Death of Dave Walker

Dave Walker was a Canadian writer, filmmaker and photo-journalist born in Edmonton on April 7, 1955. Before his career in media, he briefly served as a Toronto Police constable and later joined the British Army, serving in Belfast, Northern Ireland during "The Troubles," where he saw combat against the Provisional IRA as part of an urban reconnaissance unit trained by and seconded to the Special Air Service. After his enlistment, he returned to Canada and worked as a private investigator before beginning assignments in Southeast Asia. In the late 1980s, he located a missing Cambodian refugee girl and reunited her with her family in Canada, and he worked with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to help identify Khmer Rouge genocide perpetrators who had entered Canada among Cambodian refugees.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Walker trained Karen National Liberation Army insurgents on the Thailand–Myanmar border, where he met his future wife; they later divorced amicably after five years in Canada. During the 1990s and 2000s, he worked as a freelance photo-journalist, screenwriter, and film production fixer, including work on the film "The Beach" and with ABC News' Diane Sawyer during coverage of the 2004 tsunami. He also collaborated with Canadian filmmakers Peter Lynch and Peter Vronsky. In 1998 he published "Hello My Big, Big Honey!," a co-edited collection of love letters from Bangkok bar workers to their foreign boyfriends. In the early 1990s, Walker had been co-producing an independent film he wrote, "The Man from Year Zero," with actor Haing S. Ngor, but the project collapsed after Ngor was murdered in Los Angeles in 1996.

In 2009, Walker earned an M.A. at York University in Toronto studying Augmented Reality, producing a short film, "The Augmented Cambodian," before returning to Cambodia. In 2012 he began researching a documentary, "The Poorest Man," about a former Khmer Rouge village chief who had saved villagers during the Pol Pot regime. Because many former Khmer Rouge members had returned to positions in Cambodian government, police, military and business while claiming they had no choice in their past actions, Walker's proposed film faced hostility from some sectors in Cambodia.

On February 14, 2014, Walker disappeared after leaving his guest house in Cambodia. Hotel staff said cleaning staff visited his room around 2 p.m. and he stated he would step out so the room could be cleaned; he left carrying a bottle of water and never returned. Canada had no embassy in Cambodia at the time and limited involvement in the case, while Cambodian authorities faced resource and forensic limitations. Walker had no immediate family to advocate for him, and multiple private investigations pursued by his friends reportedly became rivalrous. On May 1, 2014, children found his body at the Angkor Temple Complex near the "Gates of Death" at Angkor Thom, roughly 13 kilometers from where he vanished. Two autopsies, one commissioned by his family, could not determine a cause of death but indicated he had died weeks earlier, likely on the day he disappeared. His remains were recovered by his ex-wife's family, cremated, and enshrined in the northern Thai village where he had met her, per his wishes. His disappearance and death remain unsolved.