Who Killed Haing Ngor‪?‬ Mary Patricia - "M.P." - Nunan

A look ahead at Season Two of "Who Killed Haing Ngor" - currently being investigated. Stay tuned for a release date!

Art, it’s been widely said, imitates life. But there are also moments when it changes it.
The impact of “The Killing Fields” was so profound, that some credit it with helping launch Cambodia’s peace plan, ending decades of civil war.

This is the second episode of a two-parter, in which I talk with journalist Jon Swain and photographer Roland Neveu. Along with Ngor, they share the distinction of having been the only people on the set of “The Killing Fields” who were also in Phnom Penh in 1975.

The first of two episodes covering my conversations with Jon Swain, of the Sunday Times, and photographer Roland Neveu. We take a look a closer look at Dith Pran, a so-called "fixer" for New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg, whose courage and heroism is what "The Killing Fields" is about.
Both Swain and Neveu covered the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and went on to be involved in the film, “The Killing Fields.” We'll hear about that in the next episode.

This week I’m talking with Dorothy Chow, the producer of the “Death in Cambodia” podcast. In it, she interviews her father, Robert Chau about his experience as a teenager escaping the Khmer Rouge.

That’s relatively rare. Many survivors are reluctant to talk about their unresolved trauma. That trauma - and the intergenerational trauma they’ve handed down to their children - are linked to the conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of Dr. Haing Ngor.

But Dorothy Chow is a co-founder of Khmer Courageous Conversations - a new initiative to break the culture of silence and to loosen grip the Khmer Rouge still have on survivors, even decades later.

here’s an enduring conspiracy theory about the murder of Haing Ngor. Many believe that the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot had him killed. That suggests that Pol Pot’s power stretched from the jungles of Cambodia to the streets of Los Angeles.

The person probably most responsible for fueling that conspiracy? It was Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch.He the top executioner for the Khmer Rouge.

That Pol Pot killed Haing Ngor is an idea I find wildly implausible, and so does Nic Dunlop, the Irish photographer who found Comrade Duch.  This is the second part of our conversation.

A conversation with Nic Dunlop, the man who found and “wrote the book” on Kaing Guek Euv, better known as Comrade Duch.

He was the infamous head of S-21 - better known as Tuol Sleng - the Khmer Rouge prison and torture center.

Duch is the one who claimed Pol Pot ordered the murder of Haing Ngor - a conspiracy theory we dismiss.