The Serpent (Part 2)

Charles Sobhraj and his trail of death

By David Cocksedge

THERE WERE rumours that Charles Sobhraj had killed before 1975, but now for the first time he began to leave a trail. His first known victim was an American adventuress named Jennie Bollivar who had travelled east to immerse herself in meditation and a Buddhist lifestyle. But she made the mistake of falling in with Charles (passing as ‘Alain Gautier') and his crowd when she met them in Bangkok. Just why Sobhraj murdered Jennie is not clear, though a Dutch diplomat named Herman Knippenberg believes that she was killed after she refused to join his entourage and traffic in drugs.

Jennie's dead body was found in March 1975 floating in a tide pool in the warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand, clad in a flowered bikini. The first diagnosis was that the young woman had drowned after a night of smoking cannabis and drinking alcohol, but months later when a full autopsy was performed, the forensic evidence made it clear that someone had held her head under water until she drowned.

The next victim was a young nomadic Sephardic Jew named Vitali Hakim who also encountered Sobhraj's criminal gang in Bangkok. Hakim moved in with the entourage and stayed for several days. Then he accompanied Ajay and Charles on a trip to the coastal resort city of Pattaya, and according to Charles, opted to stay with close friends he had met there. Yannick and Jacques were puzzled by this explanation, because Vitali had left his clothes in a closet in the Bangkok house and had turned over his passport and money to Charles for ‘safekeeping'.

Several days later, a badly burned body was discovered on the road to Pattaya, which in those days passed through the provincial capital of Chonburi. The male body showed signs of having been beaten, but it was clear to police that the poor fellow had been alive when he was doused with gasoline and then set alight. Local police assumed the man had been set upon by Thai bandits and did not connect this murder with the death of Jennie Bollivar.

Then in December 1975, Hakim's French girlfriend Charmayne Carrou came east looking for him, asking awkward questions. Before he died Vitali had left a message for her and unwittingly drew another victim into the murderous web. She traced her boyfriend's last journey to Charles Sobhraj and his ‘family', and started making enquiries. Ms Carrou was then found dead, floating in the sea – circumstances almost identical to the death of Jennie Bollivar. The autopsy revealed that Charmayne had been strangled, not drowned, and that she had been suffocated with such force that bones in her neck had shattered.

Two couples also died in mysterious circumstances. Although they were separated by time, they would share the same terrible fate at the hands of the man who had become known to Interpol as ‘The Serpent'.

Henk Bintanja and his fiancée, Cornelia ‘Cocky' Hemker, were Dutch students travelling around Southeast Asia when they met Charles Sobhraj in Hong Kong. He introduced himself as ‘Alain Dupuis', a gem dealer, and quickly gained the trust of the frugal Dutch couple. As a special favour, Charles sold Cornelia a sapphire ring for $1,600 (US) and invited them to his house in Bangkok. He had to leave before them, he said, but would send a car and driver to meet them at Don Muang International airport. Henk and Cornelia mysteriously fell ill soon after arriving in Bangkok, and began recuperating at the rented house. Charles of course locked up their valuables and passports in his safe as he ‘nursed' them back to health. The night that Charmayne Carrou appeared at the house, Henk and Cocky were quickly hustled out of the building despite their illness. No one questioned Charles and Ajay when they returned later smelling of gasoline and covered in dirt. Charles offered no explanation, but Dominique and the two former policemen were becoming suspicious.

Bangkok papers were soon trumpeting the news about two tourists who had been kidnapped and murdered. The man and woman had been strangled before their bodies were set ablaze. No identification was found on either body. Journalists speculated about just how the doomed couple had met their fate until the discovery of a second ‘drowned' Western woman pushed the story off the front pages.

Sobhraj then flew to Nepal (using Henk's passport) and discovered a pair of wandering Westerners in Katmandu. Laddie DuParr and Annabella Tremont met in Nepal and quickly became lovers. Canadian Laddie was planning to climb Mount Everest and Annabella was a restless Californian blonde looking for adventure. They spent a lot of time together relaxing in Katmandu's ‘Freak Street' where tourist hippies could buy anything from good reefer to cheap rubies. Here they met The Serpent and inevitably a nasty end. A man's body was found in a field outside the city, burned and slashed with a knife. While authorities were trying to identify the body, another corpse, very quickly identified as that of Annabella Tremont, was found nearby. She had been stabbed several times in the chest.

Police got their first lead when Nepalese Customs reported that Laddie DuParr had left the country shortly after the estimated time of Annabella's death. They surmised that Laddie had killed his new girlfriend and then fled the country. They still had no clues as to the identity of the murdered Western male, however.

Of course, it was not DuParr who had hurried out of Nepal after the double murder. Charles had used Laddie's passport to fly back to Bangkok where he sold some of the jewels that DuParr had bought in Delhi. Then, using the passport and identity of Henk Bintanja, he returned to Katmandu the next day! Nepalese police managed to trace the last few days in the lives of Laddie and Annabella and quickly brought in Charles, Marie and Ajay for questioning. The suave Charles Sobhraj very cleverly bluffed his way out of an arrest, convincing police that he had only met the American and Canadian couple briefly in his travels.

But meantime in Bangkok Dominique, Yannick and Jacques finally put the pieces together and realised that they had been in the care of a homicidal maniac. They broke into Charles' office and found dozens of passports and identity papers belonging to unfortunate tourists who had met up with Monsieur Sobhraj. The three Frenchmen filed a full report to Bangkok police on all they knew of their murderous host, and then boarded a flight to Paris, vowing never to return to Asia.

Charles and his close entourage crossed the border into India and took a bus to Calcutta. Sobhraj was low on funds but all he needed was a clean passport and some money. He soon found both in Avoni Jacob, an Israeli scholar who died in a grimy Calcutta hotel room where he was drugged and then strangled. He was killed for only 300 dollars.

Using Jacob's passport, Charles led Ajay and Marie to Singapore and then back to Bangkok where he quickly drugged and robbed a rich American tourist. Thai police then brought the trio in for questioning regarding the ‘Bikini Murders'. It was a laughable, half-hearted investigation, as the Thai authorities were not prepared to ruin their valuable tourist industry with a highly publicised trial

But the Dutch Embassy, led by Herman Knippenberg, was adamant about having a full-scale investigation. Knippenberg was particularly driven to prosecute Charles Sobhraj, or Alain Gautier or Robert Dubious, or whoever this mysterious man pretended to be. The diplomat had put together a large dossier on Sobhraj, and was convinced that the man police had questioned was responsible for the deaths of at least two Dutch tourists.

It was not to be. Years before, Charles had told his brother that Asia was where anything could be bought if the price was right. He proved it early in 1976 when he paid 12,000 US dollars to have a Thai immigration official look the other way while he and his cohorts fled the country.

They stopped briefly in Malaysia where Charles sent Ajay to the mining towns for some gems. Ajay duly returned with several hundred carats of jewels worth around 40,000 dollars that Charles intended to sell in Geneva. But first he had to take care of one loose end. No one knows exactly what happened to Ajay Chowdhury in Malaysia, but when Charles met Marie at Kuala Lumpur airport to catch their flight to Geneva, Ajay was not with him. She inquired as to his whereabouts but the glint in Charles' eyes told her never to ask that question again. Authorities believe that Ajay, a partner-in-crime in many of the Sobhraj murders, had finally outlived his usefulness and his body is decomposing somewhere in a steaming Malaysian jungle.

Whilst Charles and Marie flew on to Bombay, a big new story broke in Thailand. A dangerous con man had killed tourists in the country. Thai authorities now knew that they had to locate Charles Sobhraj and bring him to justice. Tourism is vital to Thailand and no 300,000 baht bribe could compete with the billions that would be lost if tourists were scared off visiting the country. Police now took a closer look at the dossier complied by Herman Knippenberg.

In Bombay, Charles killed by poisoning a young French tourist named Jean Luc Solomon, turning a simple robbery into murder. Then he and Marie went to Delhi where Charles latched onto a tour group of French post-graduate students, becoming their guide around the city. The students considered themselves lucky to have found an intelligent and helpful fellow Frenchman in such a strange place, and when he offered them each a pill that he said would ward off dysentery, many took it with gratitude.

His plan was to wait until the students fell asleep from his drug and then rob their rooms. But the pills worked too quickly and students started dropping all around him in the hotel lobby. When someone realised that the only people who fell were those who had taken the ‘medicine', a trio of burly students wrestled Charles to the ground and sent for the police. Marie was quickly arrested also as his accomplice.

Charles held out during two weeks of intense questioning, but there was now mounting evidence coming in from all corners. He was also wanted in Thailand, Nepal, Afghanistan, Turkey and Greece. He was charged with the murder of Jean Luc Solomon in Bombay and he and Marie were confined in Tihar Prison outside Delhi.

Whilst Marie languished in a rat-infested cell, Charles of course managed to make the best of it. He knew how things worked in India and concealed in his body were more than 70 carats of precious gems, more than enough to buy himself a comfortable prison lifestyle. India at the time was ruled with an iron fist through martial law by Indira Gandhi, and conditions were harsh. The judicial system was so clogged with political and criminal prisoners that two years went by before he was put on trial.

Sobhraj hired and fired lawyers and then ended up defending himself before going on hunger strike to protest the ‘inhuman conditions' at Tihar. He was eventually found guilty of manslaughter (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and was given seven years in gaol. Marie was found not guilty, but was returned to Tihar to await trial in the drugging of the French students in Delhi. She served some time for that crime and was released on mercy parole when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She died at home in Canada, still professing her love for the man who had turned her into a thief and an accomplice to murder.

Charles was given another five years for his abortive attempt to drug and rob the French students but he actually required more time in India. The warrant from Thailand was good for twenty years, which meant that as soon as he was done serving his twelve years sentence in Tihar; he would be extradited to Thailand and very likely executed there after a murder trial.

Sobhraj almost literally ran Tihar Prison. As he was finishing his tenth year behind bars, he threw a party for all his friends, which included the prison staff. This time, it didn't matter when the sleeping pills took effect, and in the middle of the party, as cons and guards alike passed out around him, Charles Sobhraj just walked out of gaol. But it was not his plan to flee the subcontinent as so many times before; he just needed more time until the warrant in Thailand ran out.

So he arranged to be caught and was sentenced for the drug assault and escape. His audacious gamble paid off. Over time, authorities around the world forgot about Charles Sobhraj and the case against him in Bangkok eventually withered away as witnesses died and evidence was lost.

On 17 February 1997, The Serpent walked out of Tihar Prison for the final time and flew to Paris where he soon became a media celebrity figure, able to charge reporters 5,000 dollars a time for interviews. In March 2002 an Indian film company announced that it was making a film of his life, with input from Sobhraj himself. In an interview, he said with astonishing candour: “I have already taken from the past what is best for me, what helps me live in the present and prepare for the future. If I play back a murder in my head, it will be to see what I can learn from the method. I won't even notice the body.”

But in September 2003 Sobhraj made the mistake of travelling to Nepal and was arrested at the Yak and Yeti Hotel in Katmandu. He was held on immigration charges, but the real reason Nepalese authorities wanted Charles was to question him about the murder of two backpackers in 1975. The victims were radiology student Connie Jo Bonzich from Saratoga, California and her boyfriend Laurent Ormond of Manitoba, Canada and their deaths carried his MO. He was tried in the summer of 2004, quickly found guilty of double homicide and sentenced to life imprisonment. Sobhraj angrily told Agence France Presse that he had been “declared guilty without proof and without witnesses” and immediately began an appeal against his sentence.

In November 2004, he attempted to escape his prison cell in Nepal by (guess what?) drugging his guards. But his plan was foiled when prison wardens found and confiscated the drug before he could use it.

Meantime, the Patan Appellate Court in Nepal ordered that the murder case be further investigated, based on the lack of evidence presented at the trial. At time of writing (December 2005) the investigation remains ongoing. Charles Sobhraj, the smooth talking con man, now 61 years old, is still in custody and may remain there for some time. Naturally, he has become good friends with all his guards, and is willing to talk to any news team that is prepared to pay.

Sobhraj has not lost any of his charm. Like all con men, he is a shameless actor, and he really loves all the attention and fame. He puts on his most sincere expression and smiles as he looks into the camera lens. It is an oddly chilling smile - the smile of The Serpent.

(Research: crimelibary.com/charles_sobhraj)

IF YOU need a check on my True Crime series of stories, published in the Hua Hin Observer, here is a complete list to date:
April 2002 -The Green Bicycle case, 1921. May 2002 - The Craig/Bentley Case, 1952. June 2002 - The A6 Murder Case, 1961. July 2002 - Murder of the Earl of Errol, 1941. August 2002 - The O J Simpson murder trial, 1995. September 2002 - The Aileen Wuornos case, 1989. October 2002 - The Ronald Opus case, 1993. November 2002 - Madame X, 1929. December 2002 - The Spree Killer, 1984. January 2003 - Shootout at Smiths' Club, 1966. February 2003 - The Christine Dryland case, 1991. March 2003 - Poisoned Pie in Essex, 1982. April 2003 - The Heydrich assassination, 1943. May 2003 - The Diana Davidson Murder case, 1969. June 2003 - The death of Alkibiades, 404 BC. July 2003 - The headsman of Colmar, 1780. August 2003 - The Ruth Ellis case, 1955. September 2003 - The Mel Jones Murder case, 1975. October 2003 - The Bluebeard of the bath, 1915. November 2003 - Murder in a combat zone, 1966. December 2003 - The Barn Restaurant murder case, 1972. January 2004 - The assassination of JFK, 1963. February 2004 - Judge Falcone and the Mafia, 1992. March 2004 - Gilles de Rais/Bluebeard, 1404-1440. April 2004 - The hand in the sand case, 1885. May 2004 - The body in the bag, 1979

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