29 Aug 2021
The Cold Deep Sleep
The Cold Deep Sleep: A Fresh Look at the Murder of Charles E. Ditlefsen and the Crimes of Herbert Craig La Fon
The first write-up of this story I did in Jan. 2021 can be found here: https://truecrimethailand.substack.com/p/the-cold-deep-sleep-charles-e-ditlefsen
It has links, sources, photos, and more.
A murder-mystery for the ages landed in the laps of Thailand's expats in 2016: a frozen chopped up body; passport forgery gangs; and a man who claimed he was CIA.
As sordid details leaked to the press — crime scene photos of a decapitated head on Stickboy Bangkok’s site, even — from late September into early October, the sands of the story kept shifting so much that it was hard to tell truth from fiction.
Arm-chair sleuths hit the forums hard. ThaiVisa and TeakDoor lit up with comments from forum warriors who did a couple Googles and thought they’d cracked the case. Well, at least they were more competent than the BiB, am I right?
The story had it all. A frozen chopped up body of a California publishing exec. An FBI fugitive on the lam for nearly 4 decades who claimed to be CIA. A shootout with police. Truth serum, lots of meth, and fake passports that tied back to known terrorists working with Al Qaeda.
But around mid-October 2016, the story blinked out of existence. Nothing but radio silence from both the Thai and English language press until December 2017 when the main suspect was sentenced to 43 years in Thai jail for concealing a corpse, weapons charges, narcotics, and fraud
The story has sat since then in a cold deep sleep.
It’s been over 3 years since any life’s been given to the story.
After writing the stories of two Thai serial killers who liked to chop up their victims and send them down the water’s deep, a reader asked me to write this.
What I found has — and I say this with a dead straight face — given me chills.
Everything you thought you knew about the 2016 case of Charles E. Ditlefsen, the victim, and Herbert Craig La Fon, the man who concealed the body? Throw it out the window.
If you’ve got the balls, read on. It’s a doozy, clocking in at 15,000 words.
I pored over 100 sources to get the meat of the story — all the press; court records; home sales; archived website captures; forum and Facebook comments; and old magazine advertisements.
I establish timelines, I explore motivations, I separate the truth from the fact in this stunning mystery.
After you’re done, you won’t be able to think about this case the same way again.
