On the Trail of the Serpent

Description

The complete story of Charles Sobhraj, the serial killer who inspired the hit Netflix series The Serpent.

Charles Sobhraj remains one of the world’s great conmen, and as a serial killer, the story of his life and capture endures as legend. Born in Vietnam to a Vietnamese mother and Indian father, Sobhraj grew up deprived of a sense of identity, moving to France before being imprisoned and stripped of his multiple nationalities. Driven to floating from country to country, continent to continent, he became the consummate con artist, stealing passports, smuggling drugs and guns across Asia, busting out of prisons and robbing wealthy associates. But as his situation grew more perilous, he turned to murder, preying on Western tourists dropping out across the 1970s “hippie trail,” leaving dead bodies and gruesome crime scenes in his wake, triggering an international manhunt that put him at the top of INTERPOL’s most wanted list.

On the Trail of the Serpent draws its readers into the story of Sobhraj’s life as told exclusively to journalists Richard Neville and Julie Clarke by the investigators, families of the victims, and even Sobhraj himself. Blurring the boundaries between true crime and novelization, this remains the definitive book about Sobhraj–a riveting tale of sex, drugs, adventure, and murder.”Extraordinary” —The GuardianRichard Neville was an Australian writer and commentator who first came to prominence as the editor of the counterculture magazine OZ. Having travelled the ‘pot trail’ throughout the 1960s and 70s, Neville and his partner Julie Clarke were commissioned by Random House to write the story of con man and serial killer, Charles Sobhraj. The result, On the Trail of the Serpent was a global bestseller. His other books include Play Power; Hippie, Hippie, Shake; Out of My Mind and Amerika Pyscho. Neville died in 2016.

Julie Clarke trained as a journalist on the Sydney Telegraph before joining ABC television. She later became a New York correspondent for Australian Consolidated Press and worked as a TV producer. She was commissioned to write On the Trail of the Serpent along with her partner Richard Neville, an endeavor that took the pair all over the world for three years.

1

 

The Face of an Angel

 

Late on a sultry afternoon in Paris in July 1976, a middle-aged man strolled from his office and into the rush-hour crowds. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and carried a battered briefcase. Alain Benard, a lawyer, had been a corporate executive for fifteen years but looked more like an academic.

 

Billboards of bronzed girls in bikinis smiled down on Benard as he jostled his way towards the Metro. It was nearing the time of year when millions of Parisians would leave the city for their annual summer holidays.

 

Benard sidestepped an elderly man bent over a pile of magazines. The man was cutting the twine from the bundle and stacking the copies of Paris Match on the racks of the news stand. Benard’s eyes followed the recognizable bright red logo. Then, having glimpsed the cover photo, he froze. The dark eyes glowering from the familiar face had stopped him in his tracks. A cold, arrogant but handsome face. There was no mistake. It was Charles Sobhraj. The headline read ‘Death Rides the Road to Kathmandu’.

 

Benard hurriedly bought a copy of the magazine, sat down at a pavement cafŽ and contemplated the cover. Charles was pictured in a pose Benard knew well, one hand on his hip and the other on a table scattered with dollars. Next to Charles was a dark-

haired young woman wearing sunglasses and leaning forward in a low-cut T-shirt. She looked more attractive than Benard remembered her.

 

‘Police have embarked on a massive manhunt for three brutal

killers,’ read the photo caption. ‘They slay young hitchhikers on the holiday road – a dozen victims have so far been found.’

 

Horrified, he quickly opened the magazine, where his eye was caught by a lurid comic strip. It showed his friend Charles with two young travellers on a palm-fringed beach. Charles’ girlfriend Marie-AndrŽe was silhouetted against the tropical moon, holding up a syringe. Next, two bodies were pictured lying on the sand, Charles bent over one of them. His girlfriend knelt next to the body of a man in shorts. Then the body was on fire, and Marie-AndrŽe was smiling as flames soared into the air. In the last frame, the young couple peered demoniacally from the page as smoke billowed behind them.

 

Benard felt sick. Surely, he told himself, it was impossible, it was absurd. And who was their accomplice? An Indian national, apparently, a young man called ‘Ajay’ whom Benard was sure he had never met.

 

He turned the page and found a photograph of a girl in a bikini, her arms outstretched and her eyes closed. ‘An 18-year-old American found dead in Pattaya,’ the caption read. ‘Another victim of the fiendish trio?’ Almost against his will, his eyes skimmed the story: charred corpses in Kathmandu covered with stab wounds, throats cut, necks broken, druggings and drownings, teenagers burned alive in Bangkok . . . All the work of a mysterious ‘Alain Gautier’, now one of the most wanted men in the world.

 

Could Charles have committed those crimes? It was still a mystery to him how his own life, that of an orderly and respectable bachelor, had become intertwined with this wounded young man – an incorrigible criminal whose career was now sending the world’s press into paroxysms of grisly prose.

 

Looking up at the blue sky, his thoughts travelled back to that day ten years earlier when a sudden impulse to do good for the world had drawn him into close proximity with this terrible darkness.

 

Benard remembered he had been taking a Sunday afternoon stroll through the park near his home. It was 1966. He was thirty-eight, prosperous but bored. The air was sweet with the smell of freshly cut grass and flowers but the ease of his cultivated life seemed sterile and cloying. He was trapped in a ghetto of privilege.

 

Above the swaying green of the poplars he noticed, not for the first time, the high grey watchtowers of Poissy Jail. Behind those walls, he knew, lived those for whom there could be no fastidious savouring of doubts on a Sunday stroll.

 

It was at this moment, Benard still remembered so clearly, that he had made a fateful decision. His father, a commodities broker, had been a volunteer prison visitor many years before. Alain decided to follow his example. This could be a fair exchange. He could use his legal training to help others and he would gain a passport to another milieu. The next day Benard applied to become an official prison visitor at Poissy Jail.

 

At first his part-time duties were simple: he advised Yugoslav construction workers who had overstayed their visas; he patched up domestic affairs for Corsican burglars; and on some weekends he would visit as many as fifteen inmates, who were happy just to have someone to talk to.

 

Then one day, the prison priest approached him about a special case.

 

‘I thought of you, Benard,’ said the older man, ‘because this case needs an intellectual with a lot of patience. It’s a young boy, very bright, in fact exceptionally so, and a rebel. He seems to live in a world of his own and refuses to come to terms with reality. But if he had a friend to connect with him, and help him, I’m sure he could go a long way. Are you interested?’

 

In fact it had seemed like the perfect project, one he embraced with alacrity.

 

The following weekend, on a wet October afternoon, he found himself walking through the heavy iron gates of the jail and waiting patiently for the guards to examine his pass and unlock the second set of doors. He followed the grey-haired social worker into the reception area.

 

‘Five months ago,’ she said, turning to him, lowering her voice, ‘Charles broke out of Haguenau. Did you read about it?’

 

Benard nodded. Last May three prisoners from the psychiatric jail had jumped over the wall after knocking out a guard and tying him to a radiator.

 

‘They caught him and transferred him here,’ she confided as she started to walk along the grey cement corridor. Benard followed.

 

‘It was a self-destructive act,’ she went on. ‘Another month in Haguenau and he probably would have got parole. Now he refuses to work and will have nothing to do with his cellmates. He wrote to the warden here accusing him of degrading the prisoners. Then he went on a hunger strike for forty-five days.’

 

She opened the door into the empty visitors’ room, with its ugly green linoleum. Benard was well accustomed to the place.

 

‘Don’t let me give you the impression that his is a hopeless case,’ she whispered urgently as they sat down. ‘As you must have gathered by now, we believe that there is no such thing. No case is lost! And the fact that Charles is so young and his crimes relatively minor, well, there’s reason to hope.’

 

‘And his background? What do we know?’ Benard enquired politely.

 

‘He was born in Saigon to a Vietnamese mother, but his father is Indian. His stepfather is French, an army man. A casualty of the mess we created in Indo-China,’ she sighed.

 

It was twelve years since the French army had been routed by the Viet Minh at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, yet Benard was well aware of the consequences of his country’s foreign policy in Indo-China, where almost 80,000 French soldiers had died. The Vietnam War, some people believed, had begun in Paris in 1858 when the politicians first ordered gunboats to sail up the Saigon River and establish a garrison. For ninety-two years the French had profited from the country’s raw materials – raising revenue to administer the colony by monopolizing opium sales to the Vietnamese.

 

The woman touched his arm, growing more serious.

 

‘I suggest that if you agree to accept this case, Mr Benard, you should do so on one condition only, a condition that we would ask you to regard as inviolable.’ She paused. ‘If you decide you want to help Charles, you would have to stay his friend throughout.’

 

‘Throughout what?’

 

‘Throughout his life. Up to now he’s been shunted back and forth between parents and continents. It’s made it hard for him to form attachments. On top of that, he had to live through the war. If you come into this boy’s life as a friend and then disappear, it would be much worse than doing nothing. Everyone has judged him, this whole system.’ She gestured at the small barred windows, the fluorescent light, the ubiquitous ugliness. ‘He needs a strong father-figure. Firm, but not judgmental. He needs just one person to stand by him.’

 

They heard the harsh voices of the guards herding prisoners along the corridor to the visiting rooms and the social worker got up to leave. She nodded and said, ‘We’ll talk again later. Good luck.’

 

Benard walked into the empty room, sat down and waited.

 

A few minutes later a twenty-two-year-old swaggered into the room. Of medium height, slim but muscular, Charles Sobhraj was strikingly handsome. He had high cheekbones, and the black eyes in his sallow face seemed to notice and analyse Benard’s every physical detail. His mouth indicated an unusual sensitivity, even sensuality. He shook hands and sat down facing Benard across the desk, comfortably in control of the situation.

 

‘So, Charles,’ said Benard gently, ‘you’ve had some bad luck in life?’

 

‘I’d call it bad justice,’ the young man said. His voice was intimate, rich and low.

 

‘It must always seem that way inside a place like this.’

 

‘I’ve already learned to live above external circumstances in life,’ Charles said, leaning back against the chair with his arms folded, staring.

 

‘That’s a stoical attitude,’ said Benard, intrigued by the young man’s intensity.

 

‘Yes, the Stoics are my favourites, actually. Their ideas are much more useful in my situation than those of the priests.’

 

‘From what I understand of the Stoics,’ said Benard slowly, ‘they teach the importance of mastering desires. But you’re here because you succumbed to yours.’

 

‘I stole out of necessity,’ Charles said. ‘The authorities had ordered me out of France, and I had no money. So, to drive across the border, I stole a car.’

 

It was said with such self-assurance that the action sounded reasonable.

 

‘But if you admit you stole, where’s the injustice?’ asked Benard.

 

‘Copping four years for trying to obey an order to leave France.’

 

‘You could have worked for the fare, perhaps?’ suggested Benard with a smile.

 

‘Without proper papers? I tried that. Peeling potatoes for four francs an hour.’

 

‘What about your family?’

 

‘I went to Marseilles to ask my mother for help. She just ignored me. She was too busy with her new boyfriend. In the end she gave me forty francs. Forty francs to leave France!’

 

‘So, you and your mother don’t get along?’

 

‘My mother is dead to me. I’ve cut her out of my life. I expect nothing from her.’

 

‘But where will you go when you leave here, Charles?’

 

‘I’ll go back home.’

 

‘To Vietnam?’

 

‘Yes. My mother brought me here – to this wonderful country where I’m treated like shit – when I was nine. You know, Mr Benard, the last time I was in Saigon I was drafted, and yet I’d still rather go back and fight than stay in France.’

 

‘So, you’re Vietnamese?’

 

‘Officially, no. My father was born in Bombay, but even the Indians refuse to issue me a passport. Anyway, as the Stoics say, it is better to be a citizen of the world than of Rome. And when I get out of jail I will be kicked out of France because I don’t have a passport.’

 

‘So, it’s because of all this that you’ve got into trouble with the warden?’

 

‘No. It’s because they won’t leave me alone to study. They stick me in this hole, so I should at least make the best of it. I try to deepen myself. Every day, you know, I exercise because however the circumstances change, I always have my body. Sometimes they put me in solitary which, of course, I don’t mind. They cut off tobacco. So what? I don’t smoke. They ban me from the cinema. I haven’t seen a film for nine months.’

 

The list of adversities seemed to cheer him.

 

‘Is such self-discipline a Vietnamese trait?’ Benard asked, polishing his glasses.

 

‘It’s not French,’ Charles said with a chilly smile. There was an impatient rattle of keys.

 

‘It’s a problematic situation, a man having no nationality. I’ll look into it,’ Benard offered quietly.

 

‘You’re under no obligation to do anything for me,’ the young man said, ‘and you know, Alain, maybe you’re a prisoner too – of your own guilt. Why else would you hang around jails?’

 

Benard was amused by Charles’ insolence. ‘Convicted prisoners are driven by unconscious forces too, especially the ones who keep coming back.’

 

‘Yes. Clack! Clack! Clack! Since I was eighteen. This is my third French jail.’

 

As the guard opened the door the two men stood up.

 

‘I’ll see you again next week,’ said Benard. ‘We’ll have more time to talk.’

 

‘Please yourself, but remember, I’m used to being lonely, Mr Benard -‘ He lowered his voice dramatically ‘- and that is how I shall always be.’

 

‘Is there anything I can bring you?’

 

‘I need nothing except books, thank you,’ said Charles, and he was led away.

 

In the weeks that followed, Benard visited Charles Sobhraj every Saturday afternoon and picked over his library to feed the prisoner’s ravenous appetite for psychology, philosophy, law, and executive training manuals. Sometimes he boasted to Benard that he sat at his desk in the cell for nineteen hours a day, poring over books. He hardly noticed the other prisoners.

 

It seemed that Charles sought not only self-improvement, but an intellectual armoury – he wanted the weapons, conventional and otherwise, to cut through the jungle outside, to carve his path to the top. Socially, Charles was on the bottom rung, without wealth, nationality or education, and jail had added a five-year handicap. But he had inherited one gift, the gift of charisma, of power over people. Charles had decided to build on this and to learn all he could about clues to the human character; the better, he thought, one day to mould them to his will. Palmistry, handwriting analysis and characterology would help him penetrate other minds and would offer short cuts in social relations.

 

As his friendship with Benard grew, so did Charles’ requests. Benard was relieved when the young man who had only wanted books also admitted to simpler human needs for chocolate, stationery and socks.

 

The young Vietnamese prisoner had become a permanent fixture in Benard’s ordered life. Now he began to investigate how to solve the problem of Charles’ nationality.

US