The United Nations Human Rights Committee argued in 2010 that he hadn’t received a fair trial, Esquire reported earlier this year. He was convicted and sentenced to life a year later and has undertaken several unsuccessful appeals. While visiting Kathmandu, Nepal - the only country where there was still an outstanding warrant for his arrest - in 2003, he was arrested on suspicion of the 1975 murder of American tourist Connie Jo Bronzich. He also managed to briefly escape prison again in 1986 by drugging guards with laced fruit, claiming it was his birthday.Īfter his release in 1997, he moved to Paris and regularly did interviews with the media, apparently smug in his freedom. But that didn't last long. He was given multiple cells and privileges, according to journalist Alan Dawson, who interviewed Sobhraj in 1984. He was incarcerated from 1976 to 1997, during which time he was apparently treated like royalty. He was found guilty of both robbery and murder, but the murder convictions were later overturned on appeal. He was charged with both robbery and the murders of an Israeli man, Alan Aaron Jacobs, in Varanasi and a French tourist in New Delhi.
His first murder charge came in 1976 when Sobhraj was caught in New Delhi drugging students, according to the Los Angeles Times. Then, in 1975, he escaped incarceration by setting fire to a prison van. He escaped an India prison a year later by again faking illness. He escaped an Afghanistan jail for robbery by faking illness and drugging guards in 1972. He also escaped jail at least four times, according to CNN. While he was never charged with the murder, he was behind bars in various countries at least five times for lower level offenses before he was officially suspected of murder.
#CHARLES SOBHRAJ DRIVER#
He claimed to have committed his first murder in 1972 by killing a taxi driver while in Pakistan. In his interviews with Neville and Clark, he initially admitted to at least 12 killings between 19, though he later recanted, CNN reports. Investigators have estimated that Sobhraj killed between 12 and 20 people, The Los Angeles Times reports. The series, based in part on the book "The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj" by Australian journalists Richard Neville and Julie Clarke, who spent dozens of hours interviewing Sobhraj in prison in 1977, depicts Sobhraj killing Knowlton and disposing of her body with the help of alleged accomplice Ajay Chowdhury.
Days after her body was found, Leclerc cashed Knowlton's traveler's checks, according to The Independent, and authorities, who assumed she drowned, never connected Sobhraj or Leclerc to her death. Knowlton turned up dead in the Gulf of Thailand in October of that year, clad in a bikini (the attire of some of Sobhraj's alleged victims also earned him the name "The Bikini Killer").
#CHARLES SOBHRAJ SERIES#
The first episode of the BBC series depicts the murder of his first known tourist victim Teresa Knowlton, a 21-year-old American backpacker who met Sobhraj in Bangkok, Thailand in 1975. In addition to money, Sobhraj, who was born in Vietnam but had French citizenship, would also steal victims’ passports for his own use. They’d target Western tourists - primarily European and American backpackers - whom they would drug, rob and, in some cases, kill.
Sobhraj (portrayed by Tahar Rahim) and his girlfriend and accomplice Marie-Andrée Leclerc (Jenna Coleman), a French Canadian, would pose as gem dealers while traveling through Thailand, Nepal and India along stretches known as the ‘Hippie Trail,” which extended from Europe into South Asia and were popular among globetrotting beatniks and hippies from the 1950s through the late '70s. Sobhraj's story is the subject of the an eight-part BBC docudrama "The Serpent," now available on Netflix. It's no wonder he became known as "The Serpent." Charles Sobhraj, the French killer and con artist believed responsible for the murders of at least 12 people across Asia during the 1970s, made a habit of evading justice, employing a slippery and dangerous nature to escape from prison on numerous occasions.
0 kommentar(er)
