It was a psychological test, the first of several that afternoon.Īs The Serpent shows, Bangkok in 1976 was a place where anyone with the right connections and spare cash could evade unwanted police attention. He wore a playful but challenging smile as I politely declined his offer. “You must be thirsty,” he said, and held out an already opened bottle of Coke. Sobhraj is escorted by armed policemen to court in Kathmandu, Nepal in 2003. He looked a curiously slight figure, his skin remarkably smooth, even youthful, given that he’d spent the past two decades in an Indian jail. This, then, was the man outside whose hotel room I stood on a warm spring day in Paris in 1997. In nearly all his murders, he first disabled his victims by spiking their drinks. With an obedient Indian accomplice called Ajay Chowdhury, he murdered them in a variety of fashions, including in one case setting fire to a young Dutch couple while they were still alive. The pair ended up in Bangkok, where he posed as a gem dealer and befriended young travellers. As she would later write from her prison cell: “I swore to myself to try all means to make him love me, but little by little I became his slave.” Ripley has been described as “suave, agreeable, and utterly immoral”, and those adjectives were not out of place for Sobhraj.Ĭertainly a young French-Canadian nurse named Marie-Andrée Leclerc was impressed when she met him travelling in India. Like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, he assumed different identities, using stolen passports and creating a trail of havoc wherever he went. He held a flamenco dancer hostage in a New Delhi hotel while he used her room to break into a gem store on the floor below. When Compagnon finally got out, she was able to take the child and flee to America to escape Sobhraj’s destructive hold.Īn embittered Sobhraj upped the crime stakes. Sobhraj managed to break out of prison by drugging a guard and then returned to France to kidnap his own daughter. They had just had a daughter, who was sent back to live with Compagnon’s parents in France. Then he and Compagnon were imprisoned in Afghanistan. But first he was imprisoned in Greece – he escaped by swapping identities with his younger brother. It was in this transient milieu that Sobhraj stole from impressionable travellers. No one took much notice of who came and went. A generation was looking to find itself by getting lost or high somewhere off the beaten track. It was an era of porous borders and lax security, when the only contact with back home were poste restante letters that might take weeks to arrive. It was 1970, the beginning of the so-called hippy trail, when hordes of young people would make long, low-budget trips through southern Europe, the Middle East, India and the far east. When he came out they embarked on a manic crime spree across Europe and Asia. He promised her that he was a reformed character and they got engaged, only for him to go back to prison for car theft.īut like so many women who were to follow, she had fallen under his spell. A well-meaning prison visitor arranged work for him on the outside and also introduced him to a bourgeois young Parisian called Chantal Compagnon. He spent most of his adolescence in Paris in and out of youth offender facilities and then their adult version. Sobhraj did not settle in his new home and twice stowed away on ships heading to Africa.Ī bright but delinquent teenager, he was irresistibly drawn to crime – car theft, street muggings, and then holding up housewives with a gun. His mother then married an occupying French soldier who, suffering from PTSD, returned to France with his young family. The child of an affair between an Indian businessman-tailor and one of his Vietnamese shop assistants, Sobhraj (played in the BBC drama by French actor Tahar Rahim) had grown up in Saigon during the Vietnamese war of independence from France. I couldn’t quite believe that someone who had confessed to a number of the murders to Neville, and against whom there was a wealth of compelling evidence, was free to walk the streets of a European capital. I had never been much interested in serial killers but I happened to read Richard Neville’s and Julie Clarke’s extraordinary account of the killings, The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, just before Sobhraj’s release was announced. Sobhraj wanted payment for the interview but I refused and, to my surprise, he agreed to talk. Sobhraj was represented by the infamous lawyer Jacques Vergès, nicknamed the “devil’s advocate” because his roster of clients included the Nazi Klaus Barbie, Slobodan Milosevic and the renowned international terrorist Carlos the Jackal.
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