At first the reports said it was a suicide. On June 4 actor David Carradine, 72, had died in a Bangkok hotel room—naked, alone, and hanging in a closet—apparently by his own hand. Almost immediately, though, other theories began to surface: Carradine wasn’t the type to take his own life; he must have died from autoerotic asphyxiation, just a sad case of solo sex-play gone wrong. No, others speculated,

Carradine had been murdered. Celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos went on Larry King Live at the behest of the Carradine family and seriously proposed that Carradine might have died at the hands of kung fu assassins—ninjas!—threatened by his noted work in exposing their ancient secrets. When a color photo appeared in the Thai newspaper Thairath showing a man—Carradine, the paper said—with his hands tied over his head dangling from a hanging rod in the closet of a tiny hotel room, a woman’s red negligee crumpled on the bed, Geragos threatened to sue any U.S. publication that took the bait and reprinted it. That didn’t stop countless Web sites from hosting the grisly images. How someone could get himself into that position on his own was difficult to imagine. But follow-up reports in the Thai media of a thin black cord looped around his neck, wrists, and scrotum convinced the prurient press that the beloved star of Kung Fu and Kill Bill had a major sideways sex jones.

Still, even at a distance of 10,000 miles, it was apparent that the slight torso and short black hair of the victim in the photo was at odds with the paunchy, road-traveled, silver-maned Carradine.

The photograph raised a number of questions about the scion of a Hollywood dynasty who boozed and brawled his way through a four-decade career. Was Carradine, the screen icon who personified Zen stoicism as Caine in the ’70s series Kung Fu, actually more of a sexual than spiritual seeker? Was the grizzled veteran whom Quentin Tarantino called “one of Hollywood’s great mad geniuses” in fact a tortured soul ready to check out? And wasn’t it a little too convenient that such a sordid suicide should take place in Bangkok, the sex capital of the world?

I wanted to know, which is how I came to be standing in a secluded corner on the grounds of the Swissotel Nai Lert Park Hotel—a five-story, five-star establishment—having just spent 23 hours in a cramped China Airlines 747, followed by a teeth-rattling cab ride through the smog-choked, sweltering squalor of metro Bangkok, dodging rickshaws and limbless sidewalk cripples begging for change. I’ve come here to follow in Carradine’s steps and try to reconstruct his final days.

In a tranquil garden on the hotel’s grounds, a handful of locals gaze down in quiet reverie, like cemetery mourners on a Sunday afternoon. Except that everywhere around me, sprouting at odd angles and thrusting skyward, are not tombstones but penises—hundreds of them. The Nai Lert Park hotel is home to Bangkok’s largest penis shrine, the spreading bouquets of phalluses left over the years for the fertility goddess, Phra Mae Tuptim. Clearly, Thailand, like the death of its most recent famous victim, has more to it than meets the eye.

A city of eight million, Bangkok is a teeming hodgepodge where native Thais rub elbows with Chinese and Indian immigrants, as Western sexual tourists explore the city’s seamy underbelly. Traffic and pollution are endemic, the cuisine is sublime, and capitalism runs rampant—no more so than in a red-light district populated by barely legal streetwalkers, rapacious con men, and alluring lady-boys. “As Calcutta smells of death and Bombay of money, Bangkok smells of sex,” wrote Paul Theroux, the poet laureate of exotic locales. It was David Carradine’s kind of town.

According to the police, the actor checked into room 352 on May 31 in the company of a French producer from the film Stretch, in which he had a small part—one of the estimated 50 roles he has taken since Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2 in 2003 and 2004 reinvigorated his career. The production filmed that day at the hotel, and Carradine completed several scenes. For days he was a visible presence—drinking in the bar, entertaining guests on flute and piano, joking with the staff. He spent the better part of the afternoon of June 3 drinking and playing piano in the lobby for a group of children. He returned to his room in the early evening and was supposed to meet the cast and crew for a late dinner after shooting wrapped. He never showed. After calls the next morning failed to rouse him, a maid was dispatched to his room. The police believe Carradine had been dead at least 12 hours. After reviewing hotel security tapes, they insisted that he was alone when he died.

For all practical purposes, room 352 has disappeared, the number plate pried off the locked wooden door. The locals say it’s common to rip up the carpets and repaint a room when someone dies in it—some prescriptive combination of Buddhism and black magic. Keying into my own standardized room, I take stock of the king-size bed, the flat-panel TV, and a closet that a dwarf would have trouble standing up in, let alone the 6'1" Carradine. If Carradine’s closet was anything like this one, he would have had to fold his body in half while sitting on the shoe bench and then fall forward to intentionally hang himself. Bending the flimsy aluminum rod with two fingers, I could easily snap it in two.

The Nai Lert’s manager, Aurelio Giraudo, a small Italian man who has run hotels all over the world, is visibly nervous. He assures me that hotel security is top-flight, that Carradine was alone at the time of his death, that the police took control very quickly, and that he never looked at the surveillance tapes or key card records himself. The room, he adds, is currently “out of inventory.”
“Michael Jackson always stays in my hotels,” he says by way of reassurance. (Jackson wouldn’t die for another 10 days.) “When somebody dies—a thousand things they die of. I don’t know what happened…Thank you for your time. Write good things.”

The first stop on my quest is a lunch with Bangkok Dan, a handsome Swiss expat and wire-service journalist who’s been here 14 years. He says that rather than a tabloid breach, the photo that has whipped up such a storm of controversy back home is reflective of the Bangkok way of life.
“You open the newspaper every day and you see that kind of stuff,” he says. “You see the ribs open, you see the head through the car window.” According to Bangkok Dan, ambulances are a luxury, supplemented by urban opportunists known as body snatchers who routinely transport the deceased to the morgue in the beds of their pickup trucks and follow police scanners to track the latest carnage. They also sell morgue photos to the highest bidder, although it’s just as easy to buy them off of the cops.

Much of what appears to Westerners as callousness, Bangkok Dan attributes to the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. “Life is worth nothing here,” he explains. “Essentially, what happened to Carradine could have happened in any town, but Bangkok makes it easy.”

The Carradines—David, Keith, Robert, and Chris (an executive at Disney’s Imagineering)—were the Baldwins of their day, a clan of combative Irish mutts and barroom brawlers who looked out for each other on the battlements of Hollywood. Their father, character actor John Carradine, appeared in 340 films in a 60-year career, a number that makes Carradine’s own career tally of 220 seem anemic by comparison. A career in Hollywood was far from a given—Carradine served a two-year stint in the Army and pursued music for a time—but in the end the family business beckoned.

Carradine played the title character in the TV adaptation of the Western Shane in 1966, which lasted one season, but his most famous role—beginning in 1972—turned the cowboy tradition upside down: Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu, a part originally created for martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Caine was a half-Chinese Shaolin monk and martial arts master wandering the American West, dispensing peacenik wisdom and brutal beat-downs in equal measure. Trippy and philosophical, Kung Fu was the closest TV ever came to dealing with the consciousness expansion of the ’60s. That same year Carradine starred in Boxcar Bertha for Martin Scorsese. “I first met David before we started Boxcar Bertha, and the main thing I remember is what a terrific actor he was, the way he used his face and body on-screen,” says Scorsese. “He was one of the first friends who showed me the ropes in L.A. For a guy who grew up on the Lower East Side [in Manhattan], it was wonderful to have someone take me under his wing. David was such a product of that time and place—L.A. in the early ’70s, living a kind of wild life, exploring Eastern philosophy. It was a real education for me.” Eventually, though, the films were overshadowed by a mercurial and often volatile personal life at odds with his Zenlike persona. Along the way he had memorable roles for Hal Ashby as Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory, in Scorsese’s Mean Streets, and in Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg, as well as overachieving B films like Death Race 2000, Q, and Sonny Boy.

In 1974, while he was starring in Kung Fu, Carradine was convicted of wandering into a neighbor’s home in Laurel Canyon high on peyote, trashing the place, then sitting down to play the piano. (The police apprehended him by following the trail of blood—two pints’ worth—from a broken window.) The same day, Carradine leapt from a car naked and bleeding and attacked a woman he believed to be a witch, beating her and demanding she remove her clothes, for which he was later forced to pay $20,000. This was followed by drug arrests, DWIs, and assault charges too numerous to mention. Carradine’s duality—a healthy lifestyle advocate who smoked two packs a day; a spiritual being whose most prized possession was his Ferrari—carried over to many of the roles he played, from the ass-kicking monk of Kung Fu to the cold-blooded assassin and loving father of Kill Bill.

Carradine was married five times, and within days of his death stories broke in the U.S. press about his robust history of sexual adventurism. Unnamed friends claimed he had a history of engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation, the practice of choking oneself (usually with a noose) to produce more intense orgasms. In divorce papers filed by his fourth wife, Marina Anderson, she cited “abhorrent and deviant sexual behavior.” (She also reported “an incestuous relationship with a very close family member.”) Another of his ex-wives, Gail Jensen, told the New York Daily News that he would construct elaborate bondage devices to tie himself up.  A quick call to the Stretch production office reaches someone who identifies himself as “the American,” who says the film is currently “in flux.” Russ Markowitz, who helped finance the film, informs me later that the crew members were all made to sign agreements not to comment on Carradine or Stretch. “From what I was told,” he says, “Carradine was very prepared and professional on set and kept to himself during his time off. I believe he was sched--uled to work the next day.”

Producer Charles Gillibert, responding from France, describes the film as “about a young French jockey who decides to ride in Asia, where he discovers that the rules are different.” Gillibert reports that the crew has already shot a month in Macao and will soon reconvene in France to finish the film. Carradine’s scenes will remain in the final cut, although the ending has now been rewritten. “During his few days of work, he showed himself very respectful of the crew and in a good mood,” says Gillibert. “On the set he was very classy.”

One guy who might bring me up to speed on any rumors flowing through the Bangkok film community is David Winters, a flam--boyant ’50s-style showman who produced several movies with Carradine, including 1989’s Future Force and its sequel, Future Zone—the kind of low-budget action fare that one might expect to be filmed in Thailand. As I’m escorted up to the penthouse apartment, I’m greeted by a 70-year-old, 5'1" Americanized Brit who furiously name-drops stars who have been dead for decades. Winters is certain that Carradine’s death was either murder or an accident. “David would not fly 20 hours to Bangkok to go kill himself in a closet,” says Winters. He had spoken to Carradine just a couple of months earlier and talked him into coming to Thailand.

Winters’ theory is that there was someone else involved, probably a lady-boy—a transvestite prostitute who sounds like a girly-man but would probably kick your ass for saying so. “The lady-boys are into that kind of stuff, and they are very beautiful here. Absolutely stunning,” says Winters. “But when they say there were no bruises on him—there didn’t have to be any bruises! They picked him up, put him in the closet, and made it look like a suicide, because either they freaked out or they had planned it.”

“A big thing here in Bangkok is that, especially the lady-boys, they’ll go back to your hotel, put something in your drink and then rob you,” adds Gary Stretch, a British actor starring in Winters’ next picture, The Warrior King. Winters reports that there was a glass of water by the bed and an unexplained shoeprint on the bedspread, and that Carradine would have had $10,000 to $15,000 in up-front payment plus per diem cash that is apparently missing.

“You come to Bangkok and the first thing you want to do is have sex,” says Winters. “This is the sex capital of the world!” I’ll hear later that Carradine was spotted the day before his death in Bangkok’s red-light district shaking hands with the locals. It’s my next stop.

A vast open-air sex market, the Patpong is a 20-minute walk from the hotel, past the U.S. and British embassies; an X-rated bazaar that looks like a psychedelic Bourbon Street. This is where they filmed The Deer Hunter to simulate wartime Saigon. The Patpong is divided into Soi 4, which is predominantly gay; Soi Cowboy, a note-perfect re-creation 
of pre-Disney Times Square, designed to cater to the Western tourist; and Nana Plaza, which is where they keep the kink. Girls in baby-doll nighties with numbers around their necks loll on red-velvet cushions behind a wall of glass, like a giant aquarium. In a far corner a Thai guy with a cash register on a rickety wooden table rings up the sales. Looking for answers at the dodgy Nana Hotel, I meet a striking-looking child bride who calls herself A. She pours herself into my lap. Like everyone I talk to in the Patpong, she doesn’t know anything about Carradine, but for 10,000 baht (roughly $300 in U.S. currency) she will come back to my hotel, tie me up, choke me, and stay the night. I take a rain check.

Whatever his sexual predilections, Carradine’s life appeared to be profoundly normal in the years before his death. Though sources estimate he made $2 to $3 million a year, he acted the part of an impoverished drifter. Mornings were spent practicing tai chi and martial arts, while afternoons saw Carradine at his favorite bar, smoking Lucky Strikes and doing crossword puzzles. Transformers producer Don Murphy reports seeing him a week before he died at La Poubelle restaurant across from the Scien-tology Celebrity Center in Hollywood (Carradine’s wife and daughters are Scientologists). Returning from a cigarette break, Carradine stopped at Murphy’s table and, pointing at the 25-year-old guy he was drinking with at the bar, said, “Would you tell this guy who I am?” When Murphy readily complied, ticking off a list of the actor’s credits, Carradine told him, “I could tell you were Irish from 20 feet away.” He was in good spirits.

But just last month, at a screening of Bound for Glory at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, an obviously enhanced Carradine accused cinematographer Haskell Wexler of “ruining my movie,” defended late director Hal Ashby’s cocaine use, forgot the words to Woody Guthrie songs he insisted on playing, and finally tossed a microphone into the crowd. People who were in attendance and witnessed Carradine’s display uniformly referred to it as a train wreck.

The day after my visit to the red-light district, I make my way to the Lumpini police station to meet with Colonel Somprasong Yentuam. When I’m finally ushered into his ice-cold office, the colonel is the very model of rectitude, pimped out in lanyards and medals. He’s also young enough to be Carradine’s grandson. “The investigation is ongoing,” he says. “I don’t know who told the press that the death of Mr. Carradine was suicide or accidental. It is unknown.” I probably would have taken greater comfort in this if he hadn’t added that the police “quarantined the fourth floor until the forensic team came.” Carradine’s room was locatedon the third floor.

In my opinion the police did not collect the evidence in a good way,” says Khunying Porntip Rojanasunan, M.D., director of Thailand’s Central Institute of Forensic Science. Porntip, as she’s known, was the first person to suggest that the cause of death was most likely autoerotic asphyxiation. She also announced that Carradine’s room came equipped with its own penis shrine.

The following day I arrange to meet an anonymous source with knowledge of the investigation at the Foreign Correspondents Club across town. He thinks there is an active cover-up: The hotel manager is scared, the maid isn’t talking, and the surveillance video has been tampered with. He also mentions the mysterious footprint. He is certain Carradine was carried to the closet, the suicide staged, and that a body snatcher was dispatched to collect Carradine’s corpse before realizing he was a celebrity. There was money missing—one of the film’s producers reported Carradine was spending money like crazy. My source says the videotapes—now in the pos-ses--sion of the Thai government—show Carradine returning to his hotel room between 9:45 p.m. and 10:45 p.m.

On my final morning in Bangkok, there is a furtive knock at the door. Lady-boy assassin? Humorless Asian mafia? No—it’s Antonio Pineda, a friend of David Winters, who has with him a member of the Bangkok press with a dozen morgue photos for sale. It’s clear from the first shot that the death scene photo—the one that ran in the Thai paper and quickly ricocheted around the Internet—is a fake.

Carradine has tattoos that run the length of his torso, a healthy paunch, long gray hair, and he’s well over 200 pounds. The journalist tells me the tabloid photo was taken in a 500-baht room—a cardboard closet, a bed, no furniture—and on closer inspection, it looks nothing like the hotel I’m staying in. Moreover, he says the Thai tabloids often run photos they know are fake—and sometimes they even stage them themselves. The morgue photos, which appear real, show a thin black cord, described in the press as a shoelace or a curtain cord, pooled on his chest and looped around his genitals, which are obscured by an index card. He’s wearing a silver bracelet on his left wrist and a thick ring on the middle finger of his left hand. On his neck is a deep laceration, filled with blood, and there is blood covering the right side of his head and matted in his hair.

“It doesn’t look like he did that himself,” says the journalist. “But it still could have been an accident. They’ll kill you for 500 baht here. If he had 20,000 baht, a Rolex watch, a gold chain, and a diamond ring, they would whack him on the head and strangle him.”

I later show these morgue photos to an intelligence source of mine in the military. “I’ve investigated autoerotic deaths,” he says, “and I have never seen a case where there is so much external bleeding and deep ligature.” He suspects a robbery.

Noted sex columnist Susannah Breslin, who has also seen two of the photos, adds, “The deep neck ligature seems to indicate something beyond sex play—solo or dominatrix-administered. Most of the time what a practitioner is looking for is effect, and the only effect that seems intended here, based on the evidence, is death. This is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Back in Los Angeles, the Carradine family engaged former New York City chief medical examiner Michael Baden to perform a second autopsy. He determined that while asphyxiation was indeed the cause of death, it was not a suicide.

However David Carradine shuffled off this mortal coil—misadventure, psychic dry dive or the famed five-pointed palm-exploding heart technique that spelled his character’s demise in Kill Bill—it’s clear that his time here was a riot of contradictions. At his funeral in Los Angeles, the 400 mourners included a phalanx of Hells Angels, headdressed members of the Lakota tribe, and numerous stars, including Darryl Hannah, Tom Selleck, Lucy Liu, and Michael Madsen, who read from a list of life rules Carradine had given him, such as “Never marry a woman named Candy,” and “Never buy anything from a man who is out of breath.” For a man who died alone in a Bangkok hotel room, it was quite an outpouring.

“I seek not to know the answers,” said Carradine as Caine in Kung Fu, “but to understand the questions.” In death, as in life, Carradine’s complex persona offered more questions than answers. However he died—and we may never know—it wasn’t so different from how he lived.

Mark Ebner has been covering crime and Hollywood for 20 years. His new book, Six Degrees of Paris Hilton (Simon Spotlight), was published in February.