[TheCruxofBag]

*Warning: To say this case is convoluted is a massive understatement, from multiple aliases, to inconsistencies, to the possibility that the deceased was wrongly identified. I apologise if the post comes across as rambling and nonsensical.

In September 2016, an American man, Donald Kramer, was caught with a forged passport by Thai tourist police. Under interrogation, Kramer claimed that he had bought the passport from a shop-house in the Phra Khanong district of Bangkok.

Police raided the shop-house, and once the occupant discovered it was a raid, he began firing, with one tourist cop being wounded in the process.




Five people were arrested, including the shooter. At first, he was identified as a British national, Peter Andrew Colter. However, several forged passports were found at the scene, showing the shooter had faked British, American, and French passports.






The other four arrested were: Jim Eger (American, 67yo), Aaron Thomas Gabel (American, 33yo), La Nanda (Burmese), and her husband Sor Ka Por Myin (Burmese).



Eventually, Mr Colter's true identity came to light - he was a 63-year-old American national, Herbert Craig La Fon. In 1979, he escaped credit card fraud charges in the USA by fleeing the country. He is believed to have run a sports good shop in Mexico, before settling in Thailand at an unknown date.

La Fon was married to a Thai woman, who refused to testify against him - she was deathly afraid of him.


Drugs and firearms were also found at the scene, but the grimmest discovery was made in a freezer in the backroom - a body, dismembered into at least six pieces, stuffed in black garbage bags.

Police found several butcher saws in the shop-house - it is believed the man's corpse was frozen before it was dismembered.

















A refrigerator seller remembered selling one of her products to La Fon in 2008. Just a few weeks prior to the bust, La Fon moved the refrigerator unit to the Phra Khanong shop-house.

An autopsy on the remains suggested that the man was of Hungarian descent, was around five-foot-nine, and that he had a fatal amount of sodium thiopental and pentobarbitol in his system.

La Fon kept tight-lipped to the police. He refused to divulge the deceased's name, but he claimed to have beaten the deceased with the help of three friends, but it was one of those friends, Robert Logan Grandey (who had died earlier in 2016) who had killed him. He said the deceased had owed him 2.1 million baht, or around USD $62,200. The fingerprints of Aaron Gabel were also found on one of the black plastic bags.

In December 2017, La Fon was sentenced to 44 years in jail for concealing a corpse, illegal possession of firearms, fraud, forging documents, and narcotics possession. Despite his fingerprints being on one of the bags, Aaron Gabel was acquitted of all charges - but he remained languishing in a Thai prison for some time. Jim Eger was also acquitted of all charges. No one was charged with murder in this case.

Who was the victim?
The dismembered corpse was found wearing a shirt with the logo of a defunct company named Cedco. As a result, both Thai and American sources identified the victim as Charles Edward Ditlefsen, a former calendar publisher who previously lived in Mill Valley, California.


Ditlefsen was the founder of Cedco, which published calendars. Cedco was a successful operation, which started out focusing on train calendars. They branched out to licensed properties - for example, getting the license to publish Star Wars calendars in 1989.


But the good times didn't last. In 2002, Cedco sued its printing company for publishing its calendars on substandard paper. The printers, however, proved that Cedco had regularly defaulted on payments, and the case was thrown out of court in 2003. In 2005, Cedco ceased operating, with debts of over $470,000.

Ditlefsen set up a new company, 'Cedrr', which focused solely on railway calendars, but he was rumoured to have gone bankrupt in 2008, with him failing to pay photographers. He wound up Cedrr, sold his Mill Valley home in 2008, and that was the last anyone heard of him.

Due to the Cedco shirt, and the fact that Ditlefsen was essentially a ghost, the Thai authorities accepted that Ditlefsen was the dismembered corpse found in the freezer. When he had died could not be ascertained.

However, a few have raised the possibility that the dismembered corpse wasn't Ditlefsen. The liver biopsy suggested that the deceased was Hungarian - Ditlefsen was born in California, and was of Danish heritage. He was also, according to former associates, much taller than five-foot-nine.

This has raised the possibility that Ditlefsen fled to Thailand to escape the debt he had accrued with his calendar businesses, and that his identity had somehow been stolen, perhaps by the murder victim. Of course, there remains the chance that the ID was correct - Ditlefsen was the victim.

All in all, the identity of the dismembered corpse might never be known with certainty.

Main source for this tale: https://truecrimethailand.substack.c...es-e-ditlefsen - it goes into substantially more detail than this summary.

[mr_feelgood]

What a lovely country

[WonderMomma]

Holy crap. Crazy case. Nice post Crux.

[William May]

If he fucked over train lovers, then he got what he deserved.


Cheating train lovers is the LOWEST form of calumny!!! Even worse than murder. Or drug dealing. It should carry the death penalty. In this case, I guess it did. But I want to know what happened to all the innocent people who purchased sub-standard railroad calendars and then had to look at them for an entire year!! Insufficiently glossy paper! Probably the wrong train ID in the pic, saying it was a Baldwin 8KC-d5, when ANYONE can tell it's ACTUALLY a Baldwin 8KC-d6!! (I mean, REALLY, you can TELL it by the fact that the rear stair rails are left-handed instead of RIGHT-HANDED, like the REAL d6's!) (Even a MORON could tell that!) Some people have LOT OF FUCKING NERVE, let me tell you!!!

[Xploit Machine]

and you wear traffic police helmet just for the pose

[Mr.NoCredit]

Great post Crux!

Thanks a lot for the effort and all you do around here. We sure need you!

[RobMoses]

Wow great post!

[Dodger712]

I can see the corpse has freezer burn. If only they had wrapped it in Saran Wrap to keep it fresh and unburned by the freezer's low temps. Sad that murderers no longer know this trick.

[kbt3168]

Doesn’t stink when it’s frozen.

[fuzzz]

Good stuff.... Thanks for all your posts.