Charles Sobhraj

The notorious murderer who preyed on 70s backpackers
Our writer recalls his bizarre meetings with a charmer and psychopath
The child of an affair between an Indian businessman-tailor and one of

his Vietnamese shop assistants, Sobhraj had grown up in Saigon during the
Vietnamese war of independence from France.
A bright but delinquent teenager, he was irresistibly drawn to crime –
car theft, street muggings, and then holding up housewives with a gun. He
spent most of his adolescence in Paris in and out of youth offender
facilities and then their adult version.
A well-meaning prison visitor arranged work for him on the outside and
also introduced him to a bourgeois young Parisian called Chantal
Compagnon. They fell in love. He promised her that he was a reformed
character and they got engaged, only for him to go back to prison for car
theft.
But like so many women who were to follow, she had fallen under his
spell. When he came out they embarked on a manic crime spree across
Europe and Asia. When he came out they embarked on a manic crime spree
across Europe and Asia. 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. 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. A
generation was looking to find itself by getting lost or high somewhere
off the beaten track. No one took much notice of who came and went.
It was in this transient milieu that Sobhraj stole from impressionable

travellers. But first he was imprisoned in Greece – he escaped by
swapping identities with his younger brother. Then he and Compagnon were
imprisoned in Afghanistan. They had just had a daughter, who was sent
back to live with Compagnon’s parents in France. Sobhraj managed to break
out of prison by drugging a guard and then returned to France to kidnap
his own daughter. When Compagnon finally got out, she was able to take
the child and flee to America to escape Sobhraj’s destructive hold.
An embittered Sobhraj upped the crime stakes. 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. Like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, he
assumed different identities, using stolen passports and creating a trail
of havoc wherever he went.
Certainly a young French-Canadian nurse named Marie-Andrée Leclerc was

impressed when she met him travelling in India. 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.”
The pair ended up in Bangkok, where he posed as a gem dealer and

befriended young travellers. 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. In nearly all his murders, he first disabled his victims by
spiking their drinks.
Bangkok in 1976 was a place where anyone with the right connections and
spare cash could evade unwanted police attention. Sobhraj made sure he
had those connections. So when travellers who he had met began
disappearing, the Thai police didn’t bother investigating.
Instead it was left to a junior Dutch diplomat looking for the missing
Dutch couple, Henk Bintanja and Cornelia Hemker, who became Sobhraj’s
nemesis. Herman Knippenberg now lives in New Zealand, where he keeps a
large archive on Sobhraj’s crimes in his home.
In July 1976 Sobhraj was on the run in India, wanted for several murders
in Thailand and two in Nepal. His first killing had been of a taxi driver
in Pakistan several years before, but between October 1975 and March 1976
he is believed to have committed 11 more murders, nearly all of them
young backpackers.
Often with the former nurse Leclerc’s help, he drugged them, led them to
believe they had contracted a tropical bug, and prevented them from
leaving his apartments on the top floor of Kanit House in Bangkok.
Even to this date, why he then killed these harmless young travellers
remains a mystery. He told Neville that they were involved in drug
dealing and he was working for a cartel, but this was nonsense.
Knippenberg has his own theory. He told me he thought that they were
killed because they rejected his criminal entreaties. He was a
patriarchal figure who demanded obedience. “In resisting the overtures of
Sobhraj,” he explained, “they triggered his childhood preoccupation with
being rejected.”
The man himself was careful not to shed any light on the matter. With the
single exception of his confessions to Neville, which he later retracted,
he has always held to the legal argument that, as he’d not been found
guilty of any murders, it meant he hadn’t committed any murders. He even
denied meeting a number of his victims when I raised their names,
although there were witness statements placing them in his apartment.
We went around and around the subject, and it became clear that he was
more interested in portraying himself as a victim: of western
imperialism, a dysfunctional childhood, racism and institutionalisation.
At one moment he would lapse into philosophical musings, the next make a
blackly mordant joke. He was narcissistic, amusing, teasing and, it had
to be said, a psychopath.
Chowdury, the only other person who could shed light on why petty theft
escalated to brutal murder, disappeared in 1976 after travelling with
Sobhraj to Malaysia. Many have speculated that Sobhraj murdered him,
though he denied it when I asked him.
He told me in Paris that he had regrets but he wouldn’t say what they
were. “My philosophy in life is that we are masters of our own destiny
and responsible for our own actions.”
For all the moral grandeur of those words, at 75 he has spent more than
half his life in prison. All he really possesses are the secrets of his
crimes. They are the only things in his misspent life that he’s ever been
able to hold on to

Charles Sobhraj

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Charles Sobhraj

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The notorious murderer who preyed on 70s backpackers

The child of an affair between an Indian businessman-tailor and one of

It was in this transient milieu that Sobhraj stole from impressionable

An embittered Sobhraj upped the crime stakes. He held a flamenco dancer

Certainly a young French-Canadian nurse named Marie-Andrée Leclerc was

The pair ended up in Bangkok, where he posed as a gem dealer and

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