Thomas Merton died suddenly in Thailand in 1968. His biography, authorized by, and with the cooperation of, Merton’s home abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, was published in 1984. At that point, essentially all that the public knew—or thought they knew—about Merton’s death was what John Wheeler, the Associated Press reporter based in Bangkok, had written in his wire service report the day after the death, and what Brother Patrick Hart of the Gethsemani Abbey had written in 1973 in the postscript to The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. Wheeler, citing anonymous “Catholic sources” had reported that Merton had been electrocuted by a faulty electric fan, with no evidentiary support. In fact, he stated that the death was in Bangkok and that Merton had been missed at lunch, neither of which was true.[1] Brother Hart had added only that Merton was wet from just having taken a shower when he encountered the fan.[2] Like Wheeler, he offered no evidence for his belated revelation.
As the authorized biographer, the British-born American academician, poet, and novelist, Michael Mott, had access to the official death investigation materials that had been sent to the abbey. These included the report of the Thai police with the testimony of witnesses, the report of the Thai doctor on the scene, and letters by witnesses.
With his source materials on Thomas Merton’s death, he had an unparalleled opportunity to set the record straight. He did, in fact, make several important revelations that were new to the public:
- the official cause of death was not “accidental,”
- the Thai authorities engaged in a cover-up,
- Merton suffered a head wound that had bled considerably,
- initial witnesses photographed the scene,
- there was no autopsy,
- the U.S. military arrived to remove Merton’s body.
Despite these revelations, Mott’s apparent intent was to preserve the common conception of Merton’s death from accidental electrocution. Revealing these facts about the incident that had previously been suppressed presented him with serious challenges. As we shall see, Mott was not always able to meet those challenges without concealing significant evidence.
Heart Failure, Not Electrocution
The U.S. Embassy Report, Thai death certificate, and Thai police report concluded that the cause of Merton’s death was “sudden heart failure.” The police concluded that he was already dead from that natural cause before he encountered an electric fan.[3] An initial December article, in The New York Times, using the Gethsemani Abbey as the source, reported, “The cause of death was officially listed as heart failure.” The article added that “Merton was found in his room at 4 P.M. badly burned by a shock he had apparently received from a standing electrical fan that had toppled over on him.”[4] To the readers it may have appeared that a shock may have caused the heart failure.
Mott makes a labored attempt to leave the same impression as The New York Times by directing the reader’s attention first to the defective fan:
The fan was sent to the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, where it was found to have a “defective electric cord installed inside its stand. When the cord contacted the metal stand, it caused an electrical leakage throughout the fan. This flow of electricity was strong enough to cause the death of a person if he touched the metal part.”
The Bangkok Police report concluded:
“However, the Investigating Officer questioned Dr. Luksana Narkvachara whose views were that Reverend Thomas Merton died because of:
- Heart failure.
- And that the cause mentioned in 1. Caused the dead priest to faint and collide with the stand fan located in the room. The fan had fallen onto the body of Reverend Thomas Merton. The head of the dead priest had hit the floor…”[5]
Despite Mott’s verbal trickery, there’s no escaping the fact that the Thai police officially concluded that Merton was dead from the natural cause of heart failure before falling into the faulty fan, a highly unlikely happenstance, to understate the case. Mott had previously told us that Merton had been found lying on his back with the five-foot high fan lying across his body. It’s quite difficult to reconcile that scene with the scenario that the Thai police postulated.
Two paragraphs later we have this from Mott:
The immediate question at the conference was confined to the cause of death, where there appeared to be two causes, electrocution and heart failure. The police investigation had not inspired much confidence. Many felt electrocution was played down to protect the reputation of the conference center. It may have been so.
The important thing to realize is that this dispute over the cause of Merton’s death simply did not exist in the eyes of the general public, at least outside Thailand. They had been told without a shadow of doubt that Merton had been electrocuted by a faulty fan.
Furthermore, that the Thai police conducted, in effect, a cover-up, ostensibly to protect the reputation of the local Red Cross center is not a matter of conjecture. Dr. Narkvachara had told the witness Fr. Celestine Say that that was their purpose.[6] We do not learn that from Mott, though but from Say’s letters. Mott also fails to tell his readers that the Thai newspapers dutifully reported simply that Merton had died of heart failure, not by electrocution by a faulty fan.[7] The reason for that, one might speculate, would have been to avoid a lawsuit that would have forced a true investigation of the death.
A Wound in the Back of Merton’s Head
The two sentences that Mott uses for this very important new revelation are very revealing in their own right:
“Little attention seems to have been given to a wound on the back of Merton’s head that had bled considerably. The obvious solution appears to be that it was caused when his head struck the floor.”[8]
Little attention, indeed! What Mott does not tell us is that there is no mention of any such wound in the official Thai reports. Imagine that. And Mott’s “obvious solution” for it is in a league with the dead priest fainting and falling into a defective fan. The floor of Merton’s bedroom where his body was found is smooth and level, and people don’t fall that way. A wound that “bled considerably” strongly suggests that the wound was a puncture wound, that is to say, that there was a hole in Merton’s skull. What innocent explanation could there be for the apparent lack of curiosity of the Thai police about that wound?
And if the wound had bled a lot, that means Merton was found lying in a pool of blood. Mott says nothing about that likelihood.
Mott is least believable when he says that things are “obvious.” Right after his two sentences revealing the bleeding head wound, we have this assurance from him: “However confused it is, the evidence still speaks overwhelmingly for an accident.”
A cornerstone for Mott’s “massive electric shock” argument is the shock that the witness Odo Haas supposedly received when he initially touched the fan:
“Without realizing that the fan was alive, Haas tried to lift it away, only to be given an electric shock that jerked him sideways. He was held to the shaft of the fan until Father Celestine managed to unplug the fan at the outlet, which was under the bed across the room.”[9]
That description of the powerful electric shock that Haas received is found only in an unsigned typewritten statement supposedly by Haas. We show in The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation that the document with that statement is obviously fraudulent. Curiously, Mott does not cite the fake document in his book. Rather, he references a letter by the witness, Fr. Celestine Say, which could not be true, because Fr. Say said simply that Haas recoiled, as one would expect, from touching the electrified fan and when he asked Haas about the shock he said that it was only a slight one. Secondhand witnesses, Reverand Rembert Weakland, who presided over the monastic conference, and Sr. Edeltrud Weist, who was a medical doctor, have also stated that Haas only received a “slight shock” when he touched the fan.[10]
No Autopsy
How could anyone make any sort of confident assertion about the cause of Merton’s death in the absence of something so fundamental as an autopsy? Mott revealed that there had been no autopsy near the end of his section on Merton’s death, and it’s quite revealing to see how he eases into the subject:
“While there are some grounds for the rumor he was murdered, they do not seem plausible. It is only a matter of real regret that his death was investigated in such a bungled and amateurish fashion and that there was no autopsy.
“Merton’s body was taken to the U.S. air base in Bangkok. In the bureaucratic red tape that developed, his Order waived an autopsy in Asia to speed his return to the United States.”
In an endnote Mott pondered several difficulties in having an autopsy performed in Thailand and potential delays that it may involve.
At this point, the most important fact that Mott concealed in his narrative comes into play. Everything in the endnote is moot, because the body was never in any Thai medical facility. In an unexplained departure from protocol in the case of the death of an American civilian in a foreign country, members of the U.S. military came to the Red Cross Center at 1:30 am on December 11 and took the body to a nearby U.S. military hospital.[11]
Once the American military had taken possession of Merton’s body, international bureaucracy and any supposed Thai medical shortcomings were irrelevant. Mott conceals these basic facts with a false statement that the body was released by the police to Abbot Weakland, then washed and taken to the chapel at the conference center, where vigil was kept, and at ten the next morning a Requiem Mass was celebrated.
The Body Photograph
The three witnesses who first saw the scene, were the monks Celestine Say, Odo Haas, and Egbert Donovan. They all found it very curious, with Merton lying on his back with his arms down by his side and the fan lying diagonally across his body. Say’s room was just across the vestibule, so Haas suggested that Say get his camera and photograph the scene for the benefit of the police investigators.[12] Only after the Thai doctor told Say that, for the sake of convenience, they were going to conclude that Merton had died of natural causes did Say decide not even to tell the Thai investigators about his photographs.
Mott might well be at his most dishonest in his discussion of Say’s photographs. He completely neutralizes them by saying that they were taken only after the scene had been disturbed.[13] That allows him to speculate about whether the body was naked and whether Merton was wet from a shower. Having access to the same letters that we read, he knew that Merton’s body was found in his summer pajamas shorts with the fan across it. That scene also matches with the sketch that Sr. Weist drew in her hand-written witness statement.
Concerning the supposed shower, Brother Patrick Hart is the source for that in his postscript to The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton in which he states that Merton, upon arriving back at the cottage, “proceeded to take a shower.” Just as Mott has no reference to the spurious Haas witness document, he has no reference to Hart’s postscript. Hart’s declarative statement would have been inconsistent with Mott’s own guesswork about the shower.
The ”Death Fan’s” Reputable Manufacturer
Mott tells us, with reference to a letter from Fr. Say, that, “The standing fan had been on day and night during that hot week,” but nowhere does he tell us that that perfectly functional fan, as we learn from Say’s letters, was made by Hitachi.[14] How, we must wonder, did this fan made by such a reputable manufacturer suddenly become mis-wired and potentially lethal? Mott dampens any such speculation by withholding the manufacturer’s name. He would also have us believe that the fan in Merton’s room that had been working so well is the same as the mis-wired one that was found lying across Merton’s body, practically inviting people to conclude that it was the death instrument.
Mott, as we have indicated, does give us something of the flavor or the shabbiness of the Thai police investigation, but he would have gone quite a bit further in that regard had he told us that it was not dated or signed and that the names of witnesses mentioned are all wildly misspelled. It’s as though they intentionally wanted to make it difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to track down those witnesses to hear what they had to say for themselves. Mott also fails to tell us about the official witness statements that were sent to the Abbey of Gethsemani that have never been allowed to see that light of day, which the abbey now says have been lost.
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[1] John T. Wheeler, “Thomas Merton Dies in Electrocution Accident,” Associated Press, December 11, 1968. In actual fact, Fr. Celestine Say sat across from Merton at lunch and gave him the key to the cottage when he left with Fr. François de Grunne. (Celestine Say, letter to John Moffitt, July 1, 1969, Moffitt papers.).
[2] Brother Patrick Hart, postscript, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, New Directions, 1973, pp. 258-259
[3] The conclusion of police investigation report on the death of Reverend Thomas Merton, author unknown, date unknown, the Merton Center.
[4] Israel Shenker, “Thomas Merton Dead at 53; Monk Wrote of Search for God,” The New York Times, December 11, 1968.
[5] Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, Houghton Mifflin Company 1984, p.566.
[6] Celestine Say, letter to Flavian Burns, Mar. 18, 1969, the Merton Center.
[7] John Howard Griffin, The Hermitage Journals: A Diary Kept While Working on the Biography of Thomas Merton (Edited by Conger Beasley, Jr.), Image Books, 1983, p. 4. Griffin’s source for that information is an article entitled “Dernier Souvenirs,” in French by the conference attendee, Jean Leclercq. He does not say where the article appeared.
[8] Mott, op. cit., p.566.
[9] Ibid., p.565.
[10] Rembert Weakland, “Merton, A Film Biography produced by Paul Wilkes. M. Edeltrud Weist, Report on the first impressions after Rev. F. Thomas Merton’s tragic death given by an eyewitness, handwritten note, Bangkok, Dec. 11, 1968, the Merton Center.
[11] Bernardo Perez, O.S.B., “The Death of a Monk,” Philippines Free Press, April 5, 1969
[12] Celestine Say, letter to Flavian Burns, Mar. 18, 1969, the Merton Center.
[13] Hugh Turley and David Martin, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton, McCabe, 2018, pp.165-168
[14] Celestine Say, letter to John Moffitt, July 1, 1969, Moffitt papers.
David Martin and Hugh Turley
Delivered by Hugh Turley by Zoom call to a conference in homage to Thomas Merton at the Argentine chapter of the International Thomas Merton Society at the National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina, on August 28, 2025.