Trial of Princess Baby Fish transfixes Thai public

BANGKOK - This is a cautionary tale for commoners who become caught up in the decadent whirl of high society. It is a story of lust, royals, a poisoning with flea powder, and it all centres on a young woman called Princess Baby Fish.

Life has not gone swimmingly for the ill-fated Chalasai Yugala, ever since she confessed to poisoning her powerful husband in Bangkok nearly a decade ago.

Acquitted this month of first-degree murder due to a lack of evidence, the 33-year-old remarried widow wept with joy. But Thailand's most notorious woman must now brace herself for the verdict to be challenged in the Supreme Court.

If found guilty of murdering Prince Thitipan Yugala, a distant cousin of the revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Baby Fish faces the death penalty. The Thai public is fixated by this rare look at the tangled private lives of royalty. Commentators are shocked by the circumstances of Baby Fish's abusive upbringing in the palace, where she reportedly was raped at the age of 14 and held as a sex slave.

The 60-year-old Prince Thitipan, whose pet name, Than Kob, translates as Frog, collapsed into a coma after sipping breakfast coffee laced with flea killer one August morning in 1995. He died a week later.

By all accounts, Baby Fish, his third wife, spent little time grieving.

After she rang an ambulance to whisk the Prince off to intensive care, she left with her lover, Uthet Choopwa, a teenage chestnut vendor whose stand was just around the corner from the palace.

A few Thai commentators pity Baby Fish because she forsook wealth and a lofty position for romance in penury. But most Thais revile Baby Fish as an opportunistic murderer.

Born in 1972, she was dumped by her middle-class Thai parents when she was 4 because her skin was too swarthy, and placed in Asawin Palace to be groomed as a royal servant. At 14, she was reportedly violated by her royal guardian, who became besotted and married her in 1994, when he was 59.

Baby Fish's lawyers argued that there was only circumstantial evidence and no motive for committing murder. They pointed out that Prince Thitipan openly tolerated visits by his wife's lover, even to the palace grounds.

- INDEPENDENT