The disappearance of the "Thai Silk King"
Cameron Highlands, Malaysia, March 1967
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
Jim Thompson, an American who had served in the US intelligence service (the OSS) in the Second World War, founded the Thai Silk Company in 1948 and helped take Thai silk to the world. On 24 March 1967 he arrived with two friends at the Moonlight bungalow in the Cameron Highlands for the Easter holiday.
On Sunday 26 March, after lunch, Thompson went out for a walk at around 1:30 pm and never returned. Accounts from the time say he left behind the cigarettes and the medicine he usually carried. More than 500 people searched for him for 11 days, in the largest land search in Southeast Asia, and nothing was found. Months later, his sister was murdered in Pennsylvania, a crime never solved.
Sources
In the game
Silk and Mist
Cameron Highlands, Malaysia, Easter Monday, 1967, 8 am. Mist still clings to the tea plantations around an English bungalow of stone and timber.
Theories range from a tiger attack and an accident in the jungle to kidnapping, murder by business rivals and secret work tied to the Vietnam War; none has been proved, and a Thai court declared him dead in 1974. The game borrows the bungalow in the mist, the walk with no return and the objects left on the veranda. The partner, the sapphires, the cabin and the ending are fiction.
