The man with the naked piano

Rosser was riding high. He had a big income from his various gigs. He finally had the position he always craved. With access to young girls and international pedophile contacts, he was living out his greatest sexual fantasies. "This is a fulfilling life," Rosser told the Bloomington Herald Times during a 1999 visit. "I'm doing all the things I love to do."

"He thought he was better than the average person," says an American singer who worked with Rosser in Bangkok and requested anonymity. "He was up there with the society people. He would walk with his nose in the air, walk into a restaurant carrying his briefcase, sit down and put his newspaper up. It gets to you," she says. "I watched him change in the two years I was there. By the time I left in 1999, he was just too damned arrogant."

Rosser swapped his pornography with British and Japanese pedophiles in Bangkok, and with Bill Platz in Bloomington. In turn, Platz passed the materials to other Bloomington pedophiles. Like most porn rings, it was more a chain than a club, the pornography moving from man to man, each knowing the others only by shadowy reference. Rosser was "a musician in Bangkok." Soon Platz' and Rosser's pornography was on virtually every kiddie porn site on the Web.

"The Internet has really revolutionized trafficking in child pornography and what it represents," says Ken Lanning, former FBI special agent and an expert on the sexual victimization of children. "The Internet may be acting as a catalyst, both in molestation and pornography traffic," he says. "Pedophiles can convince themselves they are not evil, just politically incorrect."

With the indictments in the United States, Rosser ran. The publicity from the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list generated hundreds of leads. The FBI received photos and videos placing Rosser in Germany, Austria, Monaco, France and Spain. Not all the tips were helpful. The Danish Pedophile Association urged their members to send false leads. In July a former Bloomingtonian saw Rosser playing a cobbled-together piano-cum-moped beside a canal in Amsterdam. He wore a goatee and a beret, still playing his old repertoire. Another informant said Rosser tried to persuade a young blond girl to come closer. "She was clearly uncomfortable with his attention," the woman told "America's Most Wanted" television show, "but he continued to coax and to entice her to get closer to him."

Last January, he performed in Barcelona, still rolling his red Apollo moped-piano around Europe. An American expatriate in Barcelona sent a picture of Rosser playing under the name of Neil Biker with a jazz quartet, the Crooked Wheel, at the city's Harlem Jazz Club. The police almost nabbed Rosser, missing him only by a week or two.

In August a viewer of "America's Most Wanted" spotted Rosser back in Bangkok. And on Aug. 21 Thai police arrested him carrying a false British passport under the name of Peter Alexander Hill and sporting a beard and surgically altered features; liposuction slimmed his face and plastic surgery changed his chin. In his nearby Chatuchak District apartment, police found additional counterfeit Norwegian and Netherlands passports, marijuana and a large cache of child pornography.

The Thai authorities quickly convicted Rosser for the counterfeit documents while they prepared their other cases for drugs and child sex crimes against him. U.S. Department of Justice and Department of State officials immediately began the extradition process with the cooperating Thai government. While there are currently a number of scenarios, most likely Rosser will serve time in Thailand for the false documents, two counts of marijuana possession (one dating back to his first arrest) and the child sex crimes before being extradited to the States to face trial on U.S. charges. When asked how much prison time Rosser faces, a U.S. legal official speaking off the record says, "Oh, he could get quite a lot."

Today, Rosser's friend Bill Platz is serving an 11-year sentence in federal prison in Lisbon, Ohio, for his conviction on charges relating to the child porn sex ring. Tham is living with her bar-worker mother in the beach town of Pattaya, as she has since her mother and Rosser's wife Muay snatched her from the Bangkok children's shelter. No one is quite certain where Muay and Rosser's son Max are living. Father Joe Maier says Muay divorced Rosser to marry a man from Australia, where she now lives. A newspaper story indicated Muay is staying with Rosser's family in America and son Max is living in Bangkok. Former Rosser friends in Bloomington say they think the boy might be with Rosser's mother in Ohio.

Throughout his arrest and sentencing in Bangkok, Eric Rosser was unrepentant, claiming he had "obviously lost his obsession." As he was led to a police car, he told reporters, "I am not the evil man everyone thinks I am. I love Thailand, that's why I'm back here." When the police captured him, he was walking to a school that would certify him to teach English. He hoped to get a job tutoring children in northern Thailand.

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