THE KNOWN UNNKOWNS - TRANSCRIPT
Haing Ngor's life story vibes like a Greek tragedy.
Listeners are familiar with it now. Our hero was a doctor with a fiance he adored who loses everything. His young family, his country, and the life he expected to live unexpectedly. Cast in a Hollywood film, he soars to global fame, finding new purpose as an actor and a humanitarian, only to be gunned down outside his home.
It's fused with layers of irony. This survivor of the Khmer Rouge channels his own experience for his role in the killing fields, exposing that revolution for the genocidal delusion that it was only to be killed in the U.S. a country that's meant to be safe. Convicted for the crime were three teenagers from an Asian gang, two of them the children of Khmer Rouge survivors. That's probably why so many people are drawn to Ngor's story. It's primal, elemental.
That brings us to the known unknowns. So much of Ngor's known story consists of lingering questions like, did the Khmer Rouge kill him? That's perfectly valid to ask, but like most theories about his murder, it's unproven. So we're left with a sense of mystery.
The known unknowns, I've realized, are what this season of my podcast has been all about. It's my take on the material we frankly just had to plow through and the suspects we had to eliminate in order to advance the investigation.
This is the last episode of season two's investigative arc, but I'm going to release a bonus episode within the next few weeks. In this episode, I'll be going over what we know. My name is Patricia Nunan, and this is who killed Haing Ngor.
TEXT: There's one defining trait to every Greek tragic hero. He or she always has a fatal flaw. In Haing Ngor's case, it's a classic hubris. Ngor had a real arrogant streak. It's not entirely who he was, but the people who loved him told him it was getting in his way.
MPN: So would you call that arrogance?.
CC: Oh, highly arrogant. Highly arrogant.
ROGER WARNER: I do think he used up all his nine lives. That was the first thing I thought of when I heard he died.
Let's recap where the investigation has taken us so far. We know that the Los Angeles police narrative about the crime simply makes no sense.
MPN: So right now we're at the what we believe was Dr. Ngor's parking spot, for one thing, a brick wall near the top of a long hill. It's just the angle. This wall, this wall that blocks view ….
The witnesses were blocked from seeing what they claim to have seen. It's something jurors would have noticed if they'd been allowed to visit.
Police provided no evidence to support their charges against Jason Chan, Indra Lim and Tak Sun Tan, then gang members with the Oriental LaZy Boys.
The prosecution said Ngor was killed in a mugging when he put up a fight for his gold chain and pendant. But the police found no murder weapon, no fingerprints, no DNA to connect the defendants to the crime scene. They never found the allegedly missing necklace. Yet they sent three teenagers to jail for decades for a crime that the Innocence center and I are extremely confident they did not commit.
SEMANCHIK: According to Eight witnesses said they heard a four cylinder car likely loaded with a couple of people fleeing up the hill, revving at a like super loud as you. A possible getaway car chugging its way up the last part of the steep hill.
That a neighborhood child told police about was apparently never investigated. Nor was the strange Asian man who appeared at the crime scene knocking on doors and saying he was looking for his mother. The stakes in this case remain painfully real. Jason Chan, the last of the convicted trio to remain in prison, won parole in 2024. Instead of being released in January 2025, he was swooped up by ICE.
JASON CHAN: I don't know what's going to happen next. I have no clue what to expect at a detention center. I hope I'll be okay.
The day this episode drops marks the 300th day that Chan's been in ICE detention.
You probably remember that Roger Warner is the co author of Ngor's memoir, A Cambodian Odyssey. Our conversation and the material he shared of his original interviews with Ngor give us some insight into the enormity of the trauma that Ngor carried. That's from both physical torture and the loss of his wife and their unborn child.
ROGER WARNER: I guess losing her when she was pregnant and trying to have a child was, you know, a kind of torture for him. And how it compared with the actual physical tortures he went through under the Khmer Rouge, I cannot say. However, it really hurt him.
We can only speculate how badly his nervous system was fried or how triggered Ngor was as he went through daily life and how unresolved trauma shaped his decisions. But we do know how intensely he compartmentalized people.
I've resisted describing Ngor as a Jekyll and Hyde figure. If you actually look up that story, Dr. Jekyll was a scientist obsessed with the idea that every person has a shadow side. So he drinks a potion, turning himself into his own alter ego, Mr. Hyde, who was a violent, murderous monster.
That analogy is simply unfair to Ngor. He was never a violent man, but you get where I'm going with that. There are exceptions, but overall Ngor gravitated towards Westerners, his fellow country people, Khmers. He often treated them with contempt.
ROGER WARNER: There were Khmer of high station who rather quickly classified him as trash.
Perhaps the most significant known unknown about Ngor is the conspiracy theory that the Khmer Rouge assassinated him in Los Angeles because of his role in the killing fields. When you put Ngor's murder in the larger historical context and understand just how close the Khmer Rouge movement was to collapse, the theory just doesn't hold up.
NIC DUNLOP: If that was under the orders of Pol Pot, you'd wonder, well, why?
The endurance of that conspiracy theory does make sense though, when you consider the unprocessed trauma carried by those in the Cambodian American.
Let's take a brief break from the recap. Nate Thayer was the Cambodian correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review. He knew Ngor from his visits to the Thai Cambodian border in the late 1980s before the peace deal was signed. Thayer was one of the experts who discounted the Khmer Rouge conspiracy theory. This audio is from an interview that Thayer did with Frank from the Innocence Center. Corruption by Cambodian leaders was among the issues that just pissed Ngor off.
NATE THAYER: He was critical, he was correct, but he had a big fucking mouth for a Cambodian. He thought he was invulnerable really. I mean he was very UN Cambodian. How vocal he was?
MPN: Was he self destructive? Frank asks.
NATE THAYER: Probably. psychologically he was a very angry guy.
Something else we know Ngor had an absolute rollercoaster financial life.
CASELLA: and I think he did have guilt. He talked about this sort of sense that people might feel guilty because they had survived and he wanted people to feel that they had a role in rebuilding their country.
His survivor's guilt saw him giving away significant sums of money to humanitarian causes in the early 1990s as Cambodia opened up to the world.
But Ngor's overall attempts to invest in Cambodia's Wild west compassion fad era were fraught with difficulties. Like the two year feud with the director of an orphanage. So squatting on his property.
Or the sawmill he was trying to get off the ground. Despite having a high ranking brother within the so called timber mafia, he spent years trying to make that happen.
Ngor was juggling so much, friends said he just stretched himself too thin.
SUSAN WALKER: Dr. Haing was I think a very bad manager of his personal finances and I just felt he needed someone to manage him.
Ngor continued to get some Hollywood roles and even had a big financial payout thanks to an IBM commercial in which he played a Buddhist monk that his agents told us about. But we also know that Ngor lived with death threats that were so consistent. His friend CC said he hated answering the phone.
CC: He said, I don't know how long I last here because there's so many threats against me. I said, why you are here if so many threats? He said, I don't know, but I want to be here.
And there's a Cambodian equivalent to what Brits and Australians call Tall Poppy syndrome,
DOROTHY CHOW: if you're familiar with the concept of crabs in a bucket, where if one crab tries to get up, the other crabs are going to try to keep him down and everybody stays down.
We also know that Ngor stood, both socially and professionally, on the periphery of powerful networks run by Prime Minister Hun Sen and other senior figures in the Cambodian People's Party, the cpp. But he never fully joined them.
As I've mentioned throughout the season, Ngor granted himself a whole lot of slack when it came to his romantic life and his sex life with women. But he clearly had a moral compass, especially when it came to Cambodians. He had really high standards for how he expected others to behave.
It's an element of hubris in Greek mythology to think that you're equal with the gods.
Here's Thayer again. As a journalist, he was famous for embedding himself with various factions in Cambodia's four way civil war. Ngor hated communism, but even the other factions disappointed him.
NATE THAYER: When this Paris Peace Agreement signed, all the guerrilla factions came back to the city. It was quite extraordinary having lived in the jungle with these guys for 10 years. All of a sudden and they all had guns and they were killing each other. All of a sudden they were sitting in the city and so there's people up to all kinds of no good, you know, trying to do bad things to other people. And the corruption was unbelievable. So all these guys who were so called non communist guerrillas, you know, once they got into town, they just sold out to the highest bidder and, and that pissed him off. So he was badmouthing then and I don't know who he went into business With. But that would be, that would be an interesting thing to look at.
I want to circle back to a story from the first episode of the first season. This is actually from the first interview I did in this project before I got truly absorbed by the investigation. My friend Andy Pendleton is a veteran aid worker. His resume spans multiple global crises from the past 40 years. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he worked on the Thai Cambodian border with UNBRO the United nations border relief operation. That's how he first met Ngor.
ANDY PENDLETON: But we had this idea. he was very vocal. He was a real advocate. And he was himself just sort of fed up with corrupt leaders, fed up with all this, and he wanted to make a difference. And he had a lot of brass, and so I didn't know he had that much brass.
It was 1988. Ngor had come to visit site two, which is a refugee camp where Pendleton was working.
ANDY PENDLETON: We invited him to speak on Human Rights Day in Site two. And he got up there on a microphone and he let everybody have it. The last targets were the Khmer leaders of the camp itself. He blasted them. And after he was finished with them and their corruption and their selfishness and everything else, he was just about done. And so people came to me and said, look, you better get him out the back way, man. This guy just put himself in a lot of heat here.
A few years later, Pendleton was in Phnom Penh working with a UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Ngor dropped in on him one day in the office.
ANDY PENDLETON: He wanted me to brief him on the refugee situation. He wanted to know about the people in situ and where they had gone. And so we pulled out some maps, some resettlement pattern maps. We looked at the demographics and stuff, and I didn't have a whole lot of time that day, but I just pushed it all to the side and talked with him, and he really appreciated it.
Pendleton is an institution among aid workers. He's fluent in both Thai and Khmer, and he knew the Cambodian scene pretty damn well.
ANDY PENDLETON: The next time I saw him was in the Royal Phnom Penh Hotel. That's when I saw him with the diamonds and jewelry around. A lot of very wealthy looking Chinese people.
The other people who knew the Cambodian scene and who had a glimpse into Ngor's life all had the same sense his murder had something to do with money.
KOJI OKADA: So we heard it was issues among the Cambodian Americans and it was something related to money.
CC: His debt about under US$50,000 back then. I said, oh, that's a lot of money. And she said, I don't know. How can I find the money to repay that? Because every money that he borrowed under my name.
MPN: he borrowed money under her name. And then when he died, she was left with debt?
CC : That's right. That's what she told me.
Besides that loan from his girlfriend, Ngor had borrowed another $33,000 from American friends in 1995. It's in the probate documents. And now here's a spoiler. It's a complicated story, but when it was finally settled, Ngor's estate was insolvent.
MPN: And because I'm chasing up leads. Can you tell me what were the rumors that you heard about the murder.
ANDY PENDLETON: Went over his head. I saw him a couple times in Phnom Penh. Had a lot of gold and diamonds and stuff on. I don't know. It's up to him. But, you know, I think that he had. He had such passion to make a difference, and he didn't care almost if he put his life at risk to do so. But when he came into Phnom Penh, I saw the people he was hanging around with. They all looked like they were loaded. And we were saying they were hearing, hey, he's just way over his head now. He made good money, but he got into investments and he borrowed money. And we heard that the Chinese mafia knocked him off.
Earlier in the season, I explained that I admired Haing Ngor. It's one of the reasons I'm motivated to do this podcast. You may be wondering that with all I've learned, if I still do, the answer is yes.
Through "The Killing Fields," Haing Ngor stepped up and embodied what Cambodia needed to begin to move on from the crimes against humanity inflicted by the Khmer Rouge. It's an injustice to the three innocent young men that Ngor's real killers have never been caught, and it's an injustice to his memory.
On top of that, as a Cambodia head, this has been a phenomenally interesting case to investigate.
As I've said repeatedly, Cambodia was the wild, wild West. What amazes me now is that as a journalist, is that during the UN peacekeeping mission called UNTAC, we were obsessed with UNTAC. It was a classic 1990s blueprint for democracy and a free market economy that the UN has imposed on nearly every country it's intervened recently. We were obsessed with that. We were fixated on the Khmer Rouge decision to drop out of the peace plan, the outbreaks of violence and political jostling both before and after the 1993 elections. We were obsessed with the success of the UN mission itself. After all, that was a story.
But this investigation has had me looking at the negative space areas outside the UNTACT lens.
Here's the question you have to ask yourself about Ngor. If he was murdered for reasons linked to his life in Cambodia. Then who there in the late 1990s had the capacity to carry out a killing in Los Angeles? Prime Minister Hun Sen could do it, but as I said, it looks like he had a soft spot for Ngor. Plus he had a proven track record of going after his enemies inside Cambodia, where Ngor was already spending a lot of time.
You see, when Cambodia threw open its doors, it wasn't just do gooders and two bit vulture capitalists who came in. Pendleton just said it. The Chinese mafia showed up. Transnational organized criminal groups in Asia these are referred to as triads and it looks like plenty of triads came to town.
That's what we're getting into in Season three. My name is Patricia Nunan and this is who killed Haing Ngor.
A few quick notes at the start of the season. I mentioned a possible confrontation with the suspect. I still want to do that, but it's premature. This remains a live investigation, but I promise there won't be as long a wait between seasons. This time, remember, there's going to be one more bonus episode that I put out in the next few weeks.
If you knew Ngor or have information you'd like to add to the investigation, please reach out at whokilledHaing Ngormail.com I'm on Telegram as MP Nunan. If you'd like to support the investigation, there's a donation button on my webpage. WhokilledHaing Ngor.com thank you for your support and thank you for listening.
Old friends - the transcript
In the first season of my podcast, I ended each episode with a request:
If you knew Haing Ngor personally and would like to contribute – even just an interesting anecdote - please get in touch. If you know any details about his murder you think are relevant, please get in touch.
Finally, someone did. And she was a goldmine.
My name is Patricia Nunan – and this is Who Killed Haing Ngor.
CC: He very ambitious. Especially he said to my father and my brother said, Look, my aim is my life. If I like somebody to address me as “doctor,” so I do absolutely anything to get the title “doctor” in front of my name.
This is CC. She’s asked me not to use her name; just her initials. She was born and raised in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. She was about 18 when the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975, and her life was upended.
A quick note: there are moments when some of my listeners might find CC’s accent a little bit tricky. But this is a very important g interview – it’s quite revealing about the last year of Ngor’s life. So I’m posting a transcript this on the “Who Killed Haing Ngor” webpage.
CC lives in Australia now. It was actually her daughter who first reached out - I’m going to call her Jane. “The Killing Fields” is such an important movie, that many Cambodians or people of Khmer heritage watch it every year, around January 7th. That’s the anniversary of when the Khmer Rouge were overthrown, in 1979.
After Jane’s rewatch, she came across my podcast. She emailed me about her “Uncle Haing,” whom she had met on a visit to Cambodia when she was about 12. We realized very quickly that her mom could be helpful to my investigation. CC’s friendship with Ngor goes back to adolescence.
In case you didn’t know? Jackfruit is a tropical fruit known for its rough exterior.
MPN: What were some nicknames you had?
CC: Well, just. I'm just being honest with you - because of his appearance, especially his facial appearance, because he have the residue mark of the pimples, and a very bad mark, yes. And we call him “jackfruit.”
MPN: Oh, no, that's so mean.
CC: It's so mean. And we call him that. We call him that? Yes, we call him. At first, he kind of growled at us. But he got used to it.
MPN: So what kind of guy was he?
CC: He’s a loudmouth, I must say. He liked to be heard.
Ngor dated CC’s older sister, toward the end of high school and into his medical school. Outside the US, med school often starts right after high school – during what Americans would call “undergrad.” CC’s sister eventually broke up with him. But Ngor remained close with the entire family.
Ngor was from Takeo province. In Phnom Penh, CC’s mother just about adopted him. That’s even after he started dating someone new. He used to get around town by motorbike. It was a white Vespa.
CC: He always respect[ed] my mother. Because when he was in medical school, he [was] always on his Vespa, come to my house, have lunch there, lie in the hammock under the tree there, study whatever he need to study. He eat, he drink and study there and go back to school at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. So the gap from 12 to 2, mostly he was there. We see him at least three times a week.
Then, in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over, and Cambodia turned itself inside out. CC was one of nine children in her nuclear family; part of a generation with more than a dozen cousins. She lost virtually everyone.
The Khmer Rouge were overthrown in 1979, and CC escaped to a refugee camp. She was now in her early 20’s. Her friends urged her to marry. They knew a guy, who seemed nice - and CC needed to team up with someone if she was going to survive. So she married him.
Fortunately, CC’s husband was a decent man. They were eventually resettled in Australia, and had three children. Years went by. One day, CC picked up a magazine, called “TV Week.”
CC: And I saw that when they making “The Killing Fields,” I saw his picture, maybe 1984, 85. And I saw. I said, “Oh.” I said to my husband, I said, “I know this man. That's Ngao Haing. I know him.” Whoever cast him, he cast the right person because that man is just everything - he can do anything.
You probably noticed – CC just pronounced Haing Ngor’s name correctly, the way Cambodians do – Ngao Haing. I’ve been using the Westernized version.
A few years later, a local charity held a screening of “The Killing Fields,” followed by a reception. Every Cambodian CC knew went to see it. Ngor was there.
CC: And when I went there, I saw him, and I walked to him. And when he saw me, he walked straight to me with his arms open - and he said, “Where's Mom?”
MPN: Oh, that's so lovely.
CC got up from our Zoom call and went to get some tissues.
CC: He said, Where's Mum? I said, Mum gone. And he got tears in his eyes and he hugged me.
[BREAK]
I wanted to share CC’s story with you for a couple of reasons. Being a movie star helped reunite Ngor with lost friends and family. And Ngor was capable of tremendous warmth. Others remember an angry, outspoken man.
CC knew them both. After all, they went so far back, she used to tease him about his acne.
In 1994, CC’s husband died. The following year, she and her children took his ashes home to Cambodia. CC’s daughter Jane was around 12, so for her and her siblings, Australian kids, it was something of a “roots” tour.
I want to emphasize the date. This trip happened in July 1995 – 7 months before Ngor was killed. During that visit, which lasted about two-three weeks, CC and her kids hung out with him nearly the entire time.
[BREAK]
MARION ROSENBERG: I remember him being very excited, very charming, always. He always used to say, no matter what time of day, what day it was, whatever it was, that his first words were always, “I'm so busy. I'm busy, busy.” “Busy, busy – that’s what he always used to say.
This is Marion Rosenberg. She’s another old friend of Ngor’s. She was his film and television agent in Los Angeles. She worked at the Lantz office, before opening up her own agency, the Marion Rosenberg Office. I interviewed her and her former assistant Greg Maher together over Zoom.
Marion ROSENBERG: : I received a phone call one morning from a very dear friend of mine, David Puttnam, who was the producer of “The Killing Fields.” He called me from London to say that the Academy Award nominations have just been announced. And much to everybody's delight and surprise, Haing Ngor had been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor award. Haing had no representation. He didn't have an agent. So I immediately told David Puttnam that I would be delighted to represent him, help him through the Academy Awards, and then see if he had the possibility of an acting career in front of him. And indeed, he did.
After "The Killing Fields," Ngor had several more roles. “Heaven and Earth,” by Oliver Stone; “My Life,” with Michael Keaton. There were television roles on “Miami Vice,” and “Highway to Heaven,” and too many other credits to name. Here’s Greg Maher.
MAHER: He sort of got typecast into playing like the Vietnamese general or the colonel, so, and so or - I don't think it really really bothered him so much. It's just, I think, there weren't like a lot of those kind of roles. So when they came up, he clearly, you know, wanted to work and he just sort of did them.
As clients go, Ngor was pretty low maintenance.
MAHER: He never played like the movie star. He was just, just Haing, you know, he wanted, he wanted to do more work, he wanted to make some more money and, you know, support the stuff that he was trying to do back home.
There’s one job Ngor did, for which he really didn’t mind being stereotyped. He played a Buddhist monk. You can find it on YouTube, if you search “IBM 1995 television commercial - monks.” Ngor is the second monk who appears.
MAHER: I remember him being a little bit unnerved by the fact that he had to shave his head. But my recollection is it was – it was quite a bit of money - and that, I think, assuaged his doubt about having to shave.
MPN: Yeah, I found that on YouTube, actually. I can send you the link. He's one of many Buddhist monks and it's IBM and they're communicating telepathically. It's a joke about how how smart IBM is.
Greg MAHER: That’s right. I remember now. That’s good.
MPN: Yeah, I was able to find that on YouTube.
Marion ROSENBERG: Yeah, he was very well paid for that. And if I can get to my files downstairs, I could actually tell you what it was paid for that.
MPN: I would love to know those numbers, actually, because we have to look into his debt issues.
Greg MAHER: I think I can remember it was a million bucks.
MPN: He made a million bucks from one commercial?
Marion ROSENBERG: No way.
Greg MAHER: Yes, I think so. I think so. Wait till you go find that slip.
Marion ROSENBERG: Are you telling me we made $100,000 out of that commercial?
Greg MAHER: I think we did.
MPN: Wow, that's a lot of money. I'd shave my head for a million dollars.
For the record, $1 million in 1995 is $2.1 million today.
Unfortunately, Rosenberg wasn’t able to locate Ngor’s booking slips. But they both remember he earned a significant sum – so I’m incorporating into my understanding of Ngor’s financial picture. Even if it were half that -- $500 thousand then, or a million dollars now - or a quarter million, even -- the monk commercial represented a windfall.
Of course, no one knew it at the time. But playing a Buddhist monk in an IBM commercial was Ngor’s last ever acting job.
[BREAK]
Back in Cambodia -- the first thing Jane remembered about meeting her Uncle Haing? He often wore a cap, because he was growing out a buzzcut, from when he played the monk. I asked CC about it.
MPN: So that. That monks commercial - did he tell you how much he made from that?
CC: No, did not. He just said look - or said, or “You will see me dressed as a monk. I do the IBM commercial. IBM computer commercial.” I said, “Okay.”
The larger question of Ngor’s finances are among the many details I’ve been sifting through from the last couple of years of his life. In Cambodia, he had a lot of irons in the fire.
To reiterate, here’s a quick list of some of Ngor’s projects and investments.
Ngor helped founded at least two small ngo’s: “Children of Angkor,” to support childhood education, and “Aid to Displaced Persons,” for refugees.
He built at least two schools and he restored a road in his home province, projects for which he teamed up with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen. He restored at least one more school in the capital. He built a temple, and a small bridge. He bought properties, like an apartment – along the river He bought the villa that he intended use for the Haing Ngor Foundation. That’s the property that caused the feud with another humanitarian, that I went over my “Compassion Fad” episode.
He opened a small trucking company. He bought saw mill – so he could dive into Cambodia’s forestry sector. And according to CC, he also had a stake in two small hotels.
CC deliberately chose not to ask Ngor about his investments. She didn’t want to know any details. She knew he had business partners from Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. She does not know any names.
One thing she knew for sure, though? Ngor was skating on thin ice.
CC: But I should say he was not a popular man back there.
MPN: He was not. Why?
CC : Wherever he goes, there always the gun under his seat.
MPN: I'm sorry, say again? He had a gun?
CC: Under his car seat.
MPN: He was afraid for his life?
CC: Yes.
MPN: This is in ‘95?
CC: He said sometime he afraid to pick up the phone because there's so many threat. I said, “Oh.” I said, “Look, it’s too much, [if you] can't stand [it,] get out of here. There's no reason to be here if you under threat all the time.”
CLIP: MPN. So who was threatening him?
CC: I don't know. But he said, because he said “I don't know how long I last here because there's so many threats against me.” I said, “Why you are here? If [there are] so many threats?” He said, “I don’t know. But I want to be here.”
CC’s point of view is significant, because as a Cambodian, she was sensitive to the cultural dynamics at play. It was why I was so keen to talk to her after Jane reached out.
Even thought she was trying not to, she actually knew some details about Ngor’s businesses and social circles. Like the lumber mill Ngor bought. He took CC and the kids out to the site, because it was along a river, so the kids could swim.
CC: No, there's not much there. There's a little thing. There's a bench there. There's a few logs there and everything. But it's not ready to operate. MPN: But were there machines there for working on the timber?
CC: Scarcely. I think one or two. One or two. That's why I said he never got [it] off the ground.
And that’s all she knew. But we’re coming back to the lumber mill soon.
[BREAK]
I want to take a break from my interview with CC to bring back Dorothy Chow. We met her in my second episode, the “Khmer Rouge Misdirect.” That’s when I debunked the conspiracy theory that the Khmer Rouge killed Haing Ngor.
Chow’s parents escaped the Khmer Rouge, and later resettled in northern California, where she was born. Her podcast, “Death in Cambodia - Life in America,” is about her father’s experience surviving the Khmer Rouge, and starting over again, in the States.
Chow has spearheaded support groups for people like her – the adult children of refugees. The goal is to help people understand their parents’ PTSD - to stem the tide of intergenerational trauma.
Chow’s too young to remember the murder of Haing Ngor. But her father remembered it well.
CHOW: Whatever the news outlets said, and whatever stories are being we're being told, he believed that it was somebody within the Cambodian community. There's this narrative within the Cambodian community that like, “We don't support each other, and we're always dragging each other down.” If you're familiar with the concept of crabs in a bucket, where if one crab tries to get up, the other crabs are going to try to keep him down, and everybody stays down. It's unfortunate, and it's something that the second generation is trying to change. But he very much believed that it was somebody within the Cambodian community who could not stand to watch one of their fellow Cambodians be so successful.
[BREAK]
Back in Cambodia – it’s July 1995 – seven months before Ngor’s murder. He kept a gun under the seat of his car. He was getting so many death threats, he hated answering the phone.
One thing the Innocence Center and I already knew was that Ngor was running with a very tough crowd.
Ngor’s brother is Chan Sarun. I’ve mentioned him before – he was the Director of Forestry – an extremely powerful post in a very dangerous economic sector.
Ngor had done development projects with Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Here’s something I didn’t know. Ngor’s had a mentor named Chea Sim. He was the president of the Cambodian People’s Party, the CPP, making him a top aide to Hun Sen.
Chea Sim had an adult daughter, who was single. And she had a big fat crush – on Ngor. It’s something CC teased him about.
CC: Everyone knew that one of Chea Sim’s daughter loves him, wants to be with him. And I teased him and said, “Hey, why not?” And he just growled at me and said, “Look, I'm not that stupid.”
“I’m not that stupid.” That’s stands out to me. Ngor had an opportunity to marry into the Cambodian elite. But to him, that would be dumb.
Ngor was a bundle of contradictions. That’s one thing this investigation is making clear.
His warmth alternated with abrasiveness. He lost his wife – and the love of his life - to the Khmer Rouge; a loss so painful he never got past it. Later, he didn’t have a problem with sleeping around.
Still – he had a strong moral code. He never evicted the orphanage squatting on his property, even though he had the law and powerful players on his side. That’s from the “Compassion Fad” episode.
Given the chance, some might leap at a marriage of convenience, to ascend to Cambodia’s most elite circles. Ngor seems to have known how toxic and dangerous that would be. To me, that’s important.
He didn’t pursue it. Instead, he put up with receiving a steady-stream of death threats on his phone.
[BREAK]
As Ngor’s friend Roger Warner, and now CC have both shared, Ngor could be an arrogant jerk – especially to Cambodians.
On trips to the provinces, where Ngor had projects, CC said ordinary Cambodians loved him, because “The Killing Fields” told their story so magnificently well. To them, he was a hero.
In addition to that “crabs in a bucket” dynamic, there was another issue at play. Cambodia had just opened up after decades of bloodshed and isolation. Tension often arose between Cambodians who came home after the peace deal was signed, and those who had stayed behind through the bitter years of civil war. This is not just about Ngor. This was widespread.
Roland Eng is a former Ambassador at Large for the Royal Government of Cambodia.
ROLAND ENG: And they introduce themselves like, you know, “I'm American-Cambodian.” So this is the mindset. You have to shift the mindset. Psychologically it’s very, very important. And it is understanding that those people who were not able to leave the country during the war have suffered during the whole period of instability in Cambodia. Yeah, they have resentment there. You left the country, You're a traitor. You're having a good life when we're suffering. This is a normal process. I mean, this is life. It's happening all around the country, all over the country.
When the Khmer Rouge were ousted – it was by Vietnam. They invaded in 1979 and occupied Cambodia for a decade.
In fact, it was communist Vietnam that installed the government run by Prime Minister Hun Sen, Chea Sim and to a lesser extent, Ngor’s brother, Chan Sarun. These are big names in the Cambodian People’s Party – the CPP, which came to power after the Khmer Rouge.
These are the people Ngor associated with. And that makes perfect makes sense: Ngor came home and reconnected with his brother.
Now - the Khmer Rouge were obviously extremists. But for Chan Sarun and others in the CPP, there was a lingering belief that communism could be done right. Or at least, what was evolving into Vietnamese-style socialism.
Here’s what blows my mind: Ngor used to actually start conversations in which he openly dissed communism and praised capitalism, according to CC.
That made a lot of people angry, including his brother.
Here, CC’s doing an impression of Ngor.
CC: “I'm an American, I become American now.” And they’re just freshly out of the communis[m]. “I don't like communists, blah, blah, blah.” That's a blasé attitude. I said, you can't go there and broadcast that: “I'm from the capitalism.” I said to him, “You can’t be that blasé.”
MPN: So would you call that arrogance?
CC: Oh, too much - highly arrogant. Highly arrogant. Because he believed, deep down in his head, “I got American passport, I'm safe. That’s my protection.” I said, “No, it's not. It's not.”
Around this time, Ngor fell out with his brother, Chan Sarun.
CC: .They had a big fight. The one that you know, broadcast capitalism and the one broadcast the other thing. So they’re just pole[s] apart.
Chea Sim died in 2015. Prime Minister Hun Sen stepped aside in 2023, in favor of his son, Hun Manet, who is now prime minster. Hun Sen is now president of the Cambodian senate. Chan Sarun is retired but remains a prominent figure. Again, I promise – we’re coming back to them.
[BREAK]
So after all this, who does CC think killed Haing Ngor? Of course, she doesn’t know.
CC: He just traumatized by so many things. I think he got involved in so many things that out of his control. Because he think that his name is so big. He just spread himself so thin. That's how I see it. He believed that, “I'm the big guy now. I'm famous. The only Cambodian that got an Oscar.” That’s in his system. Big head - become very big head.
MPN: Because I'll tell you the one thing people ask me all the time is, if he died because of business issues in Cambodia, why wouldn't people kill him in Cambodia? Like - why was it in America?
CLIP: CC: It's too obvious. It’s too obvious. They can turn it into [a] political [issue]- and it can turn into something else. With ordinary people's sentiment toward him - that's why they don't want to do that. That's my opinion. I think that - all the people think that he's a hero. Over in the United States, it’s less likely to turn political.
Ngor’s enemies had to kill him in Los Angeles, because the popular uproar over the murder of this hero would requie action from the highest levels of government. In Cambodia, the killers would have to be caught. That’s CC’s take.
[BREAK].
CC’s daughter Jane told me how she still remembers coming home from school one day to find her mother crying. She had heard the news that Ngor was dead. He was killed February 25, 1996 – again, seven months after CC took her family to Cambodia.
In the chaos and confusion surrounding his death, CC managed to connect with a girlfriend of Ngor’s in Phnom Penh. CC had not met her on her trip the previous July. But she was trying to get a sense of what happened, and someone gave her this woman’s phone number.
This girlfriend served as Ngor’s administrative assistant. And she wanted to marry him.
CC: She said to me that, “I really want to have a child with him, but him - because he's a doctor, he knows the way not to have a child with me.” That what she said to me. And “I really want to marry him, but he's just, you know, kind of slippery. He doesn't want that to happen.”
She even - what she told me: she borrowed money to prop up his business. That what she told me. I said, I asked her, I said, “If you don't mind, can you tell me how much?” She said, his debt about … under US$50,000 back then. I said, “Oh, that's a lot of money.” And she said, “I don't know, how can I find the money to repay that? Because every money that he borrowed [was] under my name.”
MPN: He borrowed money under her name. And then when he died, she was left with debt?
CC: That's right. That's what she told me.
Fifty thousand dollars in 1995 is over $105 thousand dollars today.
I know the woman CC’s talking about. She disappeared and was at one point presumed dead by Ngor’s family –they tried to find her when they were sorting out probate.
But this woman managed to leave Cambodia, and she lives in the United States. In the nearly 30 years since Ngor’s death, I was the first to let CC know.
CC: Oh, that's good. I'm so glad. I'm so pleased to know that. Because she, she did everything for him and she was hoping she can go to live in the United States. If she could go, good on her. Good on her.
I’ve reached to this woman, to ask if she’d participate in this podcast, but I have never gotten a response. Frank, from the Innocence Center, tracked her down early in their investigation. They chatted for a few minutes. But when the subject turned to Ngor, suddenly - she didn’t speak English.
[BREAK]
For the record, neither Marion Rosenberg and Greg Maher bought the police narrative that Ngor was killed in a botched robbery. It just seemed too convenient. I’ll come back to them in future episodes.
Now - let’s think back to the monks commercial, that Ngor did for IBM. It may have earned him as much as $1 million -- or $900 thousand, after his agents took their 10 percent. Even without an exact figure, both Rosenberg and Maher remember, it was a windfall.
This means in July 1995, when Ngor was still growing out his shaven head from the monks commercial, he was cash-rich. He had liquidity. That’s in stark contrast to 1994, in the midst of the orphanage dispute. That’s when he told journalist Emilia Casella he simply didn’t have the money to rent another space.
Then within seven months of his windfall, he was borrowing money in his girlfriend’s name. What on earth happened there?
In my next episode, we’ll dive into Ngor’s investment in the forestry sector – a decision a lot of people link to his death.
My name is Patricia Nunan, and this is Who Killed Haing Ngor?
If you’d like to reach out, I’m at whokilledhaingngor@gmail.com. If you knew Haing Ngor, please get in touch. I’m also on Telegram, as mpnunan
If you’d like to support the investigation, there’s a donation button on my webpage, at whokilledhaingngor dot-com. Also – I’m putting a transcript to this episode there, on the webpage.
Thank you for your support. And thank you for listening!
[ENDS]
Written by Jon Swain
Jon Swain generously sent copies of some of his clippings from 1975, from The Sunday Times.
The Sunday Times, March 2, 1975
by Jon Swain
The Sunday Times, April 13, 1975
by Jon Swain
Diary of a Doomed City. A 5 page spread published in The Sunday Times on May 11, 1975
Why Duch’s Quote Makes No Sense
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The Khmer Rouge seize control of Phnom Penh.
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The Khmer Rouge are overthrown by the Vietnamese military. Pol Pot and his top aides flee to Cambodia’s “Wild West” border with Thailand. Cvil war erupts.
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“The Killing Fields,” a Roland Joffe film starring Haing Ngor as “The New York Times” reporter Dith Pran is released.
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Haing Ngor wins the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Dith Pran.
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The Berlin Wall falls. The East-West stalemate that saw Cambodia used as a proxy-war for the big powers has crumbled. The international community turns its attention toward “fixing” long-neglected Cambodia.
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Cambodia’s four warring factions - including the Khmer Rouge - sign the Paris Peace Accords, ushering a massive United Nations peacekeeping mission into Cambodia.
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The Khmer Rouge pull out of the peace deal. This will eventually be seen as a gross strategic miscalculation on their part.
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The UN-supervised elections are hailed as a massive success.
Cambodia begins to form its new government. The only hitch? Incumbent Prime Minister Hun Sen refuses to step down. The UN cobbles together a compromise: election winner, Prince Norodom Ranariddh is the First Prime Minister; Hun Sen is the Second Prime Minister.
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United Nations peacekeepers withdraw from Cambodia, once again heralding their $2 billion mission a success.
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Haing Ngor is murdered in Los Angeles in what authorities call a robbery gone wrong.
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Second PM Hun Sen overthrows Prince Ranariddh in a coup-d’état.
Hun Sen overturned the results of the Cambodia’s first ever democratic election - and its a $2 billion price tag.
With compassion fatigue setting in, the UN, ASEAN, EU and the rest of the international community go through the motions of objecting. But ultimately - they collectively shrug.
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Approximate date of when Nic Dunlop finds Comrade Duch in Samlaut, Cambodia on the first of three reporting trips to the area.
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Kaing Guek Euv, also known as “Duch”, testifies before Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge tribunal that Pol Pot ordered the murder of Haing Ngor.
The Mysterious Ruom Ritt
Photo by MPN
Back in the ‘90’s in Phnom Penh, I used to earn extra money by translating Palace statements and other documents from French to English. Frequently, I was translating the words of Cambodia’s King Sihanouk.
King Sihanouk had one of those extraordinary - and tragic - 20th century lives, that can never possibly be replicated.
Chosen as a child by French colonial leaders to be a figurehead, his life is inextricably woven into Cambodia’s independence, the “Sideshow” period that saw Cambodia as collateral damage to the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge revolution, the years of civil war; and the UNTAC and Hun Sen eras. This is the best obituary of King Sihanouk, by my friend Kevin Barrington.
Translating all those Palace statements made me feel like I got to know King Sihanouk (who, by the way, abdicated the crown at one point and was for years “Prince” Sihanouk, til he later regained the crown, which he later abdicated again. A 20th century one-off.)
In the ‘90’s, the so-called figurehead king, who famously - and only purportedly - “reigned by did not rule,” genuinely was relevant to Cambodian politics. His opinion mattered — just not as much as he wanted it to.
Sihanouk was steadily being outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Hun Sen. The PM still had to kow-tow to the king to an extent - but Hun Sen knew he was winning the match.
So Sihanouik’s writing had a slight air of desperation: I’m the King, take me seriously. At the same time, his fatigue was evident. Reading between the lines, it was clear to me that this man, then in his 70’s, wanted to retire.
This brings us to Ruom Ritt.
Playing heed to this notion that the King was meant to be above politics, King Sihanouk invented a correspondence between himself and a childhood friend, Ruom Ritt, an ex-patriate Cambodian living in in the south of France.
Ruom Ritt would politely inquire about political goings-on in Cambodia, what the king thought of them, and what role the king thought the Palace should play.
It was bizarre to me even then. Summaries of these conversations between the King and Ruom Ritt were written in long-hand, in French, and faxed to news outlets, as part of the “BMD,” or le Bulletin Mensuel de Documentation (the Monthly Documentation Bulletin.)
It was plainly obvious that Ruom Ritt was King Sihanouk, and the “correspondence” was another ploy to make the King feel relevant to the political scene. This went on from the 1990’s until at least the early aughts.
Not surprisingly, in a lot of this “correspondence,” King Sihanouk took jabs at Hun Sen.
Eventually, Hun Sen got angry at Ruom Ritt. In 2003, he suggested that the King share his friend’s address.
King Sihanouk shot back, No – because he wouldn’t want his friend Ruom Ritt to be murdered like Haing Ngor.