interesting looking book on the westerners that were captured during Pol Pots reign.

Foxy Lady is an investigative journalist's account of the murder of four Americans, two Australians, an Englishman, a New Zealander, and a Canadian by Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. Foxy Lady chronicles the life and times of the Canadian, Stuart Robert Glass including his brutal 1978 death onboard a little yacht called Foxy Lady. Stuart's mates suffered a worse fate—dragged off to the Khmer Rouge's Tuol Sleng death house in Phnom Penh, charged with being CIA spies, tortured for a few months, and then killed.

I know all about this and the story is really sad. The Kiwi guy confessed and you can read his confession at Toul Sleng, he was a funny bugger to the end. He admitted to working at the Huntly Power Station in the Waikato about an hour south of Auckland. His CIA controller was a Colonel Sanders! After the confession they continued to torture him for months and then killed him and burnt his body at Toul Sleng with some tyres.
His brother gave evidence at the tribunal against Duch a few years ago. He is also a remarkable man, a rower who despite his sea sickness raised enough money and trained hard enough to win the first trans Atlantic rowing race with a mate. He wrote a book called The Naked Rower, it's a good yarn.
I think it was on his second visit to Cambodia that he told of the awful tragedy in his family connected with the death of his brother. The oldest brother was very close to the yachting brother and the family endured several years of agony of not knowing what had happened, he had just disappeared off the face of the earth. Some years after learning all the details, on a Christmas Day the oldest brother leapt off a cliff near the family home and died.
So the KR killed and tortured two people not one.

Very sad tale. I researched the story as well, and your summary is a good one. Thanks.

theres mention that one if not all were running hashish which is why they were inexplicably close to cambodia. is there any truth to that?

I remember reading about the incident in a couple of books, when I first moved here 15 years ago. It was claimed that the leader of the group was a notorious smuggler and that the yacht was carrying a large shipment of hash.
If true, it certainly doesn't justify what was done to them, but I thought the claims made by the brother and others at the KR Tribunal that they were totally innocent victims were rather dubious.

From Newcastle and New Zealand to the Killing Fields of Cambodia
In 1978, three young men on a gap year strayed into Cambodian waters and were discovered by members of the Khmer Rouge. Holly Baxter retraced the steps of her fellow Geordie, John Dawson Dewhirst, and his tragic companions, to uncover a haunting tale
28 September 2018

It was June 1978 when Hilary received her final letter from her brother John. “He used to write to me on his travels,” she tells me, 40 years later. “They were getting the boat ready and he was going on his final trip before coming home.”

John Dawson Dewhirst was 26 years old, and had spent the year after graduating from his degree (a bachelor of education with English from Loughborough University, which he’d attended on a scholarship) travelling round southeast Asia. He’d always been adventurous, says Hilary, “and outdoorsy. He loved writing – poetry, fictional stuff – he had a very unusual, quirky style.”

He was known by friends to be sensitive, gentle and thoughtful. Much later, family members would find out that he was described by the person who ordered his murder as “a polite young man”.

John set out to Japan and worked briefly as a teacher, and then a contract employee – “a headline writer”, Hilary thinks – for The Japan Times between June 1977 and January 1978.

Hilary knows that after John left Tokyo and The Japan Times, he travelled extensively. “South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia…” He made friends along the way, including two men called Stuart Glass, a Canadian, and Kerry Hamill, a New Zealander. They met in the Malaysian city of Kuala Terengganu, at the time a small harbour town with a tropical climate which faced onto the South China Sea, with a palm-lined beach and traditional stilt houses dotted across the river.

In the summer of 1978, six months after John had left Japan, the three decided to take a trip on Kerry’s yacht, the Foxy Lady, with John acting as a paid charter. They set off on a course towards Bangkok, three experienced sailors on a relatively short hop across the water. John, a keen photographer, took pictures of the deserted islands they passed on the way, splitting his time between navigating and cooking simple food below deck.

Then they vanished without a trace.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long ... 43801.html

So the current first comment on the above article, from Saintmaryssaint, states that communism had nothing to do with this brutal regime.
This disregards the Khmer Rouge boast of being the ultimate communists, the first to achieve true communism, even to the extreme of communal eating.

During the 1970-75 war and through the Pol Pot years, the Khmer Rouge were the darlings of the Western Left. They were adored for seeking then creating the kind of idyllic communal paradise that poets and philosophers had dreamt of for centuries: but of course once everything was exposed, Leftist revisionism immediately transformed the Rouge into Nazis.

Definitely interesting. I'd buy that for a dollar

Hearing for Cambodian Khmer Rouge leader charged over New Zealander Kerry Hamill’s death
By Stuff - November 15, 2019

A war crimes tribunal will hear appeals involving a Khmer Rouge veteran charged over the death of New Zealander Kerry Hamill.

In 1978, Hamill, brother of Olympic rower Rob Hamill, was seized from a boat off Cambodia, detained in Tuol Sleng​ prison, tortured and executed.

Court documents showed three days of hearings in the decade-long case against Cambodian naval officer Meas Muth​ were set to start on November 27.

In full: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/ ... ills-death