Two students on a train from Surin to Bangkok in December 2019 noticed the man asleep by the window. He was wearing a cap, a mask over the lower half of his face, and a jacket pulled up over himself. They had seen the scar on his forehead on a wanted poster. They compared it on their phones, and they telephoned the police.
Officers took him at Pak Chong station in Nakhon Ratchasima at about half past ten in the morning. He did not resist. There was a reward of fifty thousand baht out for him (the couple who reported him were later given eighty thousand), and he had bought his ticket at Buri Ram.
Somkid Phumphuang was born in 1964 in Nakhon Si Thammarat in the south; later reports give Trang. His parents died when he was young and he was raised by an uncle. He was thrown out of school for theft. The uncle found him work at a wood factory and he was dismissed for stealing fifty thousand baht. At some point in those years he gave false evidence in court against a local businessman, who went to prison for six years and said on his release that he intended to kill him.
Between January and June 2005 he killed five women, cafe singers and masseuses, in five provinces, going with them to hotel rooms and rented apartments and strangling or drowning them, and taking their money and gold. Warunee Pimpabutr, twenty-five, a singer at the Saeng Tawan Cafe, was killed at the Ploy Palace Hotel in Mukdahan on January 30 or 31, and he took fifty thousand baht from her. Patcharee Amataniran, a cafe singer, was strangled in Muang district of Trang on the night of June 11, for a mobile phone and three thousand baht. Porntawan Pangkhabutr, thirty-seven, a masseuse, was killed in Udon Thani between June 17 and 19.
Pongpan Sapchai was killed in a hotel room in Lampang. He strangled her and took a gold ring, a mobile telephone and a gold earring worth about five thousand baht. She was two months pregnant.
Sompong Pimpornpirom was twenty-five. He met her at a hotel in downtown Buri Ram on the night of June 20, 2005, took her to a building called Piya Mansion, and strangled her in her sleep. He took a gold ring and a necklace worth twelve thousand two hundred baht.
He was arrested on June 29, 2005. The Thai press called him Thailand's Jack the Ripper. He had used at least four other names: Chuchart Charnchai, Chuchart Kingkaew, Wichai Promphan and Suwat Charnnarong.
The five killings were prosecuted separately and every one ended in life. The Criminal Court sentenced him to death for Pongpan Sapchai, and on March 2, 2010 the Appeals Court reduced it to life. In the Sompong Pimpornpirom case the court imposed death and commuted it to life because he had confessed, upheld on appeal in August 2012. The Warunee life term was upheld on February 21, 2012 and the Porntawan term on November 25, 2012. He fought the Patcharee case, which he had not admitted; the Criminal Court gave him life on March 21, 2011 and the Appeals Court upheld it on July 31, 2013.
He served fourteen years. The corrections authorities called him a model prisoner, and royal pardons and sentence reductions cut his term to about thirteen years. He walked out of the Nong Khai Provincial Prison on May 17, 2019; one report gives May 27.
Ratsami Mulichan was fifty-one, divorced, and worked as a hotel maid in Kranuan district of Khon Kaen. She met him on Facebook, where he said he was a lawyer, and on December 2 she let him move into her house; she told her son he was going to buy her a car. On December 15 neighbors heard them arguing until the evening, when it went quiet. The next morning a neighbor found her body under the bed, wrapped in a blanket, naked from the waist down, her wrists and ankles tied. She had been suffocated. He was the chief suspect within days, and the train arrest followed.
The Khon Kaen Provincial Court gave judgment on March 17, 2021. He had confessed when first confronted with the evidence, then denied it at trial. He was convicted of premeditated murder involving torture, of theft and of concealing the body, and sentenced to death, with three years for the theft and sixteen months for the offense against the body. He was fifty-six.
He had been paroled because the corrections authorities considered him a model prisoner. That judgment was made fourteen years into a sentence imposed for strangling a pregnant woman in a hotel room, and it took seven months to be answered.
His release set off a national argument about royal pardons and the death penalty, and the corrections department promised to review how it assessed prisoners before letting them go. In August 2026 Thai judges were still citing his case in calls for a national review of sentencing.