These rocks are no strangers to explosive secrets. On Sept. 15, one of the occupants of that same room A5, Hannah Witheridge, was found bludgeoned to death in their midst alongside fellow British tourist David Miller, just a short stumble from her door. Witheridge, 23, from Great Yarmouth, a seaside town on the English east coast, had been raped and killed by blows to the head. Miller, a year older and from Jersey, one of the U.K.’s Channel Islands, had likewise suffered deep lacerations to his skull before drowning in the shallow surf.
A mute Burmese beach cleaner stumbled upon the bodies shortly after dawn. A garden hoe and wooden club found nearby were quickly fingered as the principal murder weapons.
The crime’s brutality amid Koh Tao’s insular, backpacker charm caused an international sensation and threatened to further weaken a tourist industry already reeling from the military coup of May 22, 2014, which saw hundreds arbitrarily detained and draconian new controls imposed on freedom of speech and assembly.
Junta chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha enraged many by hinting that the blame, at some level, lay with the attractive victims. “Will [tourists] survive in Thailand if they dress in bikinis?” he asked Sept. 17. He added that they would if “they are not beautiful.”
Prayuth soon backtracked on his remarks on travelers, saying, “Sometimes I speak too strongly.” But virtually his next breath again sought to assign blame: “We have to help take care of [our nation],” he said, “and not let not-good people mingle with us, such as unregistered alien workers.”
Investigators had already steered their attention to migrant workers, via a friend of the deceased, and the son of a local headman, who were briefly considered as suspects. DNA testing of casual workers was introduced and many migrants complained of rough interrogations, with some claiming that they were scalded with boiling water. (Police deny these allegations.)
Zaw Lin and Wai Phyo, both 22-year-old ethnic Rakhine from Burma’s restive Arakan state, were arrested on Oct. 2. The police quickly elicited a confession and, after a macabre reconstruction of the murders before a swarm of media — including a staged session of penitent prayers by the accused — probably hoped that the case looked closed.