Thomas Merton’s Authorized Biographer
Revealed and What He Concealed
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:
1.
Heart
failure.
2.
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.
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
Michael Mott, op. cit.
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.
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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] Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, Houghton Mifflin Company
1984, p.566.
[9] Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, Houghton Mifflin Company
1984, 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.