It's the 7th of July 1986. Kevin John Barlow and Brian Jeffrey Shergold Chambers are escorted to the gallows at Poodoo Prison Kuala Lumpur after being

sentenced to death for drug trafficking. Despite appeals from as high up as

the Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Barlow and Chambers would be the first

Westerners to hang under Malaysia's new tough drug laws.

Hi, I'm your host, Cambo, grab a beer and pull up a deck chair.

This is True Crime Island, another True Crime podcast. Now. Now I would just like to say at the start that in researching this I had to wade

through an enormous amount of bullshit and conflicting reports, and as I have already

alluded to in the intro, the two guys that could tell us the truth about what really

happened are dead. So tonight I will bring

you the story of Barlow and Chambers. They were the first Westerners to be executed in Malaysia under their new tough drug laws

that meant a mandatory death penalty for anyone trafficking or possessing more than 15 grams of a narcotic, especially heroin.

So this was a clear warning to anyone who wanted to gamble their life by trafficking drugs in or out of Malaysia.

Still, there will always be people willing to try. And it was so for Brian Jeffrey Shergold Chambers, sometimes known as Jeff

Chambers and sometimes Brian. He was born 1957 in Perth, Western Australia.

He was a seasoned drug user and trafficker who made drug run several times from Malaysia. He would bring heroin in secreted

inside his body. He would swallow some of it and stick the rest up his ass. Once by using this method he was

searched in transit at Singapore where customs officials found two small vials of

heroin in his jacket pocket, but he was able to bribe the

custom officials and they let him go.

The other main character of this story is Kevin John Barlow, who was born in 1957 at Stoke-on-Trent in England.

He moved with his family to Australia and was a bit of a handful in his youth spending several

stints in juvy.

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