John Dawson Dewhirst

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John Dawson Dewhirst (born United Kingdom 1952, died in Cambodia 1978) was a British teacher and amateur yachtsman who was one of several western victims of the Khmer Rouge during the genocidal rule of Pol Pot.

Dewhirst was born in the Jesmond district of Newcastle Upon Tyne in 1952 and trained as a teacher before moving to Japan to teach English in 1977. In August 1978 Dewhirst was apparently holidaying off the Thai coast with his friends, New Zealander Kerry Hamil and Canadian Stuart Glass. Their yacht, the Foxy Lady drifted south towards Cambodian waters and was not heard from again. It was believed all three men had either died at the hands of Thai pirates or been drowned in a storm. Two Americans named James Clark and Lance McNamara had vanished in similar circumstances that April. Before the end of 1978, two Australians named Ronald Dean and David Scott and two more Americans named Michael Scott Deeds and Christopher DeLance had also gone missing.

In early 1979, the Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Pol Pot regime. They liberated the S-21 prison in the capital Phnom Penh where over 16,000 Cambodians were tortured to death on suspicion of spying against Cambodia. Photographs of the missing yachtsmen were found in the prison files along with the 'confessions' that everyone who entered S-21 was forced to write. It seems that Dewhirst and his friends had been arrested at sea by Khmer Rouge patrol boats. Stuart Glass was shot and killed during the capture of The Foxy Lady. Hamil and Dewhirst were both brought ashore and then taken by truck to the then deserted Phnom Penh. After being savagely tortured over several weeks, Dewhirst wrote a long confession that mixed true events in his life with wholly false accounts of his career as a CIA agent planning to subvert the Khmer Rouge regime. He claimed that his father (also an agent) had been paid a large bribe for inducting his son into the CIA and that his college course in Loughborough was interspersed with training as a spy. All prisoners at S-21 wrote similar confessions which were extracted by repeated and severe torture. Prisoners were subject to whippings, the bastinado, electric shocks and waterboarding. In addition to the yachtsmen, two French brothers named Rovin and Harad Bernard were detained in early 1976. Another Frenchman named Andre Gaston Courtigne was arrested the same month along with his Khmer wife and it is possible that a handful of French nationals who went missing after the 1975 evacuation of Phnom Penh also passed through S-21. Several dozen Vietnamese, Thais, Laotians, Indians, Pakistanis and Arabs were detained in the prison at various times. None fared any differently than the Cambodian prisoners.

Dewhirst was possibly taken to Choeung Ek after about a month in S-21 where prisoners were executed and dumped in pits. The former administrator of the prison, Comrade Duch was located by a western journalist in 1999 and now faces trial along with other former Khmer Rouge leaders. He said that he remembered Dewhirst as "very polite" and that the bodies of foreign prisoners were burned in tires. It is rumored that the American prisoners may have been smuggling Thai marijuana when they were captured, but there is no evidence Dewhirst and his friends were involved in this. Dewhirst was one of two Britons to die in Pol Pot's Cambodia (the other being Malcolm Caldwell, an academic who was assassinated during a visit to Phnom Penh in December 1978), although he was the only one to die in the Killing Fields.