Could serial child killer and cannibal Si Quey, bogeyman for Thai children, have been an innocent scapegoat?
- The Chinese migrant was executed in 1959 for killing and eating children, and his embalmed body is displayed at a medical museum in Bangkok
- He has been a bogeyman for Thai children for decades, but renewed interest in his case has cast some doubt on his guilt
Si Quey Sae-ung’s reputation precedes him: notorious serial killer, vicious child murderer and ghoulish cannibal.
Seen as evil personified in Thailand, where the love of the macabre knows no bounds, the Chinese immigrant has become part of local folklore. He has been immortalised in films and books. He has also been a bogeyman for generations of children. For decades Thai parents have been warning their offspring that if they misbehaved, stayed out late or skipped school, Si Quey would come and eat their liver.
Yet on encountering his embalmed corpse, in a small medical museum at Siriraj, Bangkok’s oldest hospital, he doesn’t appear menacing at all. Instead, he strikes a pitiful figure.
Si Quey’s preserved remains are on permanent display at the hospital’s Forensic Medicine Museum: a desiccated mummy propped upright in a tall glass-walled cabinet. Slathered in hardened paraffin wax, his leathery skin glistens in the light of fluorescent lamps.
Embalming has turned the ill-fated immigrant’s features distinctly mousy, with sunken cheeks and a pointy little nose. A white tooth protrudes on each side of his mouth, which is frozen agape as if he had been cut off mid-sentence while uttering his last words.
As in death, so in life. Based on an old newspaper photo, a copy of which is framed and mounted beside him, he was a small, wiry man who also looked mousy in life. At his trial in March 1958, he was photographed yawning, which made him appear as a snarling fiend.
