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INTO THIN AIR
Nearly 44 years since the disappearance of Jim Thompson, author Stu Lloyd’s fascination with the unsolved case Has never diminished. He tells us why
“This is the man who murdered Jim Thompson,” says henna-tattooed Satia as he introduces a silver-haired Ruby Maniam. We are in Malaysia’s bustling town of Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands, and at this introduction my jaw goes momentarily slack. Then Satia, my local guide, bursts out laughing. It turns out Ruby was the last person known to have seen Jim Thompson alive.
It was Easter Sunday 1967 when Ruby, a then-spry 17-year-old, was working as a gardener at the Lutheran Mission. Mid-afternoon, he looked up from weeding the hydrangeas to see a balding gent with a camera around his neck walking slowly along the driveway. “He was taking a photo of the nice view near the tennis court. Maybe five or 10 minutes there. Then he turns and waves. ‘Bye, see you’. I see him come, I see him go.” And with that, Ruby says, he returned to his weeding.
Ruby sheepishly admits he knew nothing of what unfolded next…
A little further up the hill is Moonlight Cottage, a quaint colonial bungalow that served as a weekend getaway for a Singaporean couple, the Lings, who were dear friends of Thompson’s. They’d invited him and his Thai friend Connie Mangskau for the weekend, and they’d spent Easter Sunday picnicking at Mount Brinchang.
They noticed that Thompson, who was given to being a little prickly at times, seemed noticeably distracted that day. Their usual picnics were languid, all-afternoon affairs, but on this occasion, Jim started packing up as soon as the food was devoured, agitating to head home. They returned to the cottage for a siesta. A short while later, the sound of a chair being moved on the veranda was followed by footsteps down the gravel driveway, and… a deathly silence for the next 40-odd years. The silence continues to deafen today.
The Lings presumed he’d gone for a walk, but when their guest hadn’t returned as the short tropical twilight closed in, they went to the village to look for him. No, no one had seen him. They raised the alarm: James HW Thompson, 61, was missing.
The largest manhunt in Malaysia’s history ensued.
A British major stationed in the area – Malaysia was under threat from communist guerrillas at the time – scrambled search parties. Army helicopters swung into action. The local police joined in. This was needle-in-the-haystack stuff. For beyond the picture-perfect picket fence of Moonlight Cottage is a steep valley thickly wooded with oaks, laurels and cinnamon trees; rampant jungle of exactly the type in which Thompson once underwent commando survival training. Orang asli (indigenous) trackers were brought in, even local bomohs (witchdoctors).
A US$25,000 reward was posted – flypaper to all kinds of crazy opportunists, including a nightclub-act mind reader.
In the local kampongs (villages), the smart money was on a tiger attack. Ruby had recently seen a tiger snatch a dog from the mission. But, as Helen Robertson tells me years later, there would have been a belt buckle or shoes left over. Robertson’s husband had supplied roses to the Lings’ cottage.
Or was there a larger, more sinister, force at work?
Thompson was no ordinary man. His first taste of Asia was a posting to Bangkok as a military intelligence officer with the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) as World War II drew to a close. Post-war, the restless architect from Delaware divorced and made his way back to Thailand.
As a part-owner of The Oriental Hotel, he got involved in revamping the fabled building, which had suffered neglect under Japanese occupation. “The Oriental was a dump,” recalls Bridgette Opfer, who lived in Bangkok for a decade from 1948. “It was the best, but it was a dump.”
Harold Stephens, author of The Strange Disappearance of Jim Thompson recalls the hotel as being, “really, really run down… non-descript, the only one on the river.” But he liked taking the streetcar up New Road in the early ’60s and stopping by the Oriental, where he could enjoy a bottle of beer for just eight baht.
As Stephens recalls, Bangkok was a markedly diff erent place then, attracting just 100,000 tourists a year and with no signage in English. Opfer remembers the local ladies wore bland “little white blouses and black sarongs”. For anything colourful, she would venture down to the Karachi Store, “which had the most beautiful English export materials and lovely Swiss patterns. Then you went to a little dressmaker who charged one pound [Sterling].”
Thompson, disillusioned with his Oriental Hotel partnership, next turned his artistic eye to the exotic and evocative hand-woven Thai silks he admired. His skill as a colourist and designer kick-started what was then a lacklustre cottage industry into a major international export industry, based at his weaving village at Bang Krua, now inner Bangkok. (Thailand alone now boasts 25 Jim Thompson stores, with several overseas outlets.)
Opfer knew his products well. “I bought 28 scarves to take back to England,” she grins. “His shop was on Suriwong, next to a tailor. You paid shillings – [not literally; the tikal was then 60 to the pound] – and you could have any colour you liked if you
wanted to match it with something, I mean every shade you could imagine.”
Hollywood agreed; the casts of Ben Hur and The King and I took his eye-catching creations to a global audience.
Thompson became the number one farang (foreigner) host in Bangkok. His home on the canal, comprising six centuries-old traditional Thai teak houses from the ancient capital of Ayutthaya, was masterfully created and eclectically decorated with European, Thai and Chinese elements. It stands today almost exactly as he left it, as though awaiting his return. Somerset Maugham, that classic chronicler of South-East Asia, stayed with Thompson on his swansong visit to the region, later writing to his host: “You not only have beautiful things, but what is rare is you have arranged them with faultless taste.”
And that in itself was another point of contention.
The Thai Fine Arts Department accused the silk entrepreneur of looting up-country temples of artefacts. Thompson, who saw himself as a guardian of Thai art forms and antiquities, was deeply hurt, and responded by writing the Siam Society out of his will. The learned arts and science institution had stood to inherit his house, land, shares and priceless collections.
Could this be connected to Thompson’s disappearance? Another theory centred on Thompson’s CIA connections and friendship with former Thai PM Pridi Phanomyong, who was exiled to China in 1947. Investigators leant heavily on the communist kidnapping plot; terrorist guerrillas were active in the region until as recently as 1989. But no ransom demand was ever made. Six months later, Thompson’s elderly ister was murdered in America.
Just like Elvis, sightings of Thompson trickled in over the years. He was in Canton. Working in a furniture store in Laos. Hold on, isn’t that him in that Tahiti hotel?
In 1974, after the statutory seven-year period, Jim Thompson was officially declared dead by the US and Thailand. But in Tanah Ratah, where his name has been lent to tea rooms, dining terraces and walking tours, you could be forgiven for feeling that Jim Thompson is alive and well, despite the fact that today he’d be 103.
It took years for Ruby to summon up to courage to tell his friends what he’d seen that fateful day. He had no idea who Jim Thompson was, though he positively identifies him from a photo I show.
“I knew Thompson,” says Harold Stephens, speaking slowly and deliberately. “I went down to Malaysia the day he disappeared. I know everybody involved. I kept piecing it together, writing the story, years of work. It’s so delicate….” Just then the doorbell rings and the moment is lost.
Why, even at soporific Tanah Ratah police station – once the buzzing command post of Malaysia’s largest manhunt – his file still sits in a cabinet. “Buka!” Case still open. “Missing in action,” exclaims Corporal Khairul.
“Absolute mysteries only improve with age,” surmises William Warren in Jim Thompson: The Unsolved Mystery. “And there can have been few as absolute as Thompson’s has proved to be.” The Jim Thompson House
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