William Glenn’s death in Cambodia was neither easy nor honourable. His battered, bruised and bound body, wrapped in a duct-taped curtain, was found by children on a rubbish dump in Phnom Penh’s Por Sen Chey district on Wednesday 9 July. For now the identity of the killers of the 43-year old teacher is unknown, as is the motive for the murder. This crime may never be solved.
Investigators, who reportedly include representatives of the FBI in addition Cambodian police officers, say that Glenn was beaten about the head with a blunt instrument and was suffocated. He had been dead for some 24 hours before he was found. In his pocket were his wallet and credit cards, as well as a passport.
Whoever dumped the body was not trying to hide it. Garbage is dumped at the site every morning and the pile is cleared away every day or so. Villagers in Andong village in Kouk Roka commune’s Andong village, say that a tuk-tuk, a motorcycle-drawn carriage common in Cambodia, stopped at dump at 3am, three hours before the body was found.
Available evidence suggests that the murder was not a crime of opportunity, nor merely a robbery gone wrong. Inevitably, speculation is sweeping through expatriate forums on the internet mostly based on little evidence, although comments by some who knew Glenn may lead to useful lines of inquiry.
Glenn is from Mississippi. He was an English teacher in Thailand for 10 ten years after spending six months teaching in China. He married a Thai national and owned a small restaurant with her. After five years the marriage failed. His wife reportedly replaced him with an ‘African’ boyfriend but the two remained in regular contact.
For many expatriates who have a problem fitting in elsewhere in Asia, countries like Cambodia can look like paradise.
Glenn arrived in Cambodia on 4 May and started looking for teaching jobs and managed to find work with a couple of schools.
Those who knew him say he had a drinking problem and could become aggressive, although there’s no real evidence he has caused much trouble. He is described as having a ‘short fuse’, a characteristic that made him ill-suited for life in Asia where patience is an absolute must. He had little money and had asked his estranged wife for support. So far there is no suggestion that he was involved in drugs.
For the moment, despite much speculation, there is no evidence of a drug deal gone wrong, of punishment for an unpaid debt, or any connection to his marital problems. However, the manner in which he died suggests that he had upset someone with influence.