The British suspect in the murder of his Thai wife (pic) in 2004 has been arrested in Mueang district of Kanchanaburi province and will be extradited to his home country.
David Stuart Armitage, 62, wanted for the murder of Lamduan Seekanya, a Thai woman from Udon Thani province, was arrested by the Immigration Bureau and the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) on Jan 23.
Armitage, who had fled the UK, was residing in Thailand for an extended period, according to the DSI investigation.
The arrest ended a two-decade-long investigation into the mysterious death of Lamduan in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, UK.
Armitage was detained under the Immigration Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act between Thailand and the United Kingdom for further legal proceedings.
In 2004, the body of a young woman was found lying dead in the mountains of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Local residents referred to the unknown woman as the “Lady of the Hills” because no one knew her identity.
The body was found half-naked, face down, barefoot, and wearing a wedding ring. Officers issued a public appeal to locate her relatives, but no one came forward. Her body was buried in a grave at a village near the site where she was found.
Ten years after her death, a new investigative team in the UK took over the cold case, hoping to resolve old unsolved mysteries.
The officers formed a hypothesis, suggesting that the woman could have been a “Thai-bride type”, meaning a Thai or South-East Asian woman who married a foreigner and moved to the UK.
This was a common migration trend in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The police speculated that the reason no one had reported her as missing could be that her acquaintances believed she had returned to Thailand.
The investigators theorised that she may have been killed at home and her body transported to the remote valley to be discarded as a way to conceal the crime.
The suspect will be deported and sent back to the UK to face legal proceedings. — The Nation/ANN
