The Disappearance and Death of Dave Walker: A History
Page 13. The Investigation Part 10
Nate Thayer Crazy Town Games

INSIDE THE INVESTIGATION WEEK FOUR Part 10: Nate Thayer Crazy Town Games  

We were now rolling into the fourth weekend since Dave Walker first mysteriously disappeared on February 12 in Cambodia. While Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs made a minimal effort in dispatching a Vice-Consul from Bangkok to Siem Reap to "look in" on Dave's disappearance a week later and calling on the Edmonton Police as Canada's 'agency of record', the Cambodian authorities were dragging their feet.  Dave's room had not been sealed as a crime scene, his laptop and camera remained in the room barely secured, the scene of his disappearance had not been surveyed nor people in the vicinity polled as potential witnesses.  The Cambodians were doing nothing. 

At  the beginning of the third week, Tammy Madon asked me to act as the family spokesperson to Department of External Affairs and she and I decided to issue a carefully worded statement in the middle of that week that was designed to embarrass the Cambodian authorities for their lack of action and spur them into taking Dave's disappearance seriously. [ See Page 11 ]

In the meantime, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) got back to me regarding my initial calls to Dave's former case officer about his disappearance in Cambodia while working on a documentary film about the Khmer Rouge era.  CSIS invited me to meet with them on the coming Monday, March 3, to discuss Dave's disappearance.

"From what I hear the investigation has been stopped because of the comments in the media that were read by cambodian police"

In the meantime Nate Thayer, stinging from the humiliation of being removed as my co-spokesperson the previous weekend [See Page 10] now began whispering behind my back to Tammy Madon a series of lies that shook her confidence:  he told her that Cambodian authorities had been "close to working" with his "investigators" but because of the statement she and I issued on Wednesday, they were now dropping the investigation. This was a blatant lie. In the meantime, Tammy upon hearing this, suddenly stopped the last of our routine communications on Saturday until the below troubled message from Tammy on Facebook early Sunday morning:     

I caught Thayer in a big lie, and there would be many more coming from him! I had just found out during the previous night that shortly after our outraged family statement had been posted, the Cambodian Police finally contacted the Edmonton Police and took the report that I had filed with Edmonton PD back on Feb 26. [ See Page 11 ]

Whether the Cambodian action was the result of the statement Tammy Madon and I issued, or of the FCCT statement, or lobbying from Canada's External Affairs, or all three, who knows, but the Cambodian police were definitely not "stopping" the investigation. They were doing the opposite!  Thayer and whoever else was telling Tammy that the Cambodians were dropping the investigation, were barefaced liars.

The "over night" e-mail I had sent to Tammy which she had not apparently bothered to read (or just did not understand), was reporting that Cambodian cops were on the phone to Canada waking up a good part of the Cambodian-Canadian community in Ontario, some of whom on Sonny Chhoun's claims, we had offered up as possible suspects in the disappearance of Dave.  A senior Cambodian police official also put a long call to Dave's former wife Praiwan in Canada on Saturday night, profusely apologizing to her on behalf of the Cambodian authorities for taking so long to move on Dave's disappearance and reviewing the case with her and taking her own report from her.  Clearly the Cambodian police were gearing up.

"Do not in any way or manner invoke my name..."

Why did Nate Thayer feel the need to tell such a blatant lie to Tammy Madon?  The explanation is in what had happened earlier that day between Thayer and myself. On Saturday morning I received a polite e-mail from Thayer asking me to give him our contact in the Edmonton Police. In the spirit of team work I immediately not only gave it to him, but in view of Thayer's request that he needed it "rather urgently" I took the trouble to directly introduce him to Constable Jim Gurney, to ensure Thayer got his immediate attention.  Gurney had asked me to refer all tips or inquiries to the Edmonton Police Service main communications number, not his own desk. I quickly e-mailed Gurney that Nate Thayer would be, however, contacting him at his desk and that it was an urgent matter.

How Nate Thayer responded to my courtesy requires no comment.  Thayer's e-mails below will speak for themselves.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

From: Nate Thayer

Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2014 12:35 PM

To: Peter Vronsky

Subject: Edmonton police

 

NOT FOR QUOTATION OR DISTRIBUTION THIS IS A CONFIDENTIAL EMAIL

 

Peter, you had posted a couple days ago that the Edmonton police were conducting an investigation into Dave's disappearance and then listed an email address and a phone number for inquiries. From whom did you get that information? And can provide the name of anyone in the Edmonton police department who is assigned to Dave Walker's case. I need to know this information rather urgently

 

Thanks

 

Nate

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Wow. Crazy town. [Admittedly both of us are sounding like drama queens by the end of this thread.]  By now I was convinced that Nate Thayer was a total "wack job." He seemed to be more concerned about "confidentiality agreements" than about finding Dave.  Was this just another news story for him which he intended to ensure that won't be ripped off the way his Pol Pot story was in 1998.  Confidentiality agreements? Was he fucking kidding?

As I promised over a year ago in the above e-mail to Nate Thayer, "If you do not find Dave, we will have a very public revisit" of his e-mails.  Here they are. Read 'em and weep, in Thayer's own kooky words.

It seemed overall, that of utmost importance to Thayer was that I drop my ongoing investigation completely and withhold my information from the Edmonton Police, leaving his investigation as the only one under way, without myself being privy to its progress. As these above e-mails flew back and forth between Thayer and myself, I reached out to my contacts in Cambodia and confirmed that Thayer's so-called "investigation" was exactly where I had left it on Sunday a week ago: focused on the information being fed to us by Sonny Chhoun on Chandy "Andy" Long and Salao Mao. There was no "team" of investigators, only Sonny Chhoun, by now a serious suspect, was acting as Thayer's "investigator."   At the end of the above e-mail exchange, Thayer became shrill, threatening to plant a story in the Siem Reap newspapers negatively reporting on me.

Thayer actually had no investigation of any worth underway on the ground in Cambodia.  It was entirely in his own mind, a crazed Potemkin Village he was running out of his apartment in Washington D.C. based entirely on Sonny Chhoun's claims. But he talked a good game and leaned heavily on his reputation and naive and inexperienced Tammy Madon was taking it all in.   

"My only hope is he is crazy enough to find Dave which is why I kept talking to him."

Tammy Madon began to give me the same treatment she gave Thayer the week before.  Suddenly she stopped returning my calls or messages. She would not pick-up my calls to her in Edmonton, allowing them to go through to message. One of Dave's cousins Facebook messaged me that Tammy was "overwhelmed" by many different voices and opinions and to be cool. 

I had been in almost daily telephone, Facebook and e-mail contact with Tammy Madon since first advising her of Dave's disappearance, but as Sunday began to unfold, I realized that I had now not talked with Tammy since Thursday night. She completely stopped taking my calls.

Up until this moment I had always felt that I had Tammy Madon's trust and confidence, as she had mine, since the first hour that I informed her that Dave had gone missing and we began to raise a cry and hue from Canada while Richard Ehrlich had raised one from Cambodia and Thailand.

Now after three weeks of worry, sleepless nights on Cambodia time, two hours ahead of Edmonton time, Tammy Madon was suddenly freezing me out with no explanation other than her comment about the Cambodian police and the statement we had made. The rest of it I had to surmise. It was disheartening and it unfolded like this on Facebook messenger, a frustrated monologue from me, until Tammy finally responded some sixteen hours later.

I was pretty much out of things to say. I figured maybe Tammy is going to heave me overboard as her advisor and so for Dave's sake, I thought I would give her my last piece of advice now that she might be proceeding forward without me. I Facebook messaged her my last best advice:

That was it.  I did my best for Dave. Now all I could do is let it be what it would be.  I had bet 48 hours on Nate Thayer. 

But I had bet wrong.  Nate Thayer was even crazier than I thought; it had been only 16 hours into my predicted 48 hours when on Sunday evening Thayer threw another hissy-fit and again threatened Tammy to resign and withdraw his non-existing "investigators."

And now like a loose filament in light bulb, Tammy suddenly after days of silence, flickered alight, as if she had never gone out, with no comment or explanation to me on the preceding days. Just like that, she suddenly burst out on Facebook messanger:

Tammy and I now finally spoke on the telephone Sunday night for the first time since Thursday. Her four day silence had been churlish but I did not bring it up with her and proceeded as if nothing had been amiss between us.  Partly I understood the enormous pressure of the chorus of voices she had endured and the difficulty of making a decisions under the extremely unusual circumstances for anybody, and partly we had more urgent issues at hand than soothing my bruised ego:  Dave was still missing.  We were having this conversation about the time Nate Thayer was writing to me above, "YOU HAVE BEEN TOLD BY TAMMY THAT YOU DO NOT ANY LONGER REPRESENT THE FAMILY OR DAVE. YOU HAVE BEEN TOLD BY THE GROUP OF SCORES OF PROFESSIONALS TO STOP YOUR ROGUE ACTIONS."

Tammy Madon and I had a long conversation catching up on numerous issues that accumulated since Thursday, including the long term strategic assessment I sent her on Thursday night.  Some of the things we discussed were: 

• As I predicted, Thayer had again threatened to quit and withdraw his "investigators" from looking for Dave if he did not get his way, which is why she called me now.  Tammy told me that Nate had "called off" his investigation on Sunday.  I did not probe to ask her over what issue, we had more important things to talk about.

• I continued to maintain that Thayer "might be just crazy enough to find Dave."  Dave needed every resource available to pool into our effort, including Thayer's potentially valuable contributions.  It was important to share with and not exclude any genuine effort to ascertain what happened to Dave and to find and rescue him if still possible.

• I urged her to aid Thayer and let him run his investigation as he saw fit but to not let him withhold evidence or information from the Edmonton Police which were serving as a central receiving point of information as the Canadian "agency of record" liaisoning with the Cambodian Police.  I advised her not to take his counsel blindly.

• Even in the fourth week, I urged Tammy, that we could not discount the fact that Dave as British SAS-trained ex-elite military recon operative was better prepared than average to survive long term captivity, and without out any evidence of his death, I considered our objective first as an urgent "rescue" mission.

• Sonny Chhoun's proximity to the investigation worried both Tammy and me.  I assured Tammy that even a low ranking village constable in Cambodia would be looking at Sonny very hard as a potential suspect as Dave's business partner; that it was a given.  I again voiced my original advice, that we should keep Sonny close to us, but not trust him.  If Sonny was involved in Dave's disappearance then the closer he was to us and "feeling involved" the better the chance he would eventually make a mistake and expose himself.  On the other hand, if Sonny was truly the loyal friend that Dave deserved, Sonny would be of help.

• The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIC) had contacted me in response to my initial calls to Dave's former case officer's desk and I was scheduled to meet with them on Monday, the next day.  Tammy and I discussed his previous service record and the possible significance of CSIS asking to meet with me about Dave's disappearance.

• We discussed the Cambodian Police activity reaching into Canada over the weekend and Edmonton Police activity the same weekend.  Things finally appeared to be underway as far as police investigating was concerned.  Edmonton police had officially told us that they could not investigate anything until this was a criminal matter, but I was getting feedback that the Edmonton Police were actually doing more that they said they could: they were actively looking into the Keswick, Ontario connection.  This was heartening.

• We turned to the issue of how to handle Canadian Foreign Affairs in the forthcoming week. It seemed at the point that we achieved our initial objective of getting Dave's disappearance to come under investigation, now we needed to pause and see where the investigations were going to go and how transparent and effective will they be before making further statements or complaints.  I counseled that we ask Foreign Affairs to share with us the raw information collected in Siem Reap the previous week by Bangkok Vice-Consul Alison Catmur [See Page 7 ]  Was a formal statement taken from Sonny Chhoun? Where is Dave's laptop? His camera? Are they now in Cambodian police custody? Did Vice-Consul Catmur shoot any photographs of Dave's room? Did she even inspect it? Where is his passport?  We drafted a battery of questions in a strategy intended to keep Foreign Affairs actively apprising us of the stages the investigation in Cambodia was now undergoing.

• I suggested that perhaps the Edmonton attorney Tammy had turned to, take my place as "spokesperson", somebody more neutral for the sake of Nate Thayer and Richard Ehrlich who had been stonewalling me from the moment I had accepted that role.  I wanted to concentrate more on the investigation and its progress.

• And then, finally, I gave Tammy Madon advice that would result in my own demise from the investigation.  I suggested she retain an attorney based in Cambodia to represent Dave's interests and oversee and report to us on the conduct of all ongoing investigations underway there.  And now I foolishly suggested to Tammy the helpful attorney Bradley Gordon who had so kindly been messaging me on Facebook so persistently the previous week, hard-sell pushing himself into the investigation, offering his help for free -- "pro bono"-- magic words to any desperate ear.  [See Page 12]

It had been a sleepless weekend with the only good news coming in being the fist signs that Cambodian Police might be finally rallying to investigate Dave's disappearance with the vigour we had been requesting and demanding.

With Brad Gordon coming online, however, if it had not been before, now the entire investigation into the disappearance of Dave Walker was about to become a crazy town circus.  I had survived Nate Thayer so far.  Now I would end up trying to survive Thayer and Brad Gordon together.  And tomorrow, Monday of the fourth week, was going to be another day inside the investigation.

As I also had promised in the message above to Tammy Madon on the issue of Dave's disappearance, "I will never quit."  Here I stand today.

COMING NEXT: THE INVESTIGATION PART 11 -