Charles Sobhraj
Charles Sobhraj
Charles Sobhraj is of Vietnamese and Indian parentage and was born in 1944 in Saigon. Sobhraj gained notoriety in the seventies for committing what got dubbed as the “Bikini murders.” He usually preyed on Westerners traveling in Asia, and is reputed to have committed over 20 murders.
When I was growing up in India, the papers were full of stories about Charles, who was nicknamed “The Serpent.” He had tried to commit a spectacular jewel heist in a hotel, which involved binding and gagging the occupant of the room above the store, and drilling a hole in the floor. Just like in a Jules Dassin film
There were thrilling stories of escapes from jail. Like the time he dug a tunnel in an Afghan prison with a spoon. Another escape story involved setting fire to a prison van in Greece, while he and the other convicts were locked inside it.
Charles was finally captured in India and spent twenty years behind bars. He was released in 1997, and moved to Paris.
The last I heard of Charles was that he was planning to make a film about his life and publish the novels he had written in jail. Those plans must have been stymied by his recent arrest in Kathmandu for a murder he committed almost thirty years ago.
While researching Charles Sobhraj for “Eunuch Alley,” I came across a broadcast news story about him. The transcript from that broadcast became the script for “Snake-Byte.”
If you are interested in finding out more about Charles, there are a couple of books available from Amazon.com:
The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj by Richard Neville, Julie Clarke
Serpentine by Thomas Thompson
Both of these books are quite lurid, but then the man is a sociopath after all. Apparently the authors used interviews and were quite thorough in their research. However, it is difficult to ignore the Orientalist tenor of their narrative, they seem to have taken up from where the old “yellow peril” Fu-Manchu movies left off. So reading these books is quite a rich experience, some of it unintended by their authors I am sure.
I have been keeping up with Sobhraj’s career and you can read about him in the project related news section of my blog.