D
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I know I am responding to an old post, but in that article, they speak to Thai people who knew her in Portsmouth. She told them her husband had managed to "find a job" in Yorkshire.
From
It looks like I killed my Thai wife in the Dales but I can prove my innocence
THE Sun tracked down university lecturer David Armitage to his remote Thai home to ask if he had any part in his wife’s suspicious death – and he dodged the question. Instead, he hid behind the adv…
www.thesun.co.uk
It clarifies he was a teacher at a FE College, basically a 6th Form. "Finding a job" implies that after 12 years working in Portsmouth he was no longer working. Teachers are sort of restricted when they can start in a new job; its tied into term times.
But they didn't go to Yorkshire. They next rocked up in Rugby, both on the electoral roll, so she had a UK passport by then, but also, Rugby was intended to be a destination, and probably they were there early 2003 at least. Could she have gotten "Warwickshire" mixed up with "Yorkshire". I'm not sure if the journalist made a mistake, but he indicated that DA was originally from Rugby; his folks are from Yorkshire, but perhaps he had connections to Rugby before he went off to Thailand to teach for a bit.
And its curious why her Thai acquaintices say she just left Portsmouth without saying goodbye. My experience with my Thai wife is that Thai women are quite gregarious around other Thai women. They meet one, and 5 minutes later, they are friends for life, on social media, not just Facebook.
The house the family are photographed in front of is the one in Rugby where they registered to vote. A commented on, they weren't there long, so the job DA had there seems to have just lasted months before moving it seems to his mum and dads small bungalow in Carnforth. 3 kids aged 4 to 13, 4 adults, in a 3 bed semi bungalow, and that third room would have been small.
By then, DA was a 40 year old teacher who's career seems to have fallen apart in short order., back living with his parents in a tiny house, with a wife who likely had a limited command of English (but she tries). The job he took in Portsmouth in 1991 paid £21,000. I returned to the UK to take a postdoc position in 1996, and I was on £18,000, so he was paid ok. His salary would bave been on the up and up as his advanced up the scales; not big money, but comfortable enough, so a bit surprised that by 2000-2002, they struggled to pay the bills. And teaching posts are normally pretty steady jobs. Teachers aren't often made redundant. but they can be fired.
Evidently she sent money to her parents in Thailand
His mother died in 2012, and a tribute posted by his father and sister (but not him) on a charity page indicated she had been in a local nursing home since 2007. An obituary placed in a paper mentioned the entire family (except her), including all her children as "grandchildren".
Some odd coincidences in 2007.
2007 was when the "Lady of the Hills" was buried, and likely that would have been quite a headline locally.
In 2007, DA moved to Thailand, taking his two children, aged 8 and 15, with him, to go work at the place that probably gave him his first job. He left her son, his stepson, aged 16 or thereabouts, with his father (my assumption is his mother probably had dementia).
That's odd. His mum is now in a care home. There is a question about the bills, and finances, looking after dad (I know how traumatic it is when a parent goes into care. It usually starts off following some sort of crisis). I don't think the senior Armitages had that much money; their house was sold in 2018 for about £180k, probably when his dad went into care (passing 3 years later). 8 years of care home bills to pay; that money is all gone. He basically abandons his dad.
His wife had disappeared some years before. The story about her going off with another man in very rural area full of old people (its a street of bungalows) is nonsense it seems. Even if that was a story he made up to explain to the kids why mum had gone (forgetting the fact he didn't report it), if it was the case she had simply disappeared one weekend, surely the Lady of the Hills would have intrigued him.
So all that going on, and he decides to up sticks, aged 45, with two kids, and move to back where it all started, maybe to a place where he was really happy before, living on not a lot of money.
And lets be blunt about how it all started. He was a 29 year old teacher in Chiang Mai, a bit old to be back packing around Asia after Uni, so maybe he had a UK teaching job before, thought it blowed and headed to SEA. In 90-91, he would likely have been on 25-30,000 Baht. Lamduan was likely a bar girl having moved to a city full of farang, 10 years on, and its all gone a bit crap. His job hasn't worked out, his gut is bigger, his wife is ill and feeling homesick. His mum is also ill. He's not going to inherit the house. I reckon his internet history would be interesting during that time.
