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Ladies Corsets Biography
When I heard that two young, British visitors to Thailand —David Miller and Hannah Witheridge — had been found bludgeoned to death with an agricultural hoe last month, I thought back to the most chilling moment in my life, 32 years ago.
Two days earlier, my adventurous, attractive, 27-year-old younger sister Serena had flown out to Thailand, intending to cross over into Burma — in those days the only way one could enter that mysterious country, which was almost wholly cut off from the world.
I was leaving my house in Somerset to post a letter when I heard the phone ring. Normally, I might have carried on my way, but an inner voice said: ‘Keep calm, this call is going to change your life.’
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Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on FacebookIt was my mother in Dorset, scarcely able to speak, saying that she was handing me over to a policeman. ‘I’m afraid I have to give you some very bad news,’ he said. ‘Your sister is dead.’ Unthinkingly, my immediate response was to say, ‘I know that.’
It was only six years since my other sister, Joanna, a devoted mother-of-three, had out-of-the-blue become plunged into a suicidal depression and hanged herself. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m talking about your sister in Thailand. I’m afraid she’s been murdered.’
I immediately rushed to be with my parents, who had recently retired to an old rectory in Dorset, after 27 years running a successful girls’ prep school nearby, where I and my sisters had grown up.
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Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on FacebookTo lose a second daughter like this was an almost unimaginable blow, leaving them utterly devastated.
Over the next 24 hours, we pieced together what had happened. After a happy reunion with old friends in Bangkok, it seemed my sister had decided to head north to the Burmese frontier on local buses.
Having typically done her homework, she intended to stop halfway to visit a notable, deserted, Buddhist monastery seven miles out in the countryside from a small town. She had asked the local taxi drivers whether any of them spoke English. One who did agreed to take her to the temple.
A few hours later, he returned to tell the police that, while there, they had been attacked by ‘bandits who came out of the trees’ and that my sister was dead. She had probably been sexually assaulted.
The police took the driver to the spot, where they found my sister’s body horribly battered with a nearby ‘agricultural implement’. So suspicious was the way he stammered out his story that they charged him with murder — his name, ironically, was Bandit — but let him out on bail.
The next few days passed in a surreal blur. Told that my sister had to be formally identified, I was asked to fly out to do so.
But a friend of my parents, a former ambassador to Thailand, strongly advised against it. The sight of her mangled remains, kept unrefrigerated for more than a week, he said, would not be a good last memory of my sister. Instead, she was identified from dental records.
As we rang round my sister’s wide circle of friends, we were amazed to learn how many of them she had visited in her last days in England, almost as if she knew she might be seeing them for the last time.
Even more amazing was to find on the desk of her London flat a four-page document beginning: ‘If anything should happen to me when I am in Thailand’. It then set out exactly who she wished to inherit all her belongings.
At the end, she said she did not wish to be buried. ‘Just put my body on a bonfire,’ she had written, before telling us what she wanted done with her ashes. It was an extraordinary message to have been left by a young girl before going on holiday.
Always cheerful and full of energy, Serena had seemed so full of life, with everything going for her.
Her entry into the world 27 years earlier could scarcely have been more dramatic. She was born by the light of a hurricane lamp, in the middle of a violent thunderstorm, in my parents’ bedroom, only a few feet from a dormitory full of 13-year-old girls.
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Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on FacebookJoanna had playfully called our new sister ‘Clytemnestra’, after the tragic Greek heroine, and ‘Cly’ she was to remain to her family and friends for the rest of her life.
At university, she showed herself to be a gifted historical researcher, but she went on to spend two years working for the International Atomic Energy Authority in Vienna. An insatiable traveller, she had several times driven alone behind the Iron Curtain around Eastern Europe.
Back in London, she enjoyed welcoming her ever-widening circle of friends to dinner parties in her little flat, while for two years she worked as an expert researcher on the official biography of the former prime minister Harold Macmillan. She had lately been doing the same for the historian Robert Rhodes James on his life of Macmillan’s predecessor Anthony Eden.
Out in Thailand, we had found a splendid ally in the British vice-consul in Bangkok, William Scott.
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