Australian Simon Peter Carman “lived his normal life”, going out, washing his clothes and talking to neighbours after allegedly murdering a teenage girl and stuffing her body inside a suitcase in Thailand, police say.
Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions that some readers may find distressing.
Mr Carman, 45, was arrested at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport on Friday, just as he was preparing to board a flight to Australia, after a friend of 17-year-old Tunchanok Donhomla reported her missing to police on Thursday.
The teenage girl’s naked body, along with her personal effects, were discovered by police in black luggage in waist-high grass alongside a railway line, about 10 minutes’ drive from the apartment complex where Mr Carmen had been staying.
“After the girl [went] missing … we suspected that something bad might happen,” Pattaya City police colonel Anek Srathongyoo said.
Police allege Mr Carman picked up Ms Tunchanok from the Beach Road vice strip in the coastal city of Pattaya in the early hours of Thursday morning, local time, and took her back to his complex in Jomtien.
CCTV video shows the pair walking hand-in-hand in the building’s lobby at 3:34am before they both entered an elevator.
Ms Tunchanok, who was known as “Cake” to her friends, was never seen leaving the building. An unnamed friend later told officers she had lost contact with Ms Tunchanok shortly after the girl told her she had arrived at the “foreign man’s” room.
“I’m already in his room, his room is very messy,” Ms Tunchanok had texted, according to police.
Mr Carman, who lived in Western Australia before arriving in Thailand, told police he had not known the girl before they met in Pattaya.
After arriving at the complex, the pair went back to Mr Carman’s room and got into an argument, police said.
Where is Pattaya City in Thailand?
Thai media is reporting Mr Carman and Ms Tunchanok fought over money, after having initially agreed he would pay her 1,000 baht ($43). They reportedly argued after he offered 500 baht instead.
Police said Mr Carman told them the girl “used a knife to threaten him” while they were arguing.
Officers had previously said they noticed “fingernail scratches” on Mr Carman’s body after his arrest that were “consistent with a struggle”.
“He confessed that he killed her after they had an argument,” police colonel Anek Srathongyoo said.
He said Mr Carman told them he squeezed her neck, causing her to lose consciousness, and then kept her body in the bathroom until later that night.
“After the incident happened, he just lived his normal life,” Mr Srathongyoo said.
“Going out from the condo room, getting his clothes washed, chatting with surrounding people, no clue that he had done something bad.”
About 9:25pm that same day, CCTV footage captured Mr Carman dragging a large suitcase out of his room and leaving the condo on a motorcycle with the suitcase strapped to the back.
He then sped alongside the railway tracks, disappearing from view for nine minutes. Footage shows him returning to the accommodation about 10pm.
Mr Srathongyoo told the ABC there were signs of strangulation on Ms Tunchanok’s neck when they found her body, which they believe caused her dєatᩚh.
He said there were also bruises on her face that police believed were caused by being pressed in the luggage.
Mr Carman has been charged with four offences: murder, concealment of a body, moving or destroying a body, and taking a minor aged between 15 and 18 for 𝘴єxual purposes.
Lieutenant Colonel Kanoknun Sooksri, the investigator in charge of the case, told the ABC Mr Carman had denied all of the charges.
If found guilty, he could face between 15 and 20 years in jail, life imprisonment or the dєatᩚh penalty, police said.
The ABC has contacted Mr Carman’s family for comment.
Carman previously owned firearms in WA
Mr Carman grew up in Jerramungup, a small agricultural town in Western Australia, before moving to Albany as a teenager with his parents.
He later became a truck driver, but was involved in a motor incident, which caused an injury to his neck, two people close to him told the ABC.
The medication he took for the injury appeared to affect his speech and movement, people familiar with him said.
He had previously owned firearms, but WA court records show his guns were seized and his firearms licence suspended by police in 2023.
He was last seen in Western Australia in October 2025 and has been in Thailand for the past eight months.
Mr Carman’s most recent online history shows him commenting on photos and videos of women.
In one comment posted in October 2025, he wrote he was living in Thailand.
The ABC understands Mr Carman is now in detention in Pattaya Prison.
Father returns home with his daughter’s body
Thai police told the ABC the case bears similarities to two other cases that occurred in the last two years where a victim’s body was stuffed into luggage along with their personal effects and dumped.
One of the cases is in Ban Chang Rayong province, and the other in the Huay Yai district, Chonburi province.
There are no suggestions this case is linked with the other two crimes.
In a video after his arrest, Mr Carman addressed the victim’s family, saying he felt “bad” about “what happened to your daughter”.
Ms Tunchanok was an only child who lived with her father and stepmother in the province of Kalasin, about 480 kilometres north-east of Pattaya.
The teen had told her parents she wanted to go on holiday with a friend and travelled to Pattaya on June 16.
Thongchai Donholma, Ms Tunchanok’s father, retrieved the teenager’s body from Pattaya yesterday, and has returned to Kalasin.
“I am deeply saddened,” he said of his daughter’s dєatᩚh while outside a police station in Pattaya on the weekend.
Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong has said she will have an opportunity to talk with her Thai counterpart about the case, describing the incident as “horrific”.
“I think we’ve all been horrified about what has been reported and extend our deepest sympathies to the family and friends who have lost someone they love dearly,” she said.
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
