Charles Sobhraj

Sobhraj was born Hatchand Bhaonani Gurumukh Charles Sobhraj on April 6, 1944, in Saigon, in former French Indochina (present-day Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam). His father, Sobhraj Hatchard Bavani, was a Sindhi Indian expatriate, while his mother, Tran Loang Phun, was a Vietnamese native.

His parents never married and his father abandoned their family when Sobhraj was still a kid. As a result, he was considered stateless until his mother’s boyfriend, a French lieutenant serving in Indochina, adopted him.

He grew up being neglected by his parents in favour of his half-siblings. His family divided their time between France and Indochina. As a child, he attempted at least twice to escape his parents’ home in France and return to Saigon, even reaching as far as Djibouti on one occasion.

His life as a criminal began quite early as well. He was still a teenager when he started committing petty crimes and in 1963, he served his first jail sentence for burglary at the Poissy prison near Paris. Charming and manipulative even then, he convinced the prison officials to let him have reading materials. This was the period when he became acquainted with Felix d'Escogne, a wealthy and impressionable young man who volunteered in the prison.

After his parole, d'Escogne let Sobhraj stay at his house and introduced him to both the high society of Paris and the criminal underworld. Sobhraj met a young French woman named Chantal Compagnon and began a passionate relationship with her. Sobhraj served eight months in prison for stealing during which Compagnon remained loyal to him. They married upon his release.

One of the most notorious and ruthless serial killers of all time, Sobhraj is fluent in multiple languages, including French, Hindi, and Vietnamese. In the spring of 1975, in Srinagar, India, he met Marie Andrée Leclerc, a French-Canadian who later became one of his most fanatic supporters. In July, they travelled to Bangkok where they found a third accomplice in an Indian named Ajay Chowdhury. The group grew even larger as more people joined in, drawn by Sobhraj’s enigmatic personality.

Sobhraj and Chowdhury committed their first known murder in 1975. The victim was an American woman named Teresa Knowlton. She had known the pair and had been part of their inner circle. Discovered in a tidal pool in the Gulf of Thailand, her body had a flowered bikini on. Initially thought to be a suicide, it was only after an autopsy and forensic evidence that foul play was suspected.

Their second victim Vitali Hakim’s burnt body was discovered on the road near Pattaya resort, where Sobhraj and his group was staying at the time. He strangled Dutch students Henk Bintanja and Cornelia Hemker and burned their bodies, and later murdered Hakim's French girlfriend Charmayne Carrou, who had come to Sobhraj looking for Hakim. She was found in a flowered bikini just like Knowlton. While the deaths were not connected by the investigators at the time, this was how he came to be known as the ‘Bikini Killer.’

In the following months, he would leave a bloody trail in his wake all across South-east Asia. His other known victims were Canadian Laurent Carrière and American Connie Bronzich (killed in Nepal), Israeli scholar Avoni Jacob (killed in Varanasi or Calcutta), and French Jean-Luc Solomon (in Bombay).

In Malaysia, during a gem-heist operation, Sobhraj and Chowdhury seemed to have parted ways. Neither Chowdhury nor his remains were ever found and the search for him is continuing till this day.

Charles Sobhraj was finally caught in Delhi in July 1976, after three French students escaped his attempt to poison them and informed the police, who charged him for the murder of Solomon. Two of his accomplices, Barbara Smith and Mary Ellen Eather, tried to commit suicide in the prison.

The trial began two years later, in 1978 and Sobhraj, ever the showman, turned it into a spectacle. He went through a series of defence lawyers, started a hunger strike, and even brought in his recently-paroled brother André to help.

He was expected to be sentenced to death but received a 12-year imprisonment instead. He served his sentence in Tihar Jail where he bribed the officers and led a lavish life. He gave several interviews where the murders came up in conversations, but he never admitted to them.

Sobhraj was well-aware of the 20-year-old, still valid Thai arrest warrant against him. He knew that he would be turned over to the Thai authorities and face almost certain execution as soon as he was released. In 1986, he drugged the prison officials and other inmates in a party that he himself had organised and casually walked out of one of the most secure prisons in India. He was caught in Goa, just as he intended, and served ten more years in an Indian prison.

He became a free man on February 17, 1997. Having no warrant, evidence or even witnesses against him, the Indian government let him go back to France.