Foxy Lady (PDF)

Foxy Lady – Truth, Memory and the Death of Western Yachtsmen in Democratic Kampuchea is an investigative journalist’s account of one of history’s most intriguing footnotes: the murder of four Americans, two Australians, an Englishman, a New Zealander and a Canadian by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. Foxy Lady chronicles the life and times of the Canadian, Stuart Robert Glass – his restless youth in British Columbia; his travels across Europe, North Africa and Asia; his forays into drug smuggling; his brutal 1978 death on board a little yacht called Foxy Lady. Stuart’s mates, New Zealander Kerry Hamill and Englishman John Dewhirst, would suffer a worse fate – dragged off to the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng death house in Phnom Penh, charged with being CIA spies, tortured for a few months and then killed. As Stuart’s life unfolds, Foxy Lady charts the course of a parallel universe – Pol Pot and his gang boring their way to power. It focuses on the career of the Khmer Rouge’s chief executioner, Kaing Guek Eav, alias ‘Duch’. It was Duch who conveyed the orders that Stuart’s pals and the other yachtsmen should be killed and their bodies burned to ashes. Duch was the first Khmer Rouge leader to be tried for his crimes, by an international tribunal in Phnom Penh. Having stumbled on the story of murdered Stuart Glass, the author travels to Cambodia to watch Duch testify; interview former Tuol Sleng guards and investigate the death of the ‘Western’ yachtsmen. But ‘truth’ is elusive. Imperfect memories and conflation are among the most intriguing products of his two-year, four-continent investigation. Foxy Lady will appeal to students of Asian history, political psychology and conflict studies. Journalists, adventure travellers, Indochina war buffs and lovers of popular culture, adventure travel and narrative non-fiction will want to read this book too. http://www.foxyladyachtsmen.com/