Ron Fanelli made a living from poker during the first half of 2000 and became a well known face on the TV channel Poker Channels program, mostly thanks to the British journalist and poker player Victoria Coren, one of the channel's hosts. Ron Fanelli moved to Thailand in 2006 and quickly got married and had a kid with his wife. A few years later, his wife left him to the other side of the country and took their kid with her. After this, things started going really bad for Fanelli as he started sleeping with prostitutes and drink lots of alcohol frequently.
Pianchai Wanphen, a prostitute, was murdered on June 18 this year and Ron Fanelli quickly became one of the main suspect. The police managed to track down Fanelli after some search. He admitted what he had done after that the police presented technical proof such as a stiletto. According to the police, Ron Fanelli was drunk when he murdered Pianchai Wanphen and therefore can't explain why he did it. However, he had done a lot to get away with the murder. He had been cutting up the body into pieces and then put them in a suitcase, which he dumped at a deserted place in hope that no one would find it or be able to link him to the murder.
At first, Victoria Coren thought that the police had forced him to admit to the murder and that he was innocent. However, she changed her opinion about that when the police presented technical proof against him.
"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."
She continues...
"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." writes Victoria Coren in an article in the British newspaper The Observer."
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