TCF: On the Trail of the Serpent

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

On the Trail of the Serpent: The Epic Hunt for the Bikini Killer
By Richard Neville and Julie Clarke

The crime:

Charles Sobhraj was the child of an Indian father and Vietnamese mother born in Saigon in 1944. He took early to a life of petty crime and ran afoul of the law a lot as a juvenile. When his mother moved to France with a new partner Sobhraj went with her and got into trouble there as well. Ingratiating himself with various enablers, he left France and became an itinerant crook involved in a bunch of different scams in South-East Asia. He seems to have mainly been involved in gem and drug smuggling, and would often drug Europeans to rob them and steal their passports. For some reason, and this is the great mystery, Sobhraj’s criminal career took a much darker turn in the mid-1970s as he went on a killing spree while living in Bangkok, mainly targeting European tourists on the so-called “hippie trail.” He killed at least 12 people but perhaps twice that many. He was finally arrested in 1976 and imprisoned in India. He escaped from prison, though perhaps only to be rearrested so that he would not be extradited to Thailand, where he faced the death penalty. After serving his time in India (and with the statute of limitations on his crimes in Thailand having passed) he was set free and enjoyed a life of minor celebrity in France but in 2004 he was re-arrested while visiting Nepal (where he had also murdered a pair of tourists). In 2022 he was released from prison in Nepal on account of his age and good behaviour and now lives in France.

The book:

This is a 2021 update of a book that came out in 1979 under the title The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj. That was actually a better, or at least more accurate, title. I don’t recall any mention here of Sobhraj being called “the Serpent,” and the sobriquet “bikini killer” was only something he picked up because that’s what one of his victims was wearing when her body was found.

I suspect the book was reissued (and so retitled) in part to cash in on the spark of interest created by the 8-part BBC series The Serpent that came out in 2021. But an epilogue also brings the case up to date on Sobhraj’s later convictions and imprisonments. Though not totally up to date, since it leaves off with Sobhraj still in a Nepalese prison.

It’s likely to remain the standard work on Sobhraj then, as it’s quite well written by a pair of authors who seem to have really understood the milieu (Neville had authored an early guidebook to the hippie trail) and who had also interviewed Sobhraj extensively. This really helps because it’s a very complicated story that even now remains shady in several places. But Neville’s familiarity with Sobhraj is also problematic, which is something that Clarke (his wife as well as co-author) flags.

The thing is, Sobhraj was an accomplished con and a fraud before he was a killer and he had charm to burn. And he wasn’t just a natural but made a study of it, constantly reading books on psychology and how to influence (read: manipulate) people. So Clarke was right to feel nervous about Neville being played, which is something I think Sobhraj was definitely trying to do. But it’s also something that as readers we have to be on guard against, because so much of the story as we have it comes from Sobhraj himself. His besotted French-Canadian lover Marie-Andrée Leclerc died in 1984. His accomplice Ajay Chowdhury was last seen in 1976, with most people believing that Sobhraj killed him around that time. Add to this the fact that Sobhraj was a fluent and congenital liar, with a great deal to lie about, and parts of the story will likely always remain pretty murky.

The most obvious question, which I flagged earlier, relates to motive. Why did Sobhraj become a prolific murderer so suddenly? Usually in such cases there is a history of slow escalation. But that’s mostly with sexual serial killers and one of the distinguishing features of Sobhraj’s murder spree is that sex was not a driver. He seems to have killed as many men as he did women and I don’t think there was any evidence of sexual assault being involved. Nor does there seem to have been much if anything in the way of a financial motive. Sobhraj was certainly a thief, but seems to have made a good living off of whatever scam he was working or just drugging his victims and tossing their rooms for money, jewelry, and passports. So why did he go through the difficult process of killing so many people and then having to dispose of their bodies?

Sobhraj’s own story was that he was operating on orders given from drug cartels based in Hong Kong, who wanted him to get rid of rogue mules. Or at least that’s how I understand it. I don’t think this makes any sense at all, however, and the accounts Sobhraj gave of several of the killings didn’t match up with what we know, especially with regard to the timelines. I agree with the opinion of Herman Knippenberg, the Dutch diplomat stationed in Thailand who did so much to hunt Sobhraj down, that the hit-man explanation was “pure cant.” I would say the same about Sobhraj’s (much later) claim that he was fighting a kind of anti-colonial struggle against Western exploiters, represented by the young backpackers on the hippie trail. To be sure, he probably did feel some resentment toward Europeans in general, and the book adverts to that.

But this doesn’t explain why he started killing so many people in the mid-1970s, and I think it’s more likely that he just didn’t care for anyone very much, including members of his immediate family. And when I say he didn’t care for them I only mean he thought they were disposable, not objects of obsessive hate. It’s typical of a lot of hardened criminals that they have a near complete lack of empathy, and what’s more disturbing than the passion killers are the ones who would just as soon kill you as look at you. The lives of others, and their suffering, mean nothing to them.

I think Knippenberg gets closer to the truth when he suggests that Sobhraj just couldn’t stand the thought of anyone drifting out of his control. In her epilogue, published after Neville’s death in 2016, Clarke talks about how Sobhraj “ticked every box in the Hare Psychopathy Checklist”:

Glib and superficial charm; grandiose (exaggeratedly high) estimation of self; need for stimulation; pathological lying; cunning and manipulativeness; lack of remorse or guilt; shallow affect (superficial emotional responsiveness); callousness and lack of empathy; parasitic lifestyle; poor behavioral controls; sexual promiscuity; early behavior problems; lack of realistic long-term goals; impulsivity; irresponsibility; failure to accept responsibility for own actions; many short-term marital relationships; juvenile delinquency . . . criminal versatility.

Sobhraj, she concludes, “is the perfect psychopath.” And it’s true he really did cover all of the bases. One thing that’s left out of this checklist, however, is his need to control others. Maybe this is the flipside of the lack of personal control (among his other self-destructive habits, Sobhraj was a compulsive gambler), and maybe it comes with his narcissistic power-tripping. But however you explain it, he seems to have got some psychological satisfaction out of getting people to rely on him, submit to him, and even blindly follow him into some very dark places. I don’t think he ever loved any of the women he seduced, but his ego reveled in how much they adored him. Just before his arrest Marie-Andrée wrote in her diary “I love him so much that I can only make one being with him. I can only exist because of him, I can only breathe because of him. And my love is increasing.” This was well after she realized that she was “just an employee satisfying his whims” and even after when she must have known he was a serial murderer and after he had long been physically abusing her as well. This sort of toxic love, if you can call it that, is a drug, and it’s bad for everyone.

So, to round out the point I raised earlier, Clarke had good reason to suspect Sobhraj was working his charm on Neville while being interviewed. And there were places in the text I could see that happening. Indeed, Sobhraj has continued to cast his spell, as his sickening celebrity has continued even up to this day. It’s a point I’ve made over and over again in these True Crime Files, and elsewhere as well: Wicked people are limited in what they can achieve on their own. They need enablers. Sobhraj’s criminal career highlighted this phenomenon. Like most such operators he had a kind of sixth sense for their weakness, most evident here in the devotion of “Alain Benard” (the pseudonym given Felix d’Escogne) a soft-hearted and soft-headed prison volunteer he charmed while incarcerated as a youth in France. And later he was always surrounded by a gang of flunkies under his spell, without whom he couldn’t have operated. Yes, some of them were victims too, but we can’t let such people off that easy.

Noted in passing:

When escaping from jail in Afghanistan Sobhraj drugged his guards with sleeping pills and had to calculate a dosage based on the fact that “They were big men, more than six feet, like most Afghans.”

This surprised me enough to want to check it out. According to the most recent statistics I could find online the average height of an Afghan male is 5’6”, which ranks them in the bottom quartile of all nations. I’m sure there are regional and tribal differences, but still this is quite a miss.

I’m not sure if it was a lack of feeling that led Sobhraj to keep a pet gibbon monkey named Coco in a cage on the balcony of his Bangkok apartment. It might have been more the custom at the time. It struck me as very sad though, especially as the only time it gets referenced is when a neighbour spies it sitting in its cage “with its head in its hands” just before it is found dead one morning. Marie-Andrée then accuses one of the itinerant residents, who Sobhraj was poisoning, of poisoning the monkey. More likely, Sobhraj was using it as a guinea pig. But keeping a monkey in a cage in your apartment even without testing drugs on it just struck me as terribly cruel.

Takeaways:

You can’t spell charm without harm. If you meet someone you suspect of being charming you should at the very least be on your guard. They’re never up to any good.

True Crime Files

Beowulf

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Beowulf

This is a big book, 8.5”x12” format, which helps sell it as an epic, with the heroic, larger-than-life figures going at it in a giant mythic landscape. The double-page spreads, most often given over to climactic points in the hero’s three great battles (against the monster Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and finally a dragon), feel like paintings in a coffee-table art book and you want to enjoy them at scale. But they also mean that you can get more out of the inset art, which in a regular-size comic is harder to read.

I also thought that in most respects this was a faithful adaptation of the Old English poem. The colour scheme favours a bloody-fiery scale of reds, and Beowulf looks like his nose has been busted a fair few times, along with picking up a cauliflower ear. The monsters are believable, with Grendel’s mom maybe looking a bit too much like the Xenomorph from the Alien movies. But the dragon is pretty original, given that there’s less artistic leeway when it comes to drawing dragons.

There were a couple of odd interpretive flourishes. Grendel seems to fall in love with the naked, sleeping Beowulf, fingering his penis and then ejaculating all over him when Beowulf awakes. I wonder what that was all about. I do wonder.

Then a lot is made of Beowulf as an older man feasting at his hall. There is a focus on his mouth as he’s eating, with close-ups of his teeth and his tongue and even one cell that gives the point of view from inside his mouth as he pours a drink down his gullet. I can sort of see wanting to emphasize the eating, but I didn’t think this worked. It felt like overkill for a point that wasn’t that important in the first place.

As W. H. Auden said of the poetry of Yeats: “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” Perhaps that was part of what was meant in making such a big deal out of all the eating. Because we end on an interesting note, with the words of the Old English text appearing in print and then being digitized before finally taking the form of this graphic novel. It’s remarkable that the story of Beowulf has hung around as long as it has, but to have that kind of afterlife means putting a lot of work into adaptation, or digestion in our cultural guts.

Graphicalex

All Hallows’ Eve

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

Not many houses in my area go all out with Halloween decorations. I thought these guys did the most. They really went to town with the inflatable stuff. I wondered why a hatchet buried in a skull would be bloody, but then skulls don’t have eyeballs either. Otherwise we’ve got a pair of really tall witches and a ghost and some jack-o’-lanterns. The one inflatable I thought was out of place was the Minion. What’s he doing in here?

The Immortal Hulk Volume 5: Breaker of Worlds

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

The Immortal Hulk Volume 5: Breaker of Worlds

Another Immortal Hulk volume, another up-and-down ride. I liked the main storyline, which had the Hulk squaring off against the Hulk-hunting Shadow Base headed up by Major Fortean, who is now wearing the Abomination’s hide like a kind of symbiote. That was all well set-up and had some good action to it, albeit action of a kind that, if you’ve been following this series, is starting to feel a little stale. More bodies melting into grotesque forms and then getting killed but not really being killed because they just end up being sent to that limbo beyond the green door. Still, issues #21-24 were solid. But then issue #25 took off in another direction entirely, jumping “eons” ahead into the future with the Hulk eating the Sentience of the Cosmos and a giant Hulk becoming a god – the “Breaker of Worlds.” I mean, literally. He flies through space and crushes a planet. There’s a survivor of this Hulk apocalypse though and we’re left with the promise that veteran Hulk enemy the Leader has plans to address the situation. Which at this point you really have to wonder at.

I suppose this could all go somewhere interesting so I won’t outright condemn it. But I don’t personally care for Marvel titles when they go cosmic. I feel like they always lose the plot whenever a character becomes a god, from Dark Phoenix on down. I like it when they keep things simple. But there’s a sort of inflation built into most comic storylines, you also see it in a lot of manga, where you have to keep pumping things up until in some cases (like this) you get to a point where they collapse under the weight of some vision of infinite power.

That certainly seems to be what’s happening here. But I’ll continue.

Graphicalex

The good old days 2

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

The next page in this book of reflections follows up on a point raised in my previous post: what happens to milk that the delivery guy leaves on someone’s porch if it’s either too hot or too cold out? I think someone had to be home to bring it inside. But luckily, mom was right there in the kitchen, making dessert!

As I grew up on a dairy farm we did not have milk delivered. We did, however, skim the cream from the milk and churned our own butter out of it. And made our own ice cream. I ate a lot of ice cream in those days. And drank a lot of milkshakes.

Road trip 1

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

I thought I’d post some pics from my recent trip. Things kicked off with my walking to the train station past the trees changing colour on campus. Including this beauty. Now that’s a tree! For comparison, that’s a bus passing by it on the left.

The Approach

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

The Approach

A mid-size airport is nearly shut down due to a massive winter storm. Then a small engine-prop plane flies in out of nowhere, crashing and exploding into a fireball on landing. A body is pulled from the wreckage. Later, that body comes to life, transformed into a flesh-eating, tentacle monster. It kills people and gets bigger, and bigger. I mean, it grows like a Xenomorph. An old lady worships it, reciting Lovecraftian catch-phrases (“Yoth anon par a koth . . . Shun ara soth”). The skeleton crew at the airport, apparently cut off by the storm from any help, set out to hunt the beast down and kill it.

Like a lot of the horror comics from Boom! Studios, The Approach very much feels like a 1980s horror flick, most obviously in this case John Carpenter’s The Thing. And having spent a good chunk of my teenage years enjoying those movies, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I thoroughly enjoyed the story here by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley precisely for its most familiar (to me) elements. What pulled it down a couple of notches were two things.

In the first place, I thought they threw too much stuff into the pot. The story could be continued at the end (yes, you get a final panel/shot that suggests the monster isn’t all dead yet), but it seems pretty complete otherwise and there are two major points that are introduced that receive no explanation whatsoever. First: the plane that crashes is said to have gone missing 27 years earlier, so it not only appears out of nowhere but out of no-when. Where, or when, was it all that time? No idea. Nothing more is said of the matter. Second: does the old lady who chants to the monster know something about its provenance? Or is she just a gibbering idiot? Again, no idea.

The second reason I’d knock it down is the art. Jesús Hervás took over from Vanessa R. Del Rey as the artist of the Empty Man series in The Empty Man: Recurrence and The Empty Man: Manifestation, and I’ve already said I’m not a fan. He definitely has his own style, I give him credit for that, but it’s really not my thing. It’s just too hard to figure out what’s going on in a lot of the action scenes. And the monster here looks (and sounds) too much like the buggy creatures in The Empty Man. It’s just not that interesting.

But despite being full of stuff that isn’t explained and having a plot that’s so predictable I was calling how it was going to end by page 6 I still enjoyed this. I don’t know if it would appeal as much to people who weren’t students of ‘80s horror though.

Graphicalex

Bookmarked! #63: Bookmark Like an Egyptian

/ Alex Good / 18 Comments

Actually, I don’t think the ancient Egyptians used bookmarks because they didn’t have books. They kept written works on scrolls.

This is kept in a plastic sheath because it’s painted on papyrus, and it’s very thin and delicate. I can’t remember where I got it, but it wasn’t Egypt. So most likely some museum.

Book: A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology by Toby Wilkinson

Bookmarked Bookmarks

The good old days 1

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

Just got back from a visit to a Long Term Care facility where this book on insights into how the world has changed was lying around. It all seemed impossibly long ago, but the thing is, for my parents’ generation milk delivery was a reality, and there were still horse-drawn wagons being used both on the farm and in the streets.

I’ll post a few more of these in the weeks ahead.