PORNTHIP: Would like to conduct a post-mortem on Teoh

Her head is covered with dark red spikes, lips the colour of dried blood and gloved fingernails,  as she prepares to slice the body open, encrusted with spangles.

Once someone has seen Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand, 54, Thailand’s most famous and maverick pathologist, face to face, on television or on the cover of one of her best-selling books, it is impossible to forget her.

Malaysia was talking about her yesterday after she dropped a bombshell in the coroner’s court that there was an 80 per cent probability that political aide Teoh Beng Hock’s death was homicide and not suicide. Dr Pornthip said that Teoh’s injuries showed he could have been strangled, while the injuries to his anus may have been caused by penetration with an object before he fell to his death on July 16.

So, Dr Pornthip, who was engaged as an expert witness by the Selangor government in the inquest into Teoh’s death, has set off another firestorm of controversy with her testimony.

Clearly, controversy follows  the celebrity doctor in almost everything she does. Already, based on her  explosive testimony, Teoh’s family is mulling exhumation of his remains for a fresh post-mortem to allow Dr Pornthip to reach conclusive evidence pertaining to his death.

The family had previously refused a second independent post-mortem for reasons unknown. The coroner has now to decide if he has enough evidence to conclude or whether he feels it necessary for a second post- mortem.

And Selangor Menteri Besar Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim reiterated the call for a Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) to investigate Teoh’s death rather  than just look at the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission’s (MACC) interrogation methods.

He said the RCI proposed by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak to investigate the MACC’s methods to interrogate Teoh should be extended to cover how he really died.

When Malay Mail came face to face with Dr Pornthip yesterday, she didn’t have to say hello, her hair — orange, rust, scarlet, mauve, chestnut, whatever — screamed “Surprise!”

It was more than a surprise, a shock rather.  “Isn’t she a strange looking woman with her eccentric clothing
and makeup?” asked lawyer Shamala Fernando, prompting  a hunch that this “straightfaced woman is going to drop a bombshell”.

That she did. The stunned courtroom was in a state of disbelief especially since Dr Pornthip had not conducted her own post-mortem on Teoh nor did she inspect the scene where his body was found.

Dr Pornthip told the court she would like to carry out her own post-mortem on Teoh, but magistrate Azmil  Muntapha Abas, who is acting as coroner, indicated that it may be too late to do so at this stage. Her testimony was based on the autopsy report jointly prepared by Dr Khairul Aznam Ibrahim from the Hospital Tengku Rahimah Ampuan in Klang and Dr Prashant Naresh Samberkar from the University Malaya Medical Centre in Kuala Lumpur.

Dr Pornthip’s testimony may have added to her portfolio that  she fights for victims that have lost their lives in suspicious circumstances.

However, she did make it clear in court that she was only involved to give her expert opinion and not to ridicule the authorities.

Clearly, she was aware that her testimony would touch a raw  nerve amongst many as did her findings in Thailand that made the police “hate me”.

This “Dr Death” almost single-  handedly introduced DNA testing to Thailand and brought  some order to the procedures of her calling, detective work on the dead.

Dr Pornthip is used to corpses, having performed over 10,000 autopsies over the past 27 years, of which more than 100 dealt with fatal falls from high places.

So what’s with the flamboyance  and cadavers? The stark opposites in her life explai n her eccentric side –
example: her initial ambition was to be an interior designer and the first magazine she subscribed to was the fashion magazine Glamour and the second one was National Geographic.

Although she looks it, Dr Pornthip is not a person of the night. She is  a person of the predawn, when it is always darkest.

She is alone with her cold corpses, slicing, sawing and cracking bones as the living world still sleeps.

She extracts the jewels of her craft, the liver, the heart, the kidney and the last dinner from these swollen and discoloured bodies.

Sliced and studied under an electron microscope, they reveal their secrets.

Her artistic side found other outlets: drawing, cooking, homemaking, collecting popular music and the creation of her public image: just about anything that no one, not even rebellious kids, are wearing.

Police ‘hate’ her for her work

DR Pornthip Rojanasunand came into the spotlight in the early 1990s, when one of her medical students was murdered by her boyfriend. Her head was severed, her body cut into 168 pieces and flushed down the toilet.

The police noted a bloodstain in the boyfriend‘ s car, but failed to act upon it. A month later the murderer confessed to the police that he killed her in his apartment.

Dr Pornthip found a bloodstain in the bathroom, which DNA matched with the victim’s and soon after found her remains in the toilet.

“Since then, the police started to hate me. The Thai people saw that they needed  to trust me and the forensic evidence, not the police,” Dr Pornthip said then.

She has repeated publicly that she had come across evidence of police abuses during her work. During the government’s anti-drug campaign in early 2003, over 1,000 people vanished or were killed; Dr Pornthip has
shown that several of these deaths were caused by police.

The public soon made a celebrity of her and she became famous in Thailand as “Dr Death”. And whenever there is a murder case, chances are that Dr Pornthip is investigating.

And even if she is not involved, like when American actor David Carradine was found dead in his Bangkok hotel room early this year, she was able to solve the case quicker than her colleagues.

She was not part of the investigation. Typically for Thai media, they asked for her expert opinion about the case.

“From what I saw as an outsider, it didn‘t look like murder or suicide. So I said it could be an accident,” she told the media.

Dr Pornthip concluded that the actor strangled himself while performing autoerotic asphyxiation, in order to enhance sexual satisfaction.

Until today, the police have yet to announce a final conclusion on the Carradine case.

She may have performed more than 10,000 autopsies over the years but her biggest challenge probably was the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, which hit the west coast of Thailand and claimed over 5,000 lives.

She and her team headed immediately to Phang Na, the province with the most casualties. On the first day, she had to face 30 bodies in a temple. There was only time for a brief identification and the next day the
governor of the region asked her to go to another place, where six or seven hundred bodies were brought to a temple.

Currently, Dr Pornthip works in the deep south of the kingdom, where insurgent violence has killed over 3,000 people over the last five years.

Armed assaults and roadside bomb attacks are almost a daily occurrence. She and her team are trying now to find out who are behind the killings.

She is now the director of Central Institute of Forensic Science under the Ministry of Justice. In 2003, she was given the the honorary title of “Khunying”, the Thai equivalent to Dame.