The Life of Charles Sobhraj

The Life of Charles Sobhraj
Compiled by: Asim Deb

“I consider myself a businessman, not a criminal.…I never killed good people.” And Richard Neville from OZ magazine reported Sobhraj as saying, “If I have ever killed, or have ordered killings, then it is purely for reasons of business, just a job, like a general in the army.”

Called the “Bikini Killer” in Thailand, and “The Serpent” for for his serpentine ability to slither through borders, or prison, and also evade justice for decades, Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj, was suspected of killing more than 20 Western backpackers on the “hippie trail” through Asia. Also, it’s true that no international criminal has so far received so much of media hype.

Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj was born on 6th April 1944 in Saigon, Vietnam, which was under French rule at the time, and so he claimed French nationality. His unmarried mother Noi was a Vietnamese ship worker and his father was a Sindhi Indian Hotchand Sobhraj who deserted the family soon after Sobhraj’s birth. Sobhraj was adopted by his mother’s new boyfriend Jacques Roussel, a French lieutenant stationed in Saigon. The couple married and the family moved to Marseille, France. Roussel adopted Sobhraj’s sibling but not Sobhraj himself, leaving the boy without any formal citizenship and adrift among Vietnam, France, and Senegal as Roussel’s postings shifted. So, Charles had an unsettled childhood, never feeling quite at home in either place. At a fairly young age, Sobhraj began to display personality problems and discipline became an issue. In his teens, he turned to petty crime, which soon began to escalate out of control.

In 1960, at the of age 16, Sobhraj began stealing and received his first jail sentence for a car theft in 1963. He was sentenced to three years at Poissy prison near Paris. In this harsh prison, Sobhraj learned how to earn sympathy and favour, so he started keeping books in his cell. He found a mentor in Felix d’Escogne, a wealthy prison volunteer and knew many criminal underworld. He arranged for Sobhraj’s French citizenship and initiated him into the circles of Parisian high society. Sobhraj married a young French named Chantal Compagnon in 1969, and their daughter, Usha, was born in 1970. Intent on moving to Asia with his wife, Sobhraj committed banking fraud in Paris in June 1970 by issuing falls cheques and fled to India with Compagnon. Later that year in Mumbai he smuggled with forged documents using India’s import restrictions goods such Rolex watches, Alfa Romeo cars, etc. He then targeted tourists, robbing them of cash and passports, which he would use to make false identities for their intercountry escapes.

Soon after, he was jailed in Kabul, Afghanistan for car theft, illegal border-crossing, and unpaid hotel bills but escaped by feigning illness and drugging the prison guards with Largactil (a sedative).

Back in Paris, Sobhraj drugged his mother-in-law and kidnapped his daughter, who had been sent to live with her grandparents in 1971. He eluded custody again in Yogoslavia when he walked out of house arrest after stolen passports were discovered in his car.

Sobhraj summoned his half brother Jacques Roussel to join his passport-smuggling network, but Roussel was arrested in Greece in 1973, and implicated Sobhraj, leading to the detention of both. In Korydallos Prison in Greece he organized a tunnel escape that failed. On April 26, 1975, however, he succeeded in escaping while being taken to the prison on the Greek island by lighting a fire in a prison van and slipping away amid the smoke. Immediately after the escape, Sobhraj reappeared in India by May 1975, moving eastward over the following months and arriving in Thailand by August 1975. By then, wife Compagnon divorced Sobhraj and moved to the United States with their daughter, and remarried.

In September 1975, Sobhraj drugged Frenchman André Breugnot, drowned him in a bathtub, and staged the scene as an accident. In mid-October in Pattaya, with accomplice Ajay Chowdhury (an Indian associate who later vanished), he drugged and drowned American backpacker Teresa Knowlton, whose body was found in a bikini that contributing to his “Bikini Killer” moniker.

On October 27, in Si Racha village, with Chowdhury, Sobhraj drugged, strangled, and burned the Turkish traveler Vitali Hakim under the pretext of taking him to the gem mines at Chanthaburi. In December in Pattaya Sobhraj and Chowdhury strangled Stephanie Parry (Hakim’s friend) to death and left her in a ditch.

Moving to Kathmandu, Nepal, he drugged and burned American Connie Jo Bronzich and Canadian Laurent Carrière. Sobhraj also then poisoned a Dutch couple Henk Bintanja and Cornelia (“Cocky”) Hemker and then burned their bodies. They were initially mistaken for Australian travelers Vera and Russell Lapthorne, who luckily survived an earlier poisoning.

Back in Bangkok on March 11, 1976, Thai police raided Sobhraj’s Kanit House apartment (bought in September 1975 with his girlfriend Marie-Andrée Leclerc) and found stolen passports. Though the police picked up Sobhraj, Leclerc, and Chowdhury, they were shortly released for lack of evidence.

Moving to India, on July 5, 1976, with his French associate Jean Dhuisme, Sobhraj drugged 60 French students at Delhi with laxatives and sleeping pills to steal their passports. The drugs didn’t affect all the students, three of his victims attacked him and alert the authorities. Sobhraj was sentenced to 12 years in prison and really embraced his life inside. He bribed the guards and lived a life of luxury. He was also accused of the murder of French tourist Jean-Luc Solomon, who had been poisoned in a Bombay hotel in July 1976. Sobhraj went on a hunger strike but to no avail. He was sentenced to seven years imprisonment. He was spared India’s death penalty, even although the prosecution fought for it. He was sentenced a further five years on other criminal charges, making a total of twelve years imprisonment. In May 1982 an Indian court convicted him of the 1975 murder of Alan Jacobs, an Israeli tourist, and gave him and Leclerc each a life sentence, both of which were later overturned.

While imprisoned in Delhi’s Tihar Jail, Sobhraj could record officials’ statements of corruptions, and then blackmailed the superintendent for privileges. On March 16, 1986, under the guise of his 42nd birthday party, he staged his most famous prison escape: Sweets laced with sedatives like Chloral Hydrate and medazepam, he overpowered the jail wardens as Sobhraj fled in a car with his accomplices and four prisoners. He staged his jailbreak and also ensured that Thailand’s statute of limitations on the murder charges expired, thus averting a possible death sentence. The 20-year extradition warrant from Thailand had expired and Sobhraj was not in possession of legal travel and identity documents. But he was recaptured on April 6, 1986, at O’Coqueiro restaurant in the Indian coastal state of Goa by the Inspector Madhukar Zende. He was then released from prison in India in 1997. The escape from Tihar Jail added 10 years to Sobhraj’s existing sentence, which he was serving for various crimes including poisoning and murder.

The Indian government decided to deport Sobhraj to France, as he had always claimed French nationality, having been born in Vietnam when it was under French rule. The government also withdraw all pending cases against him, taking this decision, as they believed his further stay in India might have created law and order problems. New Delhi additional sessions Judge Y S Jonwal finally allowed the public prosecutor to withdraw the remaining 1986 jailbreak case against Sobhraj, as he had already served more than twice the maximum 10-year sentence. The French Embassy in New Delhi issued Sobhraj with a travel permit and Indian authorities received the order of his expulsion from the country. On 8 April 1997, two days after his 53rd birthday, Sobhraj was deported to France accompanied by two officials of the Foreigners Regional Registration Office. Sobhraj by then a media celebrity for all the bad reasons, he had to wait at Charles De Gaulle airport as the press wanted his interview. That gave him more money to earn. Sobhraj settled in the suburbs of Paris as if enjoying his retirement. Behaving like a celebrity, he hired an agent and began charging thousands for personal interviews and photographs. He entered a £7 million deal for an Indian film based on his life.

In 2003, Sobhraj surprisingly returned to Nepal, where he had committed crimes for which he had not yet been acquitted. This journey was to be his downfall, as a journalist saw him in the streets of Kathmandu on 17 September and Sobhraj was arrested on 19 September 2003 at the Royal Casino in Kathmandu’s five-star Yak and Yeti Hotel. He was arrested for the 1975 murders of Bronzich and Carrière.

On 20 August 2004, in the Kathmandu District Court, he received a life sentence. Then a decade later was given an additional life sentence for Carrière’s killing. A substantial portion of the evidence was provided by Interpol and Dutch investigator, Knippenberg, who had been collecting documentary evidence against Sobhraj for almost 30 years. So, Sobhraj remained in prison for 19 years until Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered his release on December 23, 2022, citing age and humanitarian grounds, deporting him to France.

In late September 2004, Sobhraj’s long-suffering wife, Chantal, filed a case against the French government before the European Court of Human Rights for refusing to provide Sobhraj with any assistance. In 2005, Kathmandu’s Court of Appeals confirmed Sobhraj’s conviction. Then released on humanitarian grounds in 2022, he now lives in France.

By now, I am sure the readers has lost complete track of how many crimes he did and in how many countries. In short, these are France, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, India, Thailand, and Malaysia, and could escape from prisons from many of them.

Whilst latterly believed to be a psychopath, Sobhraj’s motives for murder were dissimilar from most other serial killers. He seemed not to be driven by any deep-seated violent impulses or twisted sexual fantasies, but rather by the need to find a ready source of finance for his outlandish lifestyle. It is unclear as to why Sobhraj would choose to return to Nepal when he had settled quite comfortably in France but there are some who claim it was ultimate arrogance combined with his constant need for attention that drove him to it. In some people’s eyes, this only served to make him all the more chilling. That’s why he said, Sobhraj as saying, “If I have ever killed, or have ordered killings, then it is purely for reasons of business, just a job, like a general in the army.”

Vietnam attempted to conscript him, India proved unfavorable to him, and France granted him citizenship only years later. Not belonging anywhere would become the foundation of his later craft: passing as anyone, anywhere. May be, so as a child, he frequently rebelled by running away, stealing toys for his siblings, and shoplifting.

It’s interesting, in Goa, India, a statue of Sobhraj, featuring his signature cap and sunglasses, stands in the O’Coqueiro Restaurant, Alto-Porvorim, Goa, where he was captured.

There is Serpent’s one unsolved mystery: does Charles Sobhraj know what happened to Ajay Chowdhury?
The serial killer’s mysterious friend helped him commit at least 8 murders. In 1976, they walked together into the Malaysian jungle and then disappeared. Is he still alive?

His life remains one of the most notorious examples of cross-border crime of the 20th century. So many books are written on his memoir Moi, le Serpent (2023; by Jean-Charles Deniau), in the books Serpentine (1979) by Thomas Thompson and On the Trail of the Serpent (1979) by Richard Neville and Julie Clarke, in the documentary Sobhraj, or How to Be Friends with a Serial Killer (2004), in the Indian film Main Aur Charles (2015; “Me and Charles”), and in the dramatized BBC-Netflix miniseries The Serpent (2021).

Serial Killer, or Bikini Killar, or The Serpent, whatever we say, his crime track records embarked on a life as an international lawbreaker, which would take him to Greece, Turkey, Iran, India, Thailand, Pakistan and Afghanistan. His skill in passport thefts would be enough food for the Hollywood and Bollywood movies.

References:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Sobhraj
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-64073271
https://www.afp.com/en/release-prison-charles-serpent-sobhraj
https://www.crimeandinvestigation.co.uk/crime-files/charles-sobhraj-the-serpent
Wikipedia

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