They met in darkness. Pastor Christopher LaPel was tending to his tiny, ramshackle church in a remote part of Cambodia on a sweltering night in 1996 when he was approached by a man in his 50s with a soft, barely audible voice.

The man, who seemed profoundly depressed, introduced himself as Hang Pin, a high school math teacher. He seemed so small and meek, it was hard to imagine he would have anything out of the ordinary to say. But shaken, he told the pastor that his wife had been brutally murdered by intruders months before, and the attackers had bayoneted him in the back to try to kill him. Now, he said, he had to find God.

The next day, LaPel—a serious man who divides his time between his native Cambodia and a church in Los Angeles that is part of the Purpose Driven network of churches—stood in the middle of the Sangker River and baptized Hang Pin in the muddy runoff from upstream clothing factories.

Hang Pin embraced his new life. “He was the most astute Bible student I have ever had,” LaPel remembers. Soon Hang Pin was a lay pastor.

Four years passed. In the middle of the night, back in Los Angeles, LaPel got a phone call from a man he had never heard of. The man’s message was simple: “Hang Pin is Comrade Duch.”

LaPel fell to his knees in shock.

“I hit myself in the head,” he says.

He had recalled instantly that Duch—the nickname of Kaing Guek Eav—was the warden of the Khmer Rouge’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison. The meek, depressed man who had become a diligent minister was one of the bloodiest mass murderers the world has known.



In July 2008, I arrive in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, to trace the making and redemption of Comrade Duch, a man personally responsible for 17,000 killings. I am searching for victims and villains caught up in the murderous regime that all but destroyed Cambodian society in the 1970s as more than one and a half million people perished. I want to know what made Duch kill so many, why he repented, and to reach some conclusions about his sincerity—and God’s power to forgive. I am also prepared to hear challenges to an underpinning of theological belief—that someone as evil as Duch can indeed find redemption. Who was this man? Who is he now? Does he represent a sham or salvation? Evil itself or everlasting redemption?

I’m in Phnom Penh as the Royal Government of Cambodia and the United Nations are finally preparing to prosecute senior members of the Khmer Rouge nearly 30 years after the genocide of the Killing Fields. Duch is to be the first of them tried. His notoriety is so significant that hundreds of Cambodians have volunteered to work with the chief investigator, Youk Chhang, to assemble evidence against him.

I meet Youk at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which is located behind a wall on a tree-lined street in the city center. He is a cheery man with salt-and-pepper hair, a joyous smile, but—like the hundreds who have come forward to help him—he is haunted by bloody memories.

Youk tells me he has reviewed all the documents from the Tuol Sleng torture manual. Duch, he says, was very precise. He detailed exactly how he wanted his guards to inflict pain on the prisoners. “He took notes every day, every hour, every minute.” Among his favorite tortures was hanging prisoners upside down and plunging their heads into tubs of urine and feces to make them talk. He was particularly brutal to babies. He ordered his soldiers to grab them by their feet and bash their heads against trees until they died.

“He was an angry man, and he wanted to be somebody,” Youk says. “I can feel the anger in his handwriting. He would use red to show it. He would use words like ‘dogs,’ a curse word. For the Khmer people, to be called such names is worse than being killed.”

Duch would order interrogations and confessions, each of which he would sign off on. “He was very cold-blooded, and his handwriting is on almost every single confession,” Youk says. “The documents are the smoking gun. They will be the first line of evidence against him.”

But is the man going on trial now the same one who killed and tortured? He has confessed his own guilt, has been ministering to others in jail, and has agreed to testify against them in court. Has Duch’s faith earned him redemption or even a measure of mercy? Has faith changed him?

Youk Chhang has his doubts.

Photo: Nic Dunlop/Panos Pictures
Slideshow Photos: Sarah Caron/Polaris Images

After being jailed in isolation in a Cambodian military prison for the past eight years awaiting trial, Duch has been moved to a new detention center adjacent to the court. No one is allowed to see him there, not even his family—except for Pastor Christopher LaPel.

Following weeks of refusals, LaPel has agreed to meet with me. Accompanied by a Cambodian driver, a translator, and a French photographer, I set out for the remote province of Battambang, where the pastor is conducting Bible studies for local villagers. It is almost dark when we get there, six hours later. Turning down a dirt road lined with small shacks, we find the small white church with a carefully painted blue door where LaPel preaches.

This is the church where he first met Duch.

Young boys are playing soccer outside, and young girls are preparing a dinner of soup and chicken in the church kitchen when LaPel comes out to greet me. He’s friendly, but cautious. Duch is a part of his Christian family, and the pastor is not comfortable letting a reporter into this sacred inner circle.

But during dinner he warms, and invites me to attend Sunday service at his church the next morning. Although nearly 95 percent of Cambodians practice Hinayana Buddhism, this Christian church quickly fills with 200 men, women, and children wearing colorful Western clothes. As Pastor LaPel leads them in prayer, they break out in song: “Praise Jesus. Let him give us joy and help.” Dressed in an immaculate blue polo shirt, he waits for them to be seated. “Thank you, Jesus, for how much you have suffered for us,” he says, “sticking yourself onto the cross and taking our sins away.” Soon he beckons three former Khmer Rouge soldiers to join him. They are about to become his newest lay pastors.

Later, one of the soldiers, Long Pe, tells me he began murdering when he was little more than a child. Now he has been drawn to Christ, and is eager to convert others.

“Once the Khmer Rouge come to Christ, they are committed,” LaPel says. “They were fanatical Communists, and now they are fanatical Christians.”

The pastor himself came to Christianity late in life. When the service is over, he tells me about his remarkable journey. I begin to understand how he has been able to forgive a man who ordered soldiers to bash babies to death.
    


Pastor LaPel grew up in Phnom Penh, where he lived a privileged life as the son of a man who was a Brahmin Buddhist high priest and spiritual adviser to Prince Sihanouk, Cambodia’s late and revered monarch. On April 17, 1975, “a day I will never forget,” he says, Khmer Rouge soldiers in flatbed trucks, waving guns, roared     into the city. “They tell us that B-52 bombers will come   and bomb the city, so just get out for three days and come back,” he recalls. More than a million people left in scenes like those of the 1984 movie The Killing Fields. “It was chaos,” says LaPel. “The road was like human flooding, because if you didn’t go, they killed you.”

Three days became three and a half years of terror. The Khmer Rouge set about systematically annihilating entire classes of society—doctors, teachers, and intellectuals, even anyone who went to high school or college. The regime wanted to create a society of pure revolutionaries who would enable Cambodia, renamed Democratic Kampuchea, to become a Communist utopia. Its leaders sought to control everything—even what people thought and said. LaPel says merely thinking about the past became a crime, called “memory sickness,” that could lead to execution.

LaPel’s family fled across the country to Battambang and then split up, figuring it would be easier for each person to melt away separately as an anonymous worker in the rice paddies.

LaPel worked in those paddies every day, surviving on watery soup, rats, lizards, and crickets. His parents died in other paddies from overwork and malnutrition. He himself often became feverishly ill. Because he had no toothpaste except for a piece of charcoal and no comb except a piece of carved wood, he was barely able to brush his teeth or comb his hair for three years—three years that felt like 30, he says.

When you have no food and your body is always beaten, you are just waiting to die,” he whispers, his back rigid and dignified. “Most of my friends died from execution, overwork, starvation, or disease. You do not want to live, because it is so awful. Many times I told friends I would be willing to die if they would just let me eat one heaping plate of rice.”

LaPel lost 70 pounds, suffering from constant diarrhea and a fever of around 104 degrees—whether from malaria or typhoid or dengue fever, he never knew. There were no doctors left to turn to.

The strong survived. The educated did not.

“They would always ask, ‘Who are you? Have you been to school?’ ” he says. “If you told them you were once in high school or college, you’d die faster than anyone else.”

His brother and sister were executed. He had reason to think he would soon die too. “One night,” he remembers, his words hardly audible now, “I heard a voice call out my name, saying that a comrade of the Khmer Rouge wanted to see me. Someone dragged me out of my hut. I knew that I would be killed. Whenever someone called you out at night, it meant they were going to kill you. You know you are gone.”

Terrified, LaPel walked into the hut of the official who had asked for him. “They push me down,” he continues. “I am kneeling. And I lost my balance. And somebody put their hand on my head.” LaPel makes a gesture, as if about to slice his throat. “And suddenly they noticed that I had a cross. Even though my father forbade it, and before I even came to Jesus, I always wore a cross. I don’t know why, it just made me feel safe.”

Light reflected from the cross. The official hesitated. Then he said, “He is very sick. Let him go back and rest.”

The Khmer Rouge gave him medicine and food, he says, fighting back tears. “They took care of me. I don’t know why. I believe that cross saved my life.”

In that moment, LaPel decided to give himself to God. But he also decided something else. He came to a conclusion that may mystify many who have endured pain at the hands of others and want only revenge. He concluded that if the monsters of the Khmer Rouge had saved him, he could choose to save the monsters of the Khmer Rouge.

“When I became a Christian and learned that God is love I wanted to share Christ with them,” he explains. “God is love, and God is light—and I wanted them to see the light. The Khmer Rouge was filled with hatred. I told them, ‘If you open your heart, God can take you from hate to love. If you are willing to open your heart, you can go from despair to peace.’ ”

He pauses. “I do not see them as monsters. I see them as men who live in darkness, filled with sin. God will show them the way to hope.



Back in Phnom Penh, I visit the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, where Duch’s trial will take place.

It is a massive facility with walls the color of gold and a sentry at each of its three large red gates. Duch and four other top Khmer Rouge prisoners are being held here, hidden in the back of the facility, behind a five-meter wall topped with barbed wire. Since some of them are old and feeble, an ambulance is parked nearby, with doctors and nurses on call around the clock.

LaPel has told me that at the prison, where Duch was held for eight years, Duch read the Bible to other prisoners and the guards. He gave his testimonial of how he had been turned from the devil to Jesus, and in so doing spread the Word to other, lower-level Khmer Rouge soldiers in the jail. Once they were released, many of these soldiers traveled to Battambang to meet LaPel. And now, the pastor says, Duch is trying to share Christ with inmates and guards in his new prison.

I try to enter the prison, but the authorities refuse to allow me to see Duch, and his lawyers won’t even speak to me. Then I am introduced to Helen Jarvis, chief of public relations for the United Nations tribunal, who in turn asks Duch’s French lawyer, François Roux, to reconsider an interview. Roux relents, but reveals nothing—except that he is annoyed that LaPel has been talking to me.

I begin searching for anyone who has known Duch. I soon hear that his mother is alive in Siem Reap, home         of Cambodia’s famed temple complex, Angkor Wat. After a long drive, I arrive at night and am told I must check in with the village chief to get her address. But the chief is not in his office. He’s outside in a pond, scrubbing his back with a long wooden brush. “Come back at six in the morning,” he says. But at six all he says is that Duch’s mother has moved. No, they don’t know how to find her.

When I tell LaPel about the dead ends, he arranges for me to meet Duch’s daughter and sister, who live in Samlaut. The daughter, Ky Shiv Kim, was born long after the Khmer Rouge atrocities ended. A pretty, slender shy girl, she is nursing her eight-month-old son when I find her. Her aunt, Kim Hong Kim, sits next to her.

Silent moments pass as we stare at each other uncomfortably. Finally, the aunt—Duch’s sister—starts to tell me about him. She says her brother was a loner as a child, who loved books more than people. In 1969, filled with patriotism, he joined the Khmer Rouge with other young idealistic Communist rebels. As he rose through the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, the group’s patriotism turned to bloodthirsty paranoia—and perhaps his did too.

In 1979, the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by a small Cambodian force backed by 150,000 Vietnamese troops. Duch fled to the countryside, where he took on the identity of Hang Pin, married, had four children, and became a respected teacher.

His sister says she never asked him what he did with the Khmer Rouge. She didn’t want to know. But eventually she learned he became the warden of the Tuol Sleng, a former high school he helped convert into a center for mass interrogation and torture, where he then meticulously supervised and documented the rituals of death. Men and women were chained together in a row, sometimes 100 at a time, and forced into cells on the second floor of the school, a claustrophobic torture that led many to leap to their deaths when the leg chains were unbolted. The torture and the 17,000 deaths were documented—and discovered once the Khmer Rouge were forced from power.

Did his daughter ever see a sign of the brutal man he’d been? “He was strict,” she says. “But not really a tough guy. He made us do chores, but he never touched his children. He was mostly strict towards himself.”

“Everyone said he was a good teacher, and he was a good principal too,” says his sister Hong. “Everyone always praised him, because he was the best among the teachers.”

For 20 years, Duch was a respected family man and teacher, showing no sign that he had ever been anything other than an ordinary member of society. Then one night, intruders broke into his house, ordered him and his wife and children onto the floor, and bayoneted his wife to death. Duch was repeatedly bayoneted in the back—a Khmer Rouge punishment for betrayal.

He didn’t die. But his life of deception did. Forced to face himself and all the killings he had caused, including his wife’s, he spiraled into the profound depression that led him to Pastor LaPel. When life hurts, God heals.


    
When the Vietnamese invaded in 1979, leading to the fall of the regime, Pastor LaPel fled over the border to a refugee camp in Thailand, where he met Vanna, the woman who became his wife. It was the beginning of a journey that has taken him to the comfort of the church, and eventually back to Cambodia, where his ministry has planted more than 200 churches.

In 1980, LaPel and his wife immigrated to Lincoln, Nebraska, where she had a sister, and later that year moved to California. While in the U.S. he began working in churches and eventually became a pastor of the Golden West Christian Church in Los Angeles. About ten years ago he attended a Pastors’ Conference at Saddleback Church. He says he came away from the conference with a vision: to build a community of churches in Cambodia.

“This is part of the Rick Warren idea to focus on a larger dream,” LaPel says. “I knew that I had to do it in Cambodia. My heart is there, with my people. I want them to know God’s love and to have hope and a real life in Christ. It was really tough, especially in a Buddhist country, but I never have fear.”

Duch was his best Bible student. He took the best notes of anyone LaPel had ever taught. “After he was baptized, he was completely changed, 180 degrees,” LaPel says. “I can see his face; it shone with joy and peace.”

Duch soon baptized 14 families in his village and started a church in his home. During a battle between the government and an attempted rebel coup in 1997, he, his sister, and their families escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand, where he became a health worker. His sister says she worked as a midwife and a nurse, and he became an administrator at the hospital and tried to spread the word of Christ.

“He ministered to refugees,” says LaPel. “He wrote to me about it and that was the last word I got from him for a long time. When he moved back to Cambodia, he was taken into custody.”

Duch—Pastor Hang Pin, as he was known—had ministered for about three years when a tip from two journalists led to his 1999 arrest. His sister says she did not find out her brother was Duch until the day the police cars pulled   up in front of his house. Does she feel shame? No, she says; her brother was just acting on orders. My mind immediately flashes on the image of the Nazi executioner Adolf Eichmann.

“What created the Khmer Rouge is a mystery,” his sister says. “It was like everybody faced the same circumstances. You were either beaten or you were a slave or you were killed. Everyone just tried to survive.”

Now things are different for her brother, she says. “He has a commitment. He always tells me, ‘Accept the Lord. Only Christ has the answer.’ His faith is very strong.”



But Youk Chhang, the investigator who has helped the prosecution, has a different point of view. Whether Duch’s conversion is sincere or not, Youk says, justice demands that he be judged in court.

Youk has his own story of Khmer Rouge cruelty, revenge, and forgiveness.

“I was imprisoned at age 13,” he says. “The Khmer Rouge tortured me and beat me up. They killed my sister and all my mother’s brothers and sisters.”

He shrugs. He is so open and good-humored, it is hard to imagine what he has been through. “After the war, I got very angry. I wanted to beat up the Khmer Rouge who tortured me. But I learned from my mother that revenge is not the answer. The village chief who was responsible for my sister’s death went to my mother’s home and washed her feet and then asked for her forgiveness. And she forgave him. This was a very brutal man, but my mother said, ‘Enough.’ ”

There’s been enough revenge, Youk says. We need to forgive. But society also demands justice. And justice will come, Youk says, at the trial.

But what about Duch’s beliefs? Isn’t his dramatic conversion from killer to respected teacher, then to pastor and repentant Khmer Rouge enough to redeem him?

Truth be told, it is hard to find many in Cambodia who believe in Duch’s sincerity. Youk skirts around the spiritual implications of the question. He pauses for a while to collect his thoughts. “I think Duch was living with guilt and perhaps looking for something to reconcile with, within himself,” he says. “Duch is looking for an exit strategy, an internal reconciliation with himself. But he dare not go to anybody here, because they are all his enemies. The only ones he can go to are Christians.”

Buddhist monks I interview later at their temple are even more dismissive. “Duch has become a Christian to earn points,” one monk scoffs. “In our belief, you take your sins with you to the next life. Duch will surely come back in a form befitting his crime.”

What sort of form of life? The monk doesn’t hesitate. “A bug.”

How is it possible for a man responsible for 17,000 murders to be forgiven? “A song says it best,” says Pastor John Rowe, director of planned giving at Hope International University in Fullerton, California. “‘Redeemed, how I love to claim it. Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. Redeemed by his infinite mercy, his child forever I am.’

“To be redeemed is to be forgiven. To be forgiven is, according to 1 Peter 3:18, our appeal to God for a clear conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To be redeemed, for me, is to have and keep a clear conscience today, which requires considerable confession and forgiveness, and to have the steadfast hope of an eternal life.”

“The question of redemption is epic,” says Pastor Gonzalo Rodriguez of Good Shepherd Baptist Church in New Orleans. “We have an authority on this, and the  authority is the Bible. We do it by the book. In the Bible we find that there is no sin God cannot forgive. If you repent, God will forgive, even if the laws of earth demand that you suffer the consequences of the crime.”

That Pastor LaPel can forgive and that Duch can be forgiven is not an act of this world, says Rick Warren. It is too big for any human to accomplish. It is an act of God.



I decide to visit the museum at Tuol Sleng to help me better grasp the human horror of what Duch did. Here the blood of thousands of prisoners who were systematically numbered, photographed, interrogated and tortured, and then sent off to die is still on the walls. Harnesses and chains that held prisoners down are in the rooms; the weapons of torture, like iron handcuffs, are everywhere. There are photos of every prisoner who came through the doors, their faces lining the rooms, haunting me.

You can almost hear the screams and cries. And you can see the torture with your own eyes because there are paintings, dozens of them, all made by one man, an artist named Vann Nath.

I call Vann Nath and we meet at his studio. He arrives with Tiger Balm to relieve the headache he says he knows he will have after talking about Tuol Sleng. He is one of a handful of prisoners who got out alive.

Vann Nath remembers being interrogated by Duch. Vann Nath refused to confess, and was only spared execution because Duch commanded him to paint a portrait of the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, instead.

Two months ago, Vann Nath saw Duch again when the former warden was taken back to Tuol Sleng as part of a pretrial investigation. There Duch had to face some of his former guards and accusers, and reenacted his crimes.

Duch stood in the room where blood spatters still stain the walls and floor, where men and women were chained and beaten. “He was standing across from me,” Vann Nath says. “He was crying. He was screaming.” Vann Nath begins rubbing the Tiger Balm into his throbbing temples. “He kept saying, ‘I am sorry. I am sorry.’”



I want to speak to Pastor LaPel one more time before I leave Cambodia to ask him about his last visit with Duch in prison.

LaPel says that at first the guards would not allow him in. It took hours, and repeated calls to a judge, before he got through the locked gates and into the detention center that Duch now calls home.

“When he saw me, he ran to me, crying,” the pastor says. “He said, ‘I am happy. No matter what, I won’t give up the faith.’”

“I brought him a Bible,” LaPel says, “because they took the one he had. He told me he has been ministering in prison. He wanted me to have a service, and he invited three of the guards in to worship. And I prepared Communion and read Psalm 23: ‘The Lord is my shepherd.’ ”

One by one, the other hard-core Khmer Rouge leaders joined them: first, Ieng Sary, who had been deputy prime minister for foreign affairs for the Khmer Rouge, then Khieu Samphan, the head of state during the regime. “Duch told me he wants them to know the Word of God.”

LaPel smiles, radiant.

But doesn’t he have doubts about this man? Doesn’t he need to question Duch about his terrible past? “I want to ask him why he did it, but I cannot,” he says. “I am not a reporter. I am his pastor.”

But Duch did tell him this: “I am ready for the trial. I will testify.”

Pastor LaPel says that God caused Duch to confess. The killer who is now a pastor will be the only one among the Khmer Rouge leadership who will admit what he did and repent his crimes. The relief LaPel feels in knowing that this one lost soul will testify is palpable. Duch, he believes, will be redeemed.

“I am sure he will testify, and he will not lie,” LaPel says. “He told me, ‘I will speak the total truth.

“‘And that will set me free.’”