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.