Sandra Gregory "Forget You Had A Daughter"

[Guest]

Sandra Gregory is a British Woman who served 8 years of a 25 year sentence for attempting to smuggle 89 grammes of heroine from Thailand to Japan. Half her sentence was spent in Lard Yao womens prison in Bangkok, the rest in the UK. This book is her story of what happened.

 

I found it hard to like or even feel sympathy for her. She was selfish and stupid although I dont think she was naive. She carried the drugs for a friend, Robert Locke, who it transpired was known to both UK and Thai authorities. He claimed they were for his own personal use and agreed to pay her 1000 pounds. She needed the money for an air ticket back to the UK and incredibly readily agreed. They were picked up as they arrived at Don Muang and both arrested.

 

Her account of life in Lard Yao is the most compelling thing in the book, although, suprisingly, she found it far harder to adapt to prison life in the UK where she was moved around a number of top security prisons for reasons not exactly specified. She even knocked around with Rose West, wife of Fred for a while in Durham prison. She is very fair to Thailand and the Thais but the Thai judicial and prison systems fare appallingly, which isn't suprising and she doesnt spare the gory details of prison life, including a tale of a dead body left so long in the sun on the hospital roof that it exploded in the heat!

 

It is an interesting and open account, although she gives the impression that she hasn't told the whole story especially about why she was treated as she was in the UK, and why she needed a grand for an air ticket which in 1993 would have cost a couple of hundred quid.

 

There is an introduction by white suited ex anti-sleaxe MP and BBC reporter Martin Bell who suggests that the book should be required reading. It certainly should be by anyone stupid enough to shove some packets of heroine up their fanny for an air ticket.

[thai3]

 

The bitch should have served the whole sentence, at least she could have been honest about the reason for doing it. But to admit to being just plain greedy would not have cast her in the role of innocent victim, which is how most of these scumbags want to be seen. No sympathy with her at all, hope most of the books don't sell.-peter