Ginggaew Lorsoungnern: The Thai Lady That Survived Her First Execution
- Aug 11, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 22
On 13 January 1979, Ginggaew Lorsoungnern became the second woman in Thai history to be executed by gunfire. What happened next turned her death into one of the strangest and most disturbing episodes in the country's criminal history. Moments before being tied to the wooden execution cross, she begged for her life. “I didn't do it, I didn't kill the boy. Please don't kill me,” she said. Ten bullets later, she was declared dead. Then, in the prison morgue, she started trying to stand up.
From Housekeeper to Kidnap Conspirator
Ginggaew was born in 1950 and worked as a housekeeper and childcarer for Vichai and Jitra Srijareonsukying, a Bangkok couple with a six year old son. She was trusted enough to pick the boy up from school every day and look after him at home, right up until she was dismissed from the job.
By late 1978 she was unemployed and struggling financially. Her boyfriend, a 28 year old man with an existing criminal record, persuaded her to take part in a kidnapping plot targeting the family she'd worked for. Investigators later named five other conspirators alongside her: Thongmuan Grogkoggraud, Pin Peungyard, his wife Thongsuk Puwised, Gasem Singhara and Suthi Sridee. Ginggaew's role was the one that mattered most to the plan working. She knew the boy, knew his routine, and could get him to go with her without raising any alarm.
A Ransom Drop That Fell Apart
On or around 18 October 1978, Ginggaew collected the boy from school as she had a hundred times before and took him to a hideout in Nakhon Ratchasima Province. The kidnappers demanded 200,000 baht and told the parents to throw the cash from a moving train somewhere between the Jantuek and Pakchong railway stations, where a marker flag would show the drop point.
It went wrong almost immediately. It was dark, the parents couldn't find the flag, and the ransom never made it into the kidnappers' hands. What followed was the crime's most horrifying detail. The gang turned on the child, stabbed him, and buried him while he was still alive, something confirmed later when soil was found in his lungs during examination. In a detail rooted in local superstition, they buried him with traditional offerings, apparently hoping it would stop his spirit from haunting them.
Chavoret Jaruboon, a prison officer who years later became Thailand's official executioner and wrote a memoir about his career, recorded that Ginggaew allegedly tried to stop the killing, at one point throwing herself over the boy to shield him. Newspapers at the time weren't interested in that nuance. “She was all over the news, like some kind of film star,” Chavoret later wrote, describing coverage that was often sensationalised and unreliable.
Sentenced Under an Authoritarian System
On 12 January 1979, Thailand's prime minister personally signed the execution order, a routine practice under the country's authoritarian government at the time that bypassed the lengthy appeals process common elsewhere. Ginggaew was moved from Lard Yao women's prison at Klong Prem Central Prison to Bang Kwang Central Prison in Nonthaburi Province, the facility that housed Thailand's death row and later earned the nickname the Bangkok Hilton.
Three of the six conspirators, Ginggaew, Gasem Singhara and Pin Peungyard, were scheduled to die the following day. The other three received life or fixed term sentences instead.
How Thailand Carried Out Executions
To understand what happened to Ginggaew, it helps to understand exactly how executions worked in Thailand at the time. The country had used beheading as its standard method for centuries before switching to firing squad in 1934, on the reasoning that shooting was considered more humane. The first execution under the new system took place in 1935, using a Bergmann submachine gun mounted on a fixed stand. From 1937 until the method was finally abolished, more than 500 people were shot at Bang Kwang Prison this way.
Unlike a traditional firing squad with several shooters, Thailand used a single executioner and a single mounted machine gun. The condemned was tied standing to a wooden cross, hands held together in the traditional wai gesture of prayer, facing away from the gun toward a wall of sandbags. A cloth screen was placed between the prisoner and the weapon, with a small target fixed to it at exactly the height of the heart. The executioner never saw the prisoner's face. By tradition, executioners would ask forgiveness from both the condemned and from the earth itself, since the blood would spill onto the ground, before a red flag was dropped as the signal to fire. Up to fifteen rounds could be used per execution.
The Final Hours
Ginggaew's last hours were marked by repeated fainting and collapse. Chavoret Jaruboon, then working as an escort rather than the executioner himself, later wrote that escort duty was one of the most emotionally difficult roles in the entire process, and that even hardened prison staff were shaken by how distressed she was.
She was selected to go first, at 5pm. She collapsed on the way to the execution chamber and had to be revived before she could be tied to the cross, hands placed in the wai position, a small white square fixed to the screen behind her marking where her heart should be. At 5.40pm, the executioner fired ten rounds. A doctor, Dr Porngul, examined her and pronounced her dead. She was untied, laid face down, and carried to the morgue.
She Was Trying to Get Up
As the second prisoner, Gasem, was being led toward the execution chamber, sounds started coming from the morgue. Ginggaew, covered in blood, was trying to stand up.
The reason came down to her own anatomy. Ginggaew had situs inversus, an extremely rare condition, thought to affect roughly one in ten thousand people, in which the major organs are mirrored to the opposite side of the body from where they'd normally sit. Her heart was on her right side rather than her left. None of the ten bullets fired at the target on the screen had actually hit it.
Some of the escorts in the room tried to hasten her death themselves, pressing down on her back or attempting to strangle her, before Chavoret stopped them. “I couldn't help thinking that she was dying the way that little boy had died, except suffocating from blood instead of earth,” he wrote. Dr Porngul ordered her taken back to the cross. This time, fifteen rounds were fired into her back. Only then was she dead.
The Others Follow
Gasem Singhara died instantly from his own volley, described as stoic and silent throughout. Pin Peungyard went last and, like Ginggaew, needed a second volley before he died. By the end of the evening, prison staff were badly shaken. “We were all in need of more than one stiff drink that evening,” Chavoret admitted afterward.
The Man Who Watched, and Later Took the Job Himself
Ginggaew's execution stayed with Chavoret Jaruboon for the rest of his life. He went on to formally become Bang Kwang Prison's resident executioner in 1984, a position he held for nearly two decades. Over that time he personally carried out 55 executions, all by machine gun, making him the last person in Thailand to hold the job before the country abandoned shooting altogether in favour of lethal injection in 2003, a change introduced under the government of Thaksin Shinawatra. He later published his account of the job as The Last Executioner in 2006, in which he expressed real doubts about how severely Ginggaew had been punished given her apparent attempt to protect the boy, though he acknowledged that in Thailand's justice system at the time, clemency was almost never on the table. His story was later adapted into a 2014 Thai feature film of the same name.
Chavoret wasn't the only prolific state executioner to leave behind a written record of the job. Britain's Albert Pierrepoint carried out several hundred hangings across his career and later wrote his own memoir wrestling with many of the same questions about duty, guilt and capital punishment that run through Chavoret's account.
A Grim Footnote in Thai Legal History
Ginggaew's execution was the first shooting of a woman in Thailand since 1942, and remains one of only a small number of women executed by the Thai state in the modern era. Female executions have always been rare enough to draw outsized attention, in Thailand as elsewhere. In the United States, Mary Surratt became the first woman executed by the federal government more than a century earlier, for her alleged role in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, a case that similarly divided opinion over how much guilt she truly bore compared to the men around her.
More than four decades on, Ginggaew's case is still remembered less for the crime itself than for the botched, doubled execution that followed it, a rare instance of a state execution failing in the most public and horrifying way possible.
