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Ban Bo, Thailand: No one in Thanchanok Donhomla’s family quite remembers when or why she came to use the nickname “Cake”.
They do know, though, that she had grown weary of her father’s original, playful designation.
“I called her Dukdik,” said Thongchai Donhomla, smiling at the memory. It means something akin to restless wriggler.
“She complained it sounded like the name of a puppy”.
So Cake it was.
In the painful fortnight since her fateful meeting with a slow-talking, slow-moving Australian near Pattaya, in Thailand, the name has travelled around the world as a symbol of disadvantage and the symbiotic depths of a rampant, unregulated sex scene cruised by foreign men.
While these might be true, those who knew Cake best will remember her differently.
We spent an evening and morning recently with her extended family and villagers in the ordinary, small Thai town of Ban Bo, about 600 kilometres north-east of the long grass and rail tracks where 17-year-old Cake’s small body was found in a suitcase.
They were warm, welcoming – trying to offer us dinner despite having little to share – and eager to speak.
As any father would be, Thongchai was troubled by the police report stating his daughter and her accused killer, Simon Peter Carman, “agreed to engage in sexual services” after meeting at 3am near Jomtien Beach on June 25.
She had gone to Pattaya excitedly on June 16 on a holiday to “see the beach”, Thongchai told us, and had promised to return soon. She called as soon as she arrived to let him know she had made it.
Thongchai raced to Pattaya when told his daughter was missing. During the journey, he got the devastating news she had been found dead.
According to investigators, Carman, 45, has claimed self-defence. Thai media reported the pair argued over the equivalent of just $20.
It is clear in Ban Bo that Cake was very much loved; a dutiful teenager who looked after her great-aunts and baby cousin, Wayu, for whom she had promised to bring home clothes from Pattaya – the big city.
Sometimes, to help her family make expenses, she washed people’s dishes, Thongchai said.
If she had any burning personal ambitions, she kept them to herself.
Cake was also lonely. A victim of school bullying and with few friends, she spent long stretches in her room, a boxy chamber with the window to Thongchai’s room plastered over for privacy.
Still in the corner, having escaped cremation alongside her body like her other worldly possessions, stood a ring light for making social media videos, and, poignantly, a battered old photo album. Cake would sometimes bring it out and have Thongchai go through the faces and names, he said.
She liked to wear make-up and nice dresses. Her dad smiles about how, when he teased her about her clothing, she would call him a “dinosaur”.
If not for the circumstance of birth and geography, Cake might have been any teenager, anywhere.
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