully, together, we can make a difference for this family.

Amen!

Addendum:  I came across an August 8 update by poker columnist Victoria Coren as follows:

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the shock of hearing that my old poker friend Ron Fanelli had confessed to murdering a prostitute in Thailand, stuffing her remains into a suitcase and dumping it.

I have had a communication from someone who visited Ron in prison, saying there is something he would like to make clear. Ron did not, as the Thai police stated, confess to murder. Ron’s position is that this was self-defence. He says that the young woman pulled the knife on him; in the struggle, he stabbed her twice and killed her. He disposed of her body secretly in a suitcase because it was too late for an ambulance and he feared the police would not believe his explanation.

My original article was about the impossibility of knowing the truth in any cases like this, or of truly knowing other people at all. I am happy to state Ron’s version of events. I hope he finds peace in the future, for all the right reasons.

Tags: Capital punishment, Murder, Phuket Gazette, Ron Fanelli, thailand, United States, Victoria Coren, Wanphen Pienjai

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