Andrew Drummond - Bangkok December 19 2008 - blog
Thailand’s education authorities have been duped once again, this time by a man with a record dating back 45 years for sexually abusing children, who ran a child-sex tourism operation for profit under their noses.
The widespread abuses committed by Canadian John Wrenshall are so mind boggling it comes as no surprise this time that the U.S. authorities chose to arrest him somewhere from which he could easily be deported for trial.
He was shopped by a part-time Santa Claus, but nobody in Thailand noticed the warning bells ringing about Wrenshaw, arrested at Heathrow airport London this week, who was hiring out and also abusing young children in Bangkok.
The arrest comes after voices at Thailand’s Ministry of Education insisted it would be checking the credentials and background of foreign teachers, as they did too at private schools and universities.
Wrenshall was one of the bosses at A.U.A in Bangkok, which has the country’s leading Thai and English language programmes. The U.S. authorities want to put him on trial in New Jersey, the home of one of his client child abusers, Wayne Corliss, 59, a part-time actor and occasional Santa Claus who spilled all.
Canadian Christopher Neil, 32, a teacher at the Ramkhamheang Adventist school, and also in Korea, who was on Interpol’s most wanted list, is currently serving some eight years in prison in Thailand, leaving little hope for a ‘show trial’ in Canada, where authorities wanted to demonstrate their ability to show their sex-tourism laws are working. They won’t get Wrenshall either.
The US authorities did not, I suspect, want him bogged down in Thailand, where inevitably victims, as in the case of Neil, will be found in retrospect.
Wrenshall, according to his CV, was a consultant to ‘Travel Alberta’ and gave up a promising career and his own computer software company in Canada to teach in Thailand at a fraction of his previous salary.
Wrenshall, was Supervisor of Assessment and Supervisor of the Academic English Language Program. He had been there just short of ten years - straight from a prison sentence.
He also taught at Mahidol University out on their Salaya Campus.
Had either of these bastions of education bothered to check they may have discovered that in fact, he had left Canada in something of a hurry and rather cash strapped.
He had lost his company and had to sell his house and his car to settle civil suits by five Albertans who said he had molested them when they were minors.
At least 20 boys as young as nine were indecently assaulted by Mr. Wrenshall, from 1961 to the mid 1980s, according to court evidence in Calgary, Canada’s Globe and Mail reported.
“A former scoutmaster and Anglican choir member at Calgary’s Cathedral Church of the Redeemer, Mr. Wrenshall has a master’s degree in sociology. He lured his victims on the pretence that he was conducting a study on preteen boys’ sexuality , the court was told.
“After receiving a suspended sentence in 1970, he undertook two years of counselling. After he reoffended, a judge sentenced him in 1997 to one year in jail and two years probation, saying that would be a “satisfactory deterrent.”
“Two years later, he was pimping young Thai boys, charging up to $400 a boy and recruiting his johns in an Internet chat room called Boy Love and Chat”
Wrenshall was arrested at Heathrow on Tuesday on a warrant issued after he was indicted by a grand jury in New Jersey, USA.
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Footnote: On December 22 2008 after CEOP officers had returned to the UK the Bangkok Post published a report by Wassayos Ngamkham. Thai police were quoted that the major player a Brit had escaped arrested during the operation.
”It’s an organisation deeply involved in the sex trade with a British man as the mastermind,” Pol Lt-Col Panya said. ”He contacts customers through a website and has a Thai transvestite procure children for customers, most of whom are Europeans who have businesses in Thailand or retirees who have settled here.”
According to the inspector, the British man is a big procurer in Pattaya. However, on the morning of Dec 11 when police arrested four foreign paedophiles there, they did not find any evidence linking them to the mastermind”.
The newspaper was supplied with photographs by the Royal Thai Police.
I ,of course hope Thai police have not given the game away and that ‘Mr.Big’ has not skipped off, but if he was not around for the December 11th raids, the chances are he had already.
Your comments please on whether this story is being actively suppressed by the local powers that be. It is truely amazing that this story is out there in the rest of the world and no where to be seen in the Thai press. The local forums seem to be stopping threads on this subject too - for fear of being labelled slanderous
I hope they fry him….btw, your writing is getting quite poor…..you would think you were writing, for a tabloid, or a Thailand Sex Forum.
Neh. I dont believe there is a conspiracy to suppress this news. It was originally picked up by the wires in London so much of the stuff of local interest was not in the original story.
As a rule of thumb though the English language press do spike a lot of negative ‘foreign’ stories
Jonathan. I took a second look at this story and concur with you. I have removed some comments which tended to distract from what is quite a serious situation.
I should perhaps point out that this was a blog and not sent out as a news story.
‘I hope they fry him’ is the sort of response a tabloid newspaper would get from as typical reader on this subject.
“The widespread abuses committed by Canadian John Wrenshall are so mind boggling it comes as no surprise this time that the U.S. authorities chose to arrest him somewhere from which he could easily be deported for trial”. You had changed this from an earlier versionw here you spoke about showtrials.
I disagree with you on the above. The Canadians are pathetic in this area. They don’t want show trials they want someone else to handle their mess. They deliberatly avoided having anything to do with Neil, (there was not even a Canadian police officer helping on that)leaving it to Interpol and the RTP and they did the same with Wrenshall prefering to leave him to the US ICE people.
Canada are cowards with this crime type. Look at the mess with Mader http://www.nowpublic.com/crime/abbotsford-mader-accused-thai-child-rapist-free-bail.
In this story Janis Gray calls for Canadian action http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=1083927. She is a brave woman but is ex BC and is a useless voice on this matter. Where are the RCMP, the ones who always get their man?
Canada’s response to this whole area of crime smells of abdication.
I hope that AUA learns something, does’t sweep it under the carpet AGAIN and doesn’t use it as yet another excuse to make life difficult for its essentially law-abiding staff. And there are many of them! Sexpats are rife here, but there are loads of basically decent expats trying to work here. I do have some personal experience of an ‘abusive’ family ‘friend’. It didn’t fill me with thoughts of revenge. It does convince me, however, that this should not be covered up or ignored.
Andrew….I would certainly hope you would hold yourself to a higher standard than your readers. Your response was immature. I do read the tabloids, as well as the local press here in Thailand. I have you
Rss’d to get the real story. Yes I do hope they fry him.
Jonathan. I have no problem with the tabloids Jonathan. They break most of the stories.
Its just that your comment ‘I hope they fry him’ does not really add much to any debate. I have noted your earlier comments and acted on them.
Well to put it bluntly, they aren’t going to fry him, are they? But he might well end up in a prison where inmates have a very low tolerance of such offenders. So he might end up as an incentive to other criminals to continue with their violent ways. Capital punishment? Castration - either surgical or medical? The latter would probably be of NO real consequence to a man of his age. The options are NEVER easy. There are few people who really relish the thought of kicking another human being to death as a form of punishment. And where such people exist, they tend to end up being as barbaric as John in the long-term. Execution is at least usually fairly clinical from the executioner’s point of view. And throughout history, executioner’s have often demonstrated that they are capable of more compassion than some of their victims. John obviously prided himself on being a man of some refinement - although that is not really consistent with the crimes he is accused of. Lomg-term imprisonment would doubtless have some effect on a man of this type. He would also be a long-term example. No parole should be allowed, I think. The likelihood that he was set up is probably very slim. He probably rented another shophouse for his illegal activities, away from the house he shared with a Thai family.
There are some real problems over this issue. If you work here long enough you know that there are definitely ‘others’ lurking in the woodwork. I don’t work anywhere really close to such lurkers, but I know where some of them are - but I also don’t have much real evidence. Then, there are those who are working closer to such lurkers who are not really taking any steps against them. We need to seriously think about why that is the case.
Giving evidence to the local police or any local organization is fraught with dangers. The alternative is to give the story to someone like Andrew (no disrespect intended). Even that’s not as easy as it seems, since one begins to consider one’s own motives in becoming involved with something that ineveitably has some degree of sensationalism.
The real problem here is that the only way we can deal with these problems (in a society that lacks complaint procedures) is to become involved with the sensationalist media. Which also exposes us to danger. It is thus rather inevitable that locally-based expats feel that they can do little more about such cases than talk secretly about them amongst themselves - and never take any real action to curtail the activities of these abusers. People like John are aware of this conundrum for their colleagues, and exploit it.
I also think the ‘fry’ is no answer. In fact, it is probably another reason why some people back off reporting these things. It seems to me that a more constructive (rather than reactive approach) is needed. I have a feeling that prevention is the way to go, but it needs a different mentality from that which is current here. In other words, making sure that the abusers lose their desire to come here - and force them to stay home where they are more likely to be convicted if they offend or reoffend.
Andrew. You work and live here. Is there some way WE could set up a serious resource/contact site on this in English for Thailand? I know that you have contacts with the concerned agencies here. I would be interested in contributing myself, but I would prefer to deal with folks who want to work to stop this rather than just react to it.
In fact, I would like to go a step further in what I just said. A site dedicated to sex abusers alone would be a bit limiting. Perhaps it would be better aimed at the whole issue of expat and tourist safety/criminality here and in trhis entire region which you cover. But I don’t want to run away with the idea of ‘Bangkok Dangerous’, because I don’t totally subscribe to the idea that there is danger lurking round every corner here. But certainly there are a lot of perils that folks often blunder into unwittingly. These are issues which you frequently cover, Andrew. And there is no reason why such a site couldn’t have a more preventative role. Or provide readers with better ways to react to whatever predicament they find themselves in.
Speechless. I think you have answered your own questions. To launch an internet site dedicated to these matters would be unwise. Though as you can see a lot of my work is crime related and invariably these stories end up here.
Experience shows that reporting paedophiles to police in this region can have negative results. A former head of Interpol in Cambodia told me he insisted ‘tips’ go direct to him. Junior level officers might take the info and blackmail the foreigner involved, he said.
Tips can be passed on to foreign police of the national concerned, who may act on it, or refer back to HQ.
The Brits can contact CEOP in the case of paedophiles.
Alternatively The Foundation to Fight Against Child Exploitation in Bangkok is pro-active in this field.(facesudabkk@yahoo.com)
All newspapers I deal with keep details of informants absolutely confidential, as do I.
The resulting story may be ’sensational’ in your view but as in the case of the Canadian who got a job at AUA months after leaving prison, I would say that was sensational. There are many interpretations of this word.
Lets just say that we sometimes worry a little about it pandering a bit too much to the “hang’em, shoot’em & flog ‘em” brigade. Like drug-dealing, it becomes even more profitable when it is driven completely underground. As one person said to me recently, this & pornography are about the only things really making any money on the web.
You might just want to think about this. It is significant. While comfortably esconced in your lakeside villa, there are a whole load of folk out there who were often removed from employment because of an economic model that the hi-so fashionable are now deserting in droves. We have often ended up here earning less than the migrant workers who (in the long-term) took our jobs back home. So you can imagine how much some overly-pious, over-polite (& semi-secretive child-abuser) Canadian pseudo-intellectual might bring out the old acid in a few of us.
That said, we do actually greatly appreciate your interest in this issue. (And do not have any negative thoughts about the migrant cabbage-pickers back home either for that matter.)
(Even Canadians are welcome in the majority of cases. Just lay off on painting the town red after being holed up in some one-horse town during your entire formative years!)
Keep up the Good Work Andrew! You will be hearing more from us when the evidence becomes a bit more solid.
Are you listening Bangkok?
Someone gave me the Child Watch number a long time ago.
1300 I think they welcome any calls.
It is better then doing nothing, right?
Thanks to you and Andrew for contact information