"I am a busy man with my own film production company in Paris. "The charges are rubbish," he complained in 2004. What had driven him to risk lengthy imprisonment in this impoverished mountain state? The explanation he gave to the press at the time didn't ring true. Yet almost 30 years later Sobhraj returned to Nepal and was arrested, tried and sentenced to 20 years in jail. Confused by the ploy, the Nepalese police had allowed Gautier/Bintanja to escape to Bangkok, this time using Carrière's passport. When the Nepalese police questioned "Gautier", he claimed he was a Dutchman called Henricus Bintanja - who happened to be dead in Bangkok, another victim, it is thought, of Sobhraj. His efforts to sell his prison memoirs came to nothing, however, and six years later he was arrested in Nepal for the murders in December 1975 of a 28-year-old American backpacker Connie Jo Bronzich and her friend, a Canadian by the name of Laurent Carrière, whose mutilated corpses were found that Christmas in fields near Kathmandu.īronzich had last been seen in the company of a mysterious French gemstone dealer who looked like Sobhraj and used an alias, Alain Gautier, that Sobhraj often employed. "I'm looking for a literary agent," he told me. But he wasn't interested in settling any scores. I was a little anxious that he had taken objection to my portrayal of him as a dissembling if captivating psychopath. He called me at the Observer after my piece appeared and said he was coming to London. But presumably that's what his victims thought as well.ĭespite my pressing, he refused to speak about the murders, only allowing that there were things in his past that he regretted but they were now behind him and he wanted to start life anew.īut what could he do? What skills could he employ in France and who would employ him? He talked of making money from his story, whose financial worth he lavishly -overvalued, and he also mentioned ambitions in film. Although he tried to keep me off balance by, for example, driving me to an empty restaurant in the outer suburbs of Paris, he didn't seem scary. He was by turns funny, enigmatic, absurd and engaging. They typically have a background in crime and they tend to select their victims from a particular social group or demographic. There is usually also a psychological - rather than purely material - aspect to the killings, and perhaps a ritualised element too. Criminologists tend to define serial killers as people who have murdered three or more times over an extended period. There is a great deal of mythology surrounding serial killers and, indeed, the term itself is not exactly a scientific designation. To avoid that outcome, he escaped from prison and then allowed himself to be caught and sentenced to a term that would bring him up to 20 years - the statute of limitations on his Thai arrest warrant.Īll of which meant that in 1997 he returned to Paris, where I went to interview him for the Observer. On release, he was due to be extradited to Thailand, where he faced the death penalty for several murders. But he managed to avoid conviction for either of the killings, and instead received a 12-year sentence for the attempted robbery of the students. He was also charged with the murders of an Israeli academic in Varanasi and a French tourist in Delhi. He had been captured in 1976 while drugging 60 French engineering students in Delhi. I had last seen Sobhraj in 1997, just after he was released from two decades in an Indian prison. Both titles played on the Serpent, the nickname Sobhraj had been given by the press because he was cunning and slippery, capable of beguiling sang-froid and poisonous violence. In 1979 Thomas Thompson added an equally disturbing portrait with Later, he realised that the confession might prove problematic and denied everything he told Neville about the murders. The book was published in 1979, after the Frenchman of Vietnamese and Indian parentage had been on trial in India in 1977, when he thought the admission couldn't hurt him. The Life And Crimes Of Charles Sobhraj - later renamed And such was the richly implausible nature of his exploits that Sobhraj generated his own impressive literary testaments.įirst Richard Neville, the celebrated chronicler of the Sixties counterculture, drew an extended taped confession from Sobhraj in Like some bizarre real-life combination of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley and Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter, he was handsome, charming and utterly without scruple. Afterwards, he would steal their belongings and identities, often travelling the world on their passports and money.
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