Xnepali.Com, a Booklet on Charles Sobhraj
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xnepali.com, a booklet on Charles Sobhraj Xnepali.com special publication Title: Charles Sobhraj – The Bikini Killer Editor: Anand Sharma Date: July 30, 2010 Price: Free Download at xnepali.com Description: Collection of historical profile and news coverage. Version: 1.0 Related websites: http://xnepali.com http://blog.xnepali.com 1 xnepali.com, a booklet on Charles Sobhraj Charles Sobhraj – The Bikini Killer Described as ‘Asia’s premier serial killer’, ‘The Serpent’ and ‘The Bikini Killer’, Charles Sobhraj was infamous con artist, drug dealer, jewel thief and cold- blooded murderer. Through the 1960s and 1970s, he wove his guileful and lethal web of deceit and crime, evading authorities from numerous countries. Skilled at befriending people, his victims were usually vulnerable Western tourists in Southeast Asia. In and out of prison, he led a life of risk, manipulation and conspiracy that eventually made him a media celebrity. Never convicted for all his crimes, Sobhraj is estimated by some to have committed over 20 murders, whilst others put this number at 32. He was in Tihar prison, India for one murder, from 1976 to 1997. Rearrested in 2004, he is currently serving a life imprisonment sentence in Kathmandu, Nepal, for a double murder in 1975. He was born Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj in Saigon, Vietnam, which was under French rule at the time, and later claimed French nationality because of this. His unmarried mother was Vietnamese, with some sources naming her Noy and others, Song. His father was a Sindhi Indian from Mumbai and deserted the family soon after Sobhraj’s birth. Sobhraj was adopted by his mother’s new boyfriend, Alphonse Darreau, a French lieutenant stationed in Saigon. The couple married and the family moved to Marseille, France. Sobhraj had an unsettled childhood, as the family moved constantly between France and Indochina, 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 age of 16, Sobhraj began stealing and in 1963, age 19 he received his first jail sentence for burglary and was sentenced to three years at Poissy prison near Paris. In this harsh prison, Sobhraj began to hone his 2 xnepali.com, a booklet on Charles Sobhraj skills of manipulation in order to endear himself to prison officials to gain favors, such as keeping books in his cell. In 1969, when Sobhraj was paroled, he moved in with Felix d’Escogne, a man he had met whilst in jail. He simultaneously lived the high society life in Paris, whilst also dabbling in the criminal underworld with various scams and burglaries. Women would fall for him, as he could be particularly charming. It was during this time that Sobhraj met a young lady, Chantal, from a conservative Parisian family, and they fell in love. On the night that Sobhraj proposed to Chantal, he was arrested for evading police in a stolen car and sent back to Poissy prison for a further eight months, charged with car theft. Chantal waited for him and upon his release, they married. She soon fell pregnant but the couple began to worry about the fact that the French authorities had Sobhraj in their sights and the threat of arrest was ever-present. They decided to leave France for Asia and, using false travel documents, began travelling through Eastern Europe. They would befriend fellow travelers and then rob them of their valuables, beating a hasty retreat to the next victim. In 1970, the couple arrived in Mumbai, India, where Chantal gave birth to their daughter. Here they settled, in an attempt to provide a stable environment for their child. On the surface they made a good impression, endearing themselves to the Indian ex-pat community. However, Sobhraj had turned to crime once more and was running a car theft and smuggling enterprise. Instead of using the profits for something positive for his family, he ploughed them into his newfound hobby of gambling. Gun smuggling In December 1971, the couple fled to Kabul, Afghanistan, where they stayed at the Intercontinental Hotel for quite a while, apparently departing without paying the bill. It was here that Sobhraj made contacts for illegal gun smuggling, moving the weapons from Afghanistan by land route to sell in India. Sobhraj moved on to Pakistan, where in Rawalpindi he stole a car by drugging the driver, who died from poisoning. Around this time, he is alleged to have also been running a curio shop in Bangkok, in order to lure his favourite victims, foreign tourists. He would drug them, sometimes to death, and steal their belongings. In 1973, Sobhraj committed an armed robbery at a jewellery shop in Hotel Ashoka, Delhi but was arrested and sent to prison. At the time of Sobhraj’s arrest, police confiscated a number of revolvers, rifles and other weapons from him. After a fortnight in prison, Sobhraj faked appendicitis and 3 xnepali.com, a booklet on Charles Sobhraj managed to escape during a blackout, as it was the time of the India- Bangladesh war. Sobhraj and Chantal went on the run but Sobhraj was soon caught and put back in prison. He managed to borrow money for bail and the couple fled India for Afghanistan. They settled in Kabul, where they immediately began robbing tourists following the ‘hippie trail’ between Europe and Eastern Asia. Arrested again, Sobhraj escaped once more pretending illness and drugging the hospital guard. This time he left his family behind and fled to Iran. Weary of the constant disruption to their lives that Sobhraj’s criminal activity brought, Chantal returned to France with her daughter, declaring that she never wanted to see Sobhraj again. For the next two years Sobhraj was on the run from authorities and travelled around Eastern Europe and the Middle East, always using stolen passports. His younger brother, André, joined him in Istanbul and the two of them went on a crime spree in Greece and Turkey. The brothers were arrested and imprisoned in Athens but Sobhraj managed to escape once more, leaving André to serve his sentence. Drug Dealer In 1975, Sobhraj moved to Thailand, becoming a drug dealer to finance his lifestyle. He had also hatched a new plan and that was to create a kind of criminal family, with him at the helm. His first devotee was Marie-Andreé Leclerc from Quebec, Canada. She fell for his charm and was content to ignore both his dalliances with other women and his criminal activity. To gather more members into his clan, Sobhraj formed a new con. He would select his victims, create a troublesome situation for them and then pose as the knight in shining armour who would solve the problem. Having no idea Sobhraj was the cause of their misery in the first place; they would feel indebted to him for his aid. Using his fluency in French, he homed in on French tourists. Sobhraj stole former French policemen, Yannick and Jacques’ passports, and then helped the men retrieve them. Dominique Rennelleau from France thought he had dysentery when in fact Sobhraj had given him poisoned dysentery medication and then nursed him back to health. Sobhraj and his ‘family’ were staying at a resort in the beach town of Pattaya, where Sobhraj met a fellow criminal, Ajay Chowdhury. The young Indian man became Sobhraj’s second-in-command and the two embarked on a killing spree in 1975. Many of their victims had been part of the ‘family’ and it is possible that they were killed to prevent them going to the authorities. 4 xnepali.com, a booklet on Charles Sobhraj The first known victim was Teresa Knowlton, a young woman from Seattle who had travelled from Bangkok and was en route to Kathmandu, where she was to study Tibetan Buddhism at Kopan Monastery. She met Sobhraj, who allegedly offered to be her guide and to take her to Pattaya Beach, where her body was later found burned. Jennie Bollivar, a young woman from America, had travelled to Thailand to meditate and to experience the Buddhist lifestyle. When she met Sobhraj, he tried to convince her to join his ‘family’ but she refused. Bollivar was found drowned in a tidal pool in the Gulf of Thailand, near the town of Pattaya, wearing a flower-patterned bikini. A number of months passed before the autopsy results, combined with forensic evidence, proved the drowning in fact to be a murder. The killers’ next victim was a young nomadic Sephardic Jew, Vitali Hakim. His body was found burned on the road to the Pattaya resort where the ‘family’ were staying. Henk Bintanja, 29 and his fiancée Cornelia Hemker, 25 were Dutch students who had met Sobhraj in Hong Kong. He had invited them to Thailand and they took him up on his offer. When they arrived, Sobhraj poisoned them then nursed them back to health. During this time, Charmayne Carrou, the girlfriend of Sobhraj’s previous victim, Hakim, came to investigate his disappearance. Anxious that she may discover what they had done, Sobhraj and Chowdhury swiftly dealt with the problem. Bintanja and Hemker’s bodies were found strangled and burned on 16th December 1975. Later that same month, Carrou was found drowned in similar circumstances to Bollivar, wearing a similar flower-patterned bikini. At first, police investigators did not connect the two cases but when they did, Sobhraj became known as ‘The Bikini Killer’. Stolen passports Sobhraj decided it was time to move again and on 18th December 1975, he and Leclerc used Bintanja and Hemker’s Dutch passports to enter Nepal.