page_title: John Dawson Dewhirst
section_title: S-21 records
hierarchical_section_title: John Dawson Dewhirst / S-21 records
caption_attribution_description: English: John Dawson Dewhirst forced confession when being tortured by the Cambodian Pol Pot Regime in the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh.
context_page_description: John Dawson Dewhirst was a British teacher and amateur yachtsman who was one of nine westerners, and two Britons, known to fall victim to the Khmer Rouge during the rule of Pol Pot.
context_section_description: In early 1979, Vietnam defeated Democratic Kampuchea and overthrew the Pol Pot regime. They liberated Democratic Kampuchea's S-21 prison in the capital Phnom Penh where an estimated 20,000 people (the real number is unknown) had been sent for torture and execution (or taken to the Killing Fields for execution after being tortured), many of them for supposedly spying against Cambodia. Alleged photographs and forced confessions of nine missing Western yachtsmen (four Americans, two Australians, plus those of John Dewhirst and Kerry Hamill) were found in the prison files. The confessions of Dewhirst and Hamill revealed that they had been seized by a Khmer Rouge patrol vessel near the island of Koh Tang on the evening of 13 August 1978. Stuart Glass, the Canadian befriended by Dewhirst and Hamill, had been shot and killed during Foxy Lady's capture. Hamill and Dewhirst were both brought ashore and then taken by truck to Phnom Penh. Like the other Western yachtsmen, they were almost certainly tortured. The extent of their mistreatment is not clear. Dewhirst wrote several long confessions that mixed true events in his life with false accounts of his career as a CIA agent planning to subvert the Khmer Rouge regime. He claimed that his father (also an agent) had been paid a large bribe for inducting his son into the CIA and that his college course in Loughborough was interspersed with training as a spy. Dewhirst and Hamill signed a series of confessions between 3 September and 13 October 1978. 
   The former administrator of the prison, Kang Kek Iew (also known as "Comrade Duch"), said that he remembered Dewhirst as "very polite".
caption: John Dawson Dewhirst's first page of a forced confession when being tortured by the Cambodian Pol Pot Regime in the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh.
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