CHARLES SOBHRAJ

Charles Sobhraj-What Shaped the Serpentine Killer

Rebecca Dykes

University of Idaho
CHARLES SOBHRAJ

Charles Sobhraj, also known as “The Serpent” or “The Bikini Killer” was as deceptive,

seductive, and sinister as the names he was given. He was a charismatic serial killer who left a

trail of murders stretching halfway around the world, and has effectively evaded a life sentence

for his crimes. Using around five aliases, and various accomplices, he was responsible for twelve

confirmed murders, while the real number may be double that amount (Thompson, 1979).

Born in 1944, Sobhraj was born in Saigon to a Vietnamese mother named Tran Loang

Phun and a tailor named Sobhraj Hachand Bhaonani. Since the two were unmarried, Sobhraj’s

father left his mother while Charles, known at that time as Gurumukh, was very young, he was

adopted by his mother’s new husband, a French Army lieutenant stationed in French Indochina

(Thompson, 1979). As his mother had more children with her new partner, Charles was more and

more neglected, and would often attempt to run away in search of his biological father. His

adoptive father never quite accepted Charles completely into the family, and thought of Charles

as a misguided child after he began to act out. He started to commit petty crimes in his early teen

years, and was first imprisoned in 1963 for car theft near Paris. He managed to bribe the prison

guards into affording him luxuries such as being able to keep books in his cell. Not long after, he

served another three years for robbery, and it was during this time that he learned self-defense,

other languages, and the methods of professional criminals (Neville, 1980).

Once he was released from prison, Sobhraj moved in with a man named Felix d’Escogne.

The two had met in prison. He was simultaneously dabbling in crime in Paris as well at living in

high society, which is where met a young French woman from a conservative background named

Chantal Compagnon, over whom he was extremely influential and manipulative. In the year

1970, Charles and Chantal travelled to Asia to avoid the authorities in Paris who were aware of

Sobhraj’s illicit activities. After arriving in Mumbai, India, Chantal gave birth to their daughter
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and the couple attempted to lead a stable life for their child. While growing close to the ex-pat

community, Sobhraj was running a car theft and smuggling business to feed his gambling

addiction. A few countries, smuggling businesses, and thefts later, Sobhraj was arrested in New

Delhi in 1973 for unsuccessful armed robbery of a jewel store in a hotel. When he was captured

by police, he feigned illness and was able to escape from the hospital during a blackout.

Although he was captured again a few months later, he was able to escape again after pretending

illness and drugging the hospital guard. (Boorstin, 1979). It was during this time that he left his

wife and daughter behind and fled to Iran, and Chantal returned to France, claiming she wanted

no more to do with Charles Sobhraj. For the next two years, Charles used different stolen

passports to travel around Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and his younger brother Andre

met up with him in Istanbul to go on a crime spree together in Greece and Turkey. Once the

brothers were arrested in Athens, Charles was able to escape prison and leave his younger

brother to serve his prison sentence.

In 1975, Charles moved to Thailand, where he started selling drugs to make a living. He

slowly created a “Manson-esque” crime family there, by creating situations for others and then

posing as the hero of the situation who would solve the problem for his victims. He gained their

trust and blind commitment to him by manipulating situations to make him look better. His first

“devotee” was Marie-Andree Leclerc, a French-Canadian woman from Quebec (Thompson,

1979). He stole former French policemen Yannick and Jacques’ passports, later helping them

“find” them, and he nursed Dominique Rennelleau back to health from dysentery when really he

had been poisoning him the whole time, creating a trust bond and incorporating them into his

“family”. During this time, he met a man named Ajay Choudury, who became his second-in-

command and the two began a killing spree. It is believed that many of Choudhury and Sobhraj’s
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victims were members of the family who had been killed to prevent them from going to the

authorities.

Their first victim was named Teresa Knowlton, a woman from Seattle who was travelling

to Kathmandu to study Tibetan Buddhism at a monastery there. After meeting Sobhraj and

agreeing to let him show her around, her burned body found on Pattaya Beach, wearing a flower-

patterned bikini. The next victim was named Vitali Hakim, and his burned body was found near

the Pattaya resort where the family had been staying. Two of Sobhraj’s friends from Hong Kong,

Henk Bintanja and his fiancée Cornelia Hemker had taken Sobhraj up on his invitation for them

to visit him, and he routinely poisoned them and nursed them back to health during their stay.

During this time, the girlfriend of Sobhraj’s last victim, Hakim, had travelled to investigate his

disappearance, and Sobhraj disposed of her. In the month of December of 1975, the bodies of the

Dutch students Bintania and Hemker were found strangled and burned, and the girlfriend of

Hakim, Charmayne Carrou, was found drowned in similar circumstances to Sobhraj’s earlier

victim, also wearing a flower bikini. It was in this way that Charles Sobhraj became known as

the bikini killer (Neville, 1980).

On the 18th of December 1975, Sobhraj moved to Nepal with his “family” member

Marie-Andree Leclerc, where they murdered a tourist couple and used their passports to return

back to Thailand. Once back, members of Sobhraj’s family began to suspect him of the Pattaya

murders after finding old belongings of the victims at their resort. He went on the run once again,

this time with Leclerc and Choudhury, and after a string of different countries, more murders,

and using stolen passports from his victims, Choudhury went missing, never to be seen again

(Buncombe, 2008). Not long after, Sobhraj and his newly-developed “family” with Leclerc and

two other women were found guilty of poisoning a group of graduate students in New Delhi after
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the poison kicked in too quickly and they were able to call the police. In prison, his two newer

accomplices, Smith and Eather, attempted suicide in prison, Sobhraj was sentenced to 12 years,

and Leclerc was paroled and returned to Canada where she died of ovarian cancer in 1984.

Sobhraj used smuggled gems to live a life of luxury in prison, even breaking out and letting

himself be recaptured to avoid being extradited to another country to receive the death sentence

after his time in Thailand would be up. He planned it so that in February 1997, he was released

from prison with no other country to extradite him to be charged, and he was able to return to

France as a free man (Buncombe, 2008).

In Paris, he retired and hired a publicity agent, who was able to connect him with

interviews and photographs in return for large amounts of money. He profited greatly off of his

story during this time. However, in 2003 he returned to Nepal where he was found gambling, and

was arrested in a casino in connection to his former crimes. He was sentenced to life

imprisonment in Nepal in 2004, and his motivations for returning have not been made clear

(Buncombe, 2008).

Since he has been portrayed as psychopathic in much of the media and writing about him,

it is hard to find characteristics about Charles Sobhraj that do not align with the expectations of

psychopaths. However, I do think that he portrays himself in a light which he does not think of

himself as overly narcissistic or lacking empathy. I am sure that he possesses some traits that do

not align with our view of psychopaths, but there was no reputable sources or evidence stating

anything other than his psychopathic tendencies. Although not explicitly said, I think it worth

noting his return to Nepal after being able to live in France a free man. Even though we have no

proof as to why he went back, I think this is the one action that really struck me as inconsistent

with psychopathic tendencies. As most psychopaths would be unrestrained by sentimentality,

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personal connections, or places they loved, it does not make sense to me why a person with

psychopathic behavior would put themselves in a situation that was only at their detriment. It has

been claimed that he went back on an attention-seeking motivation, which is inherently tied to

validation from others. This, in my mind, is not concurrent with psychopathic behavior, as

seeking approval or attention from others is not considered to be a psychopathic trait. Many

psychopaths do not need the approval from others, only their acceptance as a form of

manipulation, but it is apparent that Charles Sobhraj used his notoriety to gain attention from

others in order to validate his sense of self-worth and self-importance (Walsh, 2008).

Many propose that there is a much stronger genetic link to psychopathy than any

environmental cause, and even go so far as to say that many of the environmental factors that

have been proposed to have elicited psychopathic responses would in reality elevate emotional

responsiveness (Blair, 2006). That being said, it would be more appropriate to cite the secondary

psychopathy theories that have become present in recent years to the causes of Sobhraj’s

assumed psychopathy can be linked to his abusive and negligent childhood. Although not much

is known about his family, it is obvious that his childhood was marred with isolation and lack of

social connection. He was not accepted by his family members, and was often considered a

second-rate citizen in France where he grew up. He formed no close bonds with any of his

family, and was considered an outsider. His childhood was defined by its’ constancy in

abandonment cycles, and although his father wanted nothing to do with young Sobhraj, he turned

it around in his mind that his father was a heroic figure, and if he could only rejoin him, Charles

would finally have the acceptance he deeply craved. This led to his self-reliance and inability to

connect deeply with others. It seems that in the case of Charles Sobhraj, more environmental

factors came into play to create the murderous adult, and can be aligned with the secondary
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psychopathy theory. This states that negative childhood experiences can profoundly impact those

when they reach adulthood, and young children who are severely traumatized and neglected can

learn to “turn off ’their emotional capacity as a coping mechanism for their experiences (Porter,

1996). Sobhraj’s obsession with surrounding himself with those who are endlessly devoted to

him shows his need to fill this hole that had been instilled in him since childhood. He felt that he

never had a caring and accepting family, and he sought to create his own in adulthood by starting

a group where those who surrounded him would do anything for him. The fact that Charles was

the figurehead would have satiated his desire for a dependent group of people who could become

his chosen family (Levenson, 1992).

There are many critiques surrounding the criminal justice system in the response to the

crimes of Charles Sobhraj. Although I think that at the time there was more room for corruption

in places like Paris, Sobhraj also profited off of the fact that many of the places he was arrested

and imprisoned, such as India, had extremely corrupt and ineffective criminal justice systems.

Thomas Thompson has quoted a visitor of the prison where Sobhraj spent three years of his

youth saying, “It is a horror…one enters the place and chills pass through the bones like stepping

into a cellar. Each moment I am inside, I am repelled” (1979). Although he was able to bribe, lie,

and fake illnesses to escape imprisonment, he was also subject to torturous conditions while in

prison in India (Rao, 2001). He was put in bar fetters continuously for days at a time, and

although a law at the time made it legal for the superintendent of the prison to imprison offenders

in this way if they made themselves a threat or of dangerous propensities, the nature of the

crimes of the offender could not be inherently decisive of their dangerousness in this situation.

So for Charles Sobhraj, who had not shown himself capable of violence in prison, to be

restrained in this way, was torturous and a criminal act of negligence on behalf of the prison
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system. Although later removed, this was a completely inappropriate response to Charles

Sobhraj, and would have only actually motivated his anti-social tendencies further. With most

psychopaths, only positive reinforcement of behavior has been proven successful in their

treatment, and any punishments have no effect or negative effect on their actions and behaviors

(Holmes, 1991). Although ultimately the amount of chaos in the prison systems he found himself

in were important to his escapes, they also reinforced his antisocial personality tendencies and

played a part in solidifying his path into adulthood. Hare has concluded through his research that,

in fact, many psychopaths learn from this sort of situation, and can repeat all of the psychiatric

and prison jargon they are taught to need to say (Neumann, 2006). In this way, psychopaths are

able to manipulate others into thinking they are somehow reformed, which seems to be the case

in how easily Sobhraj could entice guards and prison authorities to allow him luxuries and even

build a sense of camaraderie with them. At the time, the torrential political climate of the East

and the downfall of colonial empires would shape the prison system quite immensely, and make

them very susceptible for those like Charles Sobhraj to use to their personal benefit.

A more effective alternative response to Charles Sobhraj’s crimes would be to offer him

mental healthcare with an emphasis on positive restructuring at an early age. It is quite possible

that this intervention during his formative years when he was first imprisoned in Paris could have

had a profound impact on his life. After this, I think a long-term strategy would be to follow-up

with him on his progress, as well as continuing to offer supportive and intervention-oriented

therapies. Although the prison system he entered was flawed, by the point of adulthood, I do not

know any effective strategies for dealing with Charles Sobhraj other than life imprisonment.

Although he is considered psychopathic in nature, after murdering others there is not alternatives
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to imprisonment that would be effective with what we know about treating psychopathy at this

time in relation to serious crime.

I would be amiss if I did not mention a certain degree of the influence of post-colonialism

in the discussion regarding Charles Sobhraj. In fact, even in the most often-ctied work regarding

Sobhraj “Serpentine” by Thomas Thompson draws parallels to the fall of the French empire and

the events in Sobhraj’s life. His life was portrayed in a way that complimented anti-Orientalism

at the time, in which many members of Western society demonized people of the East (Newman,

1994). In one passage, Thompson says about Charles, “He required a country in which he was

neither known nor wanted by police, one in which riches abounded, one whose boundaries were

easy to traverse illegally, one whose residents were generous with attention and applause. At last

report, the serpentine roads of destiny-he believed- would lead him to the United States” (1979).

This passage clearly outlines the hegemonic sentiments of Western society, alluding to the

“invasion scare” that was sweeping the US during that time. Since then, many accounts of

Charles Sobhraj’s life have also drawn away from framing the story from a post-colonial

background. Two writers, Richard Neville and Julie Clarke, went to interview Sobhraj to

investigate his story from the perspective of looking at the affects of colonialism and Western

counterculture, and came out writing it from the individualist perspective of psychopathy and

individual rejection (Newman, 1994). Instead of looking at his story from the perspective of

socio-economic readings, colonial effects, and the aftermath, they turned him into an (almost

racially charged) evil Eastern demon. All this to say, I think that not only was the criminal

system at fault in some way for their treatment of Charles Sobhraj, but the media at the time as

well, with their string of biases and misinformation.

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In fact, the post-colonial world that Charles Sobhraj used to his benefit was fraught with

racial, political, and governmental instability. Although useful to look into his personal life to

find causes of psychopathy, it must also be noted that the concept of psychopathy itself is still

very much linked to Western modes of thought. Although the concept can be somewhat cross-

cultural, it would be interesting to examine Charles Sobhraj’s life from a more Eastern

perspective (Latzman, 2015). By delving into these ideas, one can more clearly see the political,

social, and racial tones in the story of Charles Sobhraj.

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Hare, R. D. (1999). Without conscience: The disturbing world of the psychopaths among us.

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