A British man was taken into police custody at a house in Nong Bua sub-district of Kanchanaburi province on suspicion that he might be responsible for the mysterious death of his Thai wife in England about 20 years ago.
The suspect, 62-year-old David Stuart Armitage, is currently being held at the Immigration Bureau detention centre in Bangkok, after his residence visa was revoked by immigration police pending the extradition process.
Armitage married Lamduan Seekanya in Thailand in 1991, before the couple moved to settle in Britain.
Lamduan’s body was found, wearing a jeans and a pair of socks, floating in a stream at Sell Gill Holes, a potholing area in Yorkshire, by a group of five mountain climbers in 2004, who alerted the local police.
Forensic experts said she could have died up to three weeks before her body was found.
They could not identify the body because no one had reported anyone missing who fitted her description, but thought that she was an Asian woman of Thai, Vietnamese, Laotian or Indonesian extraction. A gold ring, which had been made in Bangkok, was found on a finger of her left hand.
Police explained why the victim was only partially clothed, saying that she might have experienced paradoxical undressing syndrome while suffering hypothermia.
Police recreated an image of her face and sent it to several Asian embassies in the UK, hoping that they could help identify the body through their domestic police, but to no avail.
An inquiry was launched in 2007, but there was no evidence to suggest that she died from drowning or that he was assaulted. The case was then declared a cold case and named “Lady of the Hills”.
On January 22, 2019, a Thai family in Thailand claimed that the victim could be Lamduan Seekanya, who was married to Armitage, and that they had lost contact with her in 2004.
In March the same year, Yorkshire police said that they could confirm the victim’s identity, using DNA samples obtained from her family in Thailand.
The British tabloid, The Sun, managed to interview Armitage in 2020 in Kanchanaburi, but he categorically denied having anything to do with her death and complained that he had been treated as if he were a criminal suspect.
He claimed that he met Lamduan in 1990, while he was working as an English-language teacher in Chiang Mai. The couple married and moved to Portsmouth in southern England the following year.
Lamduan worked in a restaurant, while her husband taught at a college. Her health began to deteriorate and the couple experienced financial problems. In her letters sent to her home in Thailand, she said she wanted to return, but was afraid that she might lose custody of her children. She had one child from previous marriage and two with Armitage.
