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Andrew Drummond

Jingle Bells Unheard In Thailand Until Santa Shops Child Abuser

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 publish 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.

About the Author

Andrew Drummond

Andrew Drummond is a British independent journalist and occasional television documentary maker. He is a former Fleet Street, London, journalist having worked at the Evening Standard, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, News of the World, Observer and The Times.

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