Simon Peter Carman, the Australian man charged with murdering Thai teenager Tunchanok Donhomla, says he acted in self-defence to stop her from stabbing him.
The 45-year-old spoke exclusively to the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program in a private visitors’ room at Pattaya Remand Prison, where he has been detained for almost two months.
“I’m hoping and praying that I get released,” he said.
“I have not done anything wrong. I shouldn’t be here … I do not understand what’s going on.”
Simon Peter Carman, the Australian man charged with murdering Thai teenager Tunchanok Donhomla, says he acted in self-defence to stop her from stabbing him.
The 45-year-old spoke exclusively to the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program in a private visitors’ room at Pattaya Remand Prison, where he has been detained for almost two months.
“I’m hoping and praying that I get released,” he said.
“I have not done anything wrong. I shouldn’t be here … I do not understand what’s going on.”
The ABC is the first foreign news organisation in at least 15 years to receive permission to interview a foreign inmate in a Thai prison. The interview was permitted on the condition that prison officials could review the ABC’s footage for security reasons, and that prison conditions were not discussed. The interview was carried out with Mr Carman’s consent.
He faces four charges, including murder, concealing a corpse, and abducting a minor for indecent purposes.
If found guilty of murder, he faces the dєatᩚh penalty or life in prison.
“I pled not guilty, and I remain not guilty of all four charges,” Mr Carman said.
Mr Carman told the ABC he did not have a lawyer yet and had not received any visitors apart from Australian embassy officials.
Thai police wrapped up their investigation last week and intend to pass the case to prosecutors today.
Tunchanok Donhomla’s father, Thongchai Donhomla, said he wanted Mr Carman to receive a life sentence or the dєatᩚh penalty to “serve as a lesson for others”.
“I want Simon to receive the harshest punishment because I have lost my child,” he told the ABC in an interview last week.
Carman says pair fought over money
Ms Tunchanok, known affectionately by her friends and family as “Cake”, was last seen alive on June 25.
CCTV captured her walking hand in hand with Mr Carman into the elevators of his condo building.
It later captured Mr Carman dragging a large suitcase out of the building and transporting it on a motorcycle at night.
Two days later, police found Ms Tunchanok’s body in the suitcase, which had been dumped along railway tracks near Mr Carman’s accommodation.
Mr Carman was arrested at Bangkok’s international airport on June 27 while trying to board a flight to Perth, and has been in Thai police custody since.
In the interview with Foreign Correspondent, Mr Carman maintained he had acted in self-defence.
Mr Carman said he first met Ms Tunchanok on the street, where she was accompanied by two friends. He said the 17-year-old then followed him back to his accommodation.
“I honestly do not know why she followed me home,” he added.
When the ABC told him there was CCTV showing them entering the building holding hands, Mr Carman said: “I cannot remember that, but if it was hand-in-hand, I believe you.”
He said he was not aware Ms Tunchanok was a minor at the time, and believed she was roughly 25 to 35 years old.
Mr Carman said when they got to his room he “gave her 500 baht ($21) … for nothing. And she wanted more money and then she pulled a knife”.
He said he repeatedly asked Ms Tunchanok to “put down the knife” during a physical struggle, and that eventually “she went limp”.
When asked if he had called anyone, including an ambulance, Mr Carman said he had not because he “didn’t trust the police”.
He said he was not aware Ms Tunchanok was a minor at the time, and believed she was roughly 25 to 35 years old.
Mr Carman said when they got to his room he “gave her 500 baht ($21) … for nothing. And she wanted more money and then she pulled a knife”.
He said he repeatedly asked Ms Tunchanok to “put down the knife” during a physical struggle, and that eventually “she went limp”.
When asked if he had called anyone, including an ambulance, Mr Carman said he had not because he “didn’t trust the police”.
“The autopsy report said that Cake had a brain injury and she suffocated. She had no other injuries,” Colonel Anek told the ABC last week.
“We also collected Simon [Carman’s] DNA and matched it to DNA found on Cake’s body.”
Ms Tunchanok’s auntie Mirantee Thanachai, who was among those who identified the teenager’s body, said she was upset by Mr Carman’s statements.
“I’m so angry that he claimed Cake tried to hurt him and that he was just defending himself,” she told the ABC.
“If things weren’t working out, he should have just let her go.”
Ms Tunchanok’s father told the ABC he was “deeply heartbroken” by the case.
“I always told my child to be a good person, never to cheat or harm anyone. But if a bad situation happens, I always told her never to back down to anyone and to fight to the very end,” Mr Thongchai said.
“I don’t ask for much. I just hope my child gets the justice she deserves.”
💔 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.
