DASHAWN Longfellow is going home. The US Marine veteran's body was loaded onto the back of a pickup today for the trip to Phuket's airport and a connecting flight from Bangkok to the US.

The 23-year-old Purple Heart holder survived assignments to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq only to fall victim to a cowardly attack on a tropical holiday island.

On a grey Phuket afternoon, his Thai girlfriend gathered his belongings at the apartment where he was savagely knifed and stowed them into a black travel bag.

Tomorrow it will be a week since the hunt began for Englishman Lee Aldhouse, 28. Phuket police believe Aldhouse, known for his aggressive behavior, stalked Longfellow and stabbed him to death over a fight with the big former Marine that Aldhouse started, and lost, before dawn last Saturday.

Phuket police remain confident that Aldhouse will be captured soon. While Longfellow has been described by family and friends as a lovable teddy bear of a man, the dossier on Aldhouse is less kind.

Officers say that a couple of months ago, he beat up his Thai girlfriend, Fang, putting her in hospital for a week with three broken ribs. He did not visit her often, they say.

One officer, Nikom Jeeenyean, remembers Aldhouse from an encounter back in April. Aldhouse, stripped to the waist and injured, came to Chalong police station, in the south of the island, seeking an official document so that he could claim insurance after a hit-run incident in which he was knocked from his motorcycle.

Aldhouse said he had forgotten his passport and, for some as-yet-unexplained reason, claimed that he was American.

Some sources say Aldhouse has been coming to Phuket since 2006 but police say official records trace his first visit to the island to 2008.

Officers visited Aldhouse's 12,000 baht a month rented house this week and took away a pair of jeans and a pair of boxing shorts, for reasons that have yet to be explained.

Back in his home city of Birmingham, England, the local newspaper quoted a source as saying that Aldhouse may have been a pupil at Cockshut Hill secondary school in Yardley before being expelled.

''He trained as a Muay Thai fighter and competed on the club boxing circuit in Phuket, but a number of gyms asked him to leave amid concerns of aggressive behavior,'' said the report in the Birmingham Mail.

Across the Atlantic, Mr Longfellow's mother, Tammy, told an Oklahoma news blog that her son was a gentle giant.

''He fought since the day he was born,'' she said. ''He was three months premature and he made it through it. He struggled in school, he made it through it.

''He went to the Marines, two wars and he made it through it. He goes over there to do something that he loves and gets killed for something stupid.''

Phuketwan has posted dramatic footage of a man who looks like Lee Aldhouse obtaining two knives from a 7-Eleven store shortly before Mr Longfellow was stabbed to death. View the footage at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvuYakEINGg

CNN coverage with Phuketwan can be viewed at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/08/17/thailand.kickboxing.killer/?hpt=T2#fbid=j8b3WNTelG3&wom=false