‘I wanted to box for England but ended up in prison sleeping next to dead body’
A former boxer who once had ambitions to compete for England recalled how he was forced to sleep next to a dead body on his first night in a hellhole Thai jail.
Billy Moore was a schoolboy fighter in Liverpool and had also set his sights on joining the army before spiralling into a life of crime and spending time in two of Thailand's most notorious jails.
During a tough upbringing on Merseyside, Moore had explained to his father that he had dreams of becoming a professional boxer before his drug abuse took over.
"I had about 16 fights and I won a massive majority of them," he told LADbible. "You know, I had two dreams: I wanted to join the arm, and I wanted to box for England.
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"I kind of found myself moving away from it. I felt like I was missing out all the time. I'm getting offered joints and drinks and I don't want it but I feel I need to to fit in.
"You've picked up a substance, now you need to fund the habit that you've developed and that's what happened for me."
Moore committed burglary and drug-related offences as a teenager and first served time behind bars in the UK aged just 17.
He moved to Thailand to seek a new life in 2005, teaching English, boxing and even working as a stuntman for Sylvester Stallone in Rambo 4.
But he soon fell into a dangerous cycle of drink and drugs once more and ended up in a Thai prison where he witnessed violence beyond his worst nightmares.
Plagued with drug addiction, Moore spent three years and eight years locked up in Thai cells after he was first caught handling stolen goods.
But he but counts his first day at the Chiang Mai Central prison among his most harrowing. Speaking about his first night, Moore said: "That [the dead body] was my introduction to 309, which is the newcomers' cell.
"When I went in, on a Friday, I was told to sleep in the far corner, and in the corner was a body that was just lying still with a sheet over his face.
"And I was under the influence of drugs as well, I was quite heavily sedated, but I knew something wasn't right.
"The guy next to me had died earlier on in the day, but because it was a Thai bank holiday, they couldn't move him until after the weekend. So he was just left in there for three days."
Moore, now out of prison, wrote a book about his traumatic time in Thai jails, titled 'A Prayer Before Dawn', which was later made into a Hollywood movie released in 2017.
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