A room service employee knocked on the door of suite 502 at the Grand Hyatt Erawan in Bangkok at 2:00 p.m. on Monday, July 15. He was carrying a cart full of local dishes, tea, and coffee. The person who opened the door was a woman named Chong Sherine, 56 years old, who was alone in the room at that time. The waiter offered to prepare tea, but Chong, who seemed very nervous according to the worker, did not let him in.
Minutes later, security cameras captured that between 2:03 and 2:17 p.m., five other guests started arriving at the room who were part of a group of tourists that had checked into the hotel the day before, booking five rooms. That recording is the last time they were seen alive.
Thai police suspect that Chong, an American of Vietnamese origin, poisoned the other five people with cyanide in the room of this luxurious hotel in downtown Bangkok before committing suicide.
On Tuesday, around 4:00 p.m., a couple of hotel employees knocked on the door of suite 502. From the reception, they had tried to contact the guests, four Vietnamese citizens and two Americans, earlier. They tried calling their rooms, but no one answered. As the check-out time had passed, the management ordered a check to see if everything was okay.
No one opened the suite, which was locked from the inside. The employees, suspecting that someone was inside and something strange was happening, decided to enter through a back door. That's when they found the six corpses, three men and three women. Four bodies were lying on the living room floor, and the other two in the bedroom. Their ages ranged from 37 to 56 years old.
The police were certain from the beginning that it was a case of poisoning. On Wednesday, Teeradej Thamsuthee, the head of the Bangkok police team investigating the incident, revealed that after examining the bodies, the forensic team found cyanide in the blood of the six deceased individuals. Thamsuthee added that traces of cyanide were also found in the teapot and the six half-filled cups in the room.
"We are convinced that one of the six people found dead committed this crime," later pointed out Noppasin Punsawat, deputy police chief of Bangkok. Shortly after this statement, Thai investigators revealed the name of their main suspect: Chong Sherine, the woman who received the food in room 502.
Thai and Vietnamese media quickly suggested that Chong used cyanide to poison herself and her other five companions due to significant debts accumulated related to an investment in a hospital in Japan. According to unofficial reports, Chong had convinced some of the victims to invest in a failed project that resulted in losses of around 279,652 dollars.
Thai police confirmed that the main motive they are considering for the crime is a huge debt owed by one of the deceased individuals, but they have not publicly disclosed any names yet.
From Vietnam, it was mentioned that two of the victims, Thi Nguyen Phuong and Hong Pham Thanh, a married couple who ran a successful road construction company, had invested a significant amount of money in Chong's project, as well as another deceased individual, a popular makeup artist and stylist named Dinh Tran Phu.
Investigators believe that the Vietnamese individuals had been dead for between 12 and 24 hours when their bodies were found by the hotel employees. "The victims' lips and nails turned dark purple, indicating a lack of oxygen, while their internal organs had turned blood red, another sign of cyanide poisoning," stated the forensic report.
The deceased had booked four rooms on the seventh floor and one on the fifth floor of this luxury hotel in Bangkok's commercial district. What initially puzzled the police was that the reservation was made for seven people, while there were six bodies in the suite. That seventh name was identified yesterday afternoon as the younger sister of one of the victims, who was not involved in the incident as she had left Thailand the previous week.