by Gordon Kerr
Now Sobraj had another partner in crime. His younger brother André, whom he had persuaded to rob the shopkeeper all those years ago, joined him in Istanbul and they decided to work together, carrying out some robberies there before heading for Greece. After a minor jewel robbery in Athens, however, they were arrested. Charles pulled his usual stunt, feigning illness. However, as he was being transported from hospital back to prison, he escaped and disappeared. Meanwhile, the unlucky André was handed over to the Turkish authorities and sentenced to 18 years’ hard labour.
Charles Sobraj made his fraudulent way across the Near East and India, fleecing people everywhere he went. He would befriend French- or English-speaking tourist couples and either use them to courier jewels for him or just steal whatever he could from them – passports, money or tickets. Around this time, he met another woman, Marie LeClerc, a French Canadian, who had travelled east in search of adventure. He persuaded her to return with him to Bangkok where he had made his base and she became his new partner, both in bed and in crime, although that did not prevent him from enjoying the odd dalliance with other women.
He began to surround himself now with acolytes, creating a family. A French teenager named Dominique became part of the family but only after Charles had drugged him and made him believe he was suffering from dysentery. Dominique’s ‘illness’ made him dependent on Sobraj. Two other men joined up with them. Yannick and Jacques had been police officers in the French colonies touring the East. After he met them, Sobraj sent them for a night out with Marie and while they were gone, stole their passports and money. He then encouraged them to stay with him while they obtained new passports from the French embassy in Bangkok.
His final recruit was Ajay Chowdhury, a young Indian whom Charles quickly made his lieutenant.
It was around this time that the killings are said to have begun, although some say he had already become a murderer. His first known victim was Jennie Bollivar, an American Buddhist. It is presumed that Sobraj made efforts to recruit her into his ‘family’ or to become a smuggler for him, but she refused and he killed her. He was not the type to take rejection easily and she was found face down in the sea in the Gulf of Thailand. It took some weeks to establish that her head had been held under water until she drowned.
Next was Vitali Hakim, a young Sephardic Jew. He stayed with the Sobraj family for several days before going on a trip with Sobraj and Ajay to a resort by the sea. He never returned, even though he had handed over his traveller’s cheques and passport to Sobraj. Sobraj said that he had decided to stay with friends. A few days later, a badly burnt body was discovered near the resort. He had been savagely beaten and then, while still alive, had had petrol poured over him and set alight. The police put it down to Thai bandits.
Meanwhile, Charmayne Carrou, a friend of Vitali Hakim, had arrived and started asking questions about his whereabouts. She traced him to Sobraj’s enclave and was strangled by Sobraj so violently that he shattered the bones in her neck.
Henk Bitanja and his fiancée Cornelia ‘Cocky’ Hemker, two Dutch students, encountered Sobraj in Hong Kong. He told them he was a gem dealer and called himself Alain Dupuis. He invited them to his villa in Bangkok, telling them to let him know when they arrived so that he could send a driver to pick them up. Needless to say, when they arrived they fell victim to a mystery illness and remained at his apartment and Sobraj locked up their passports and valuables in his safe. A few nights later, the bodies of a man and a woman were discovered. They had been beaten and strangled before being set on fire.
Then it was the turn of Laddie DuParr and Annabella Tremont. Laddie was a Canadian in Katmandu with the intention of climbing Mount Everest, and Annabella was a Californian looking for the meaning of life, like all the rest. Before too long, Laddie was found in a field; he had been stabbed and burned. Annabella, found a short distance away, had been stabbed to death.
When the police discovered that Laddie DuParr had flown out of the country shortly after the murders, it was surmised that he had killed Annabella and fled, although they were at a loss as to who the other body was. Of course, it had been Sobraj leaving the country, using Laddie’s passport. Back in Bangkok, he sold jewels he had stolen from Laddie and then, using Henk Bitanja’s passport, returned to Kathmandu next day.
The police succeeded in working out the whereabouts of Laddie and Annabella in the last days of their lives, investigations which led to Sobraj, and he, Ajay and Marie were hauled in for questioning. As ever, though, Sobraj talked his way out of it and they were released.
The other members of the ‘family’ had, by now, realised what was going on. They had discovered dozens of passports in Sobraj’s office and informed Thai police before fleeing back to Paris. But Sobraj, Ajay and Marie, being pursued again by the Nepalese police, were now in Calcutta where Sobraj killed Israeli scholar Avoni Jacob for his passport and about $300. He was drugged and strangled.
The three fled onwards to Singapore before returning to Bangkok, where Sobraj drugged and robbed a wealthy American tourist before being picked up with Ajay and Marie by police for questioning based on their former friends’ information about what were becoming known as ‘The Bikini Murders’. The Thai police were, however, not keen on a scandalous murder trial that might damage the lucrative tourist trade and did not pursue their enquiries with any great rigour. Sobraj had always maintained that he could bribe his way out of anything in the Far East and $18,000 was all it took to get them out of this situation.
Their next stop was Malaysia where Sobraj killed Ajay after the Indian had procured around $40,000 of gems for him. It seemed that he had simply outlived his usefulness, or perhaps he just knew too much, literally where the bodies were buried.
Word was beginning to spread now that there was a serial killer on the loose in Thailand and this tended to focus the minds of the authorities somewhat. So far, the press screamed, two American women, two Canadians, a Turk, two Dutch citizens, a French woman and an Israeli scholar had all died mysteriously and no one had been arrested for any of the murders.
Sobraj and Marie were now back in Bombay, drugging people and stealing from them. A Frenchman, Jean-Luc Solomon, never came round and another death could be added to Sobraj’s murderous account. He had hooked up with two more Western women, and they all travelled to Delhi where he became involved with a group of French post-graduate students, touring the city. In their hotel, he offered them each a pill to ward off dysentery and many took it, grateful to the handsome, smooth-tongued Frenchman.
The pill was, of course, a sedative and while they were drowsy he intended to rob their rooms. However, immediately after taking the pills, the students began to collapse one by one. Those who had not taken a pill, realised at once what was going on and wrestled Sobraj to the ground.
When the women members of his team were picked up, it all began to unravel. The two new members told the police everything and he was charged with the murder of Jean-Luc Solomon. He was taken to Tihar prison. However, he was well aware of how things worked in the Indian prison system and had concealed 70 carats of precious stones on his body. As ever, he knew that a well-placed bribe would buy him his freedom.
Two years passed before he went on trial and he was found guilty of administering drugs with intent to rob and manslaughter. The penalty for manslaughter was death, but, to everyone’s amazement except perhaps Charles Sobraj, the judge sentenced him to a mere seven years. To that sentence was added a further five years for the attempt to drug the French students.
He was actually quite pleased as he knew that there was a Thai warrant for his arrest for murder which was good for 20 years. If he was released before that time, he would be extradited to Thailand and executed.
So he bided his time, practically running the prison. To celebrate his tenth year in jail he threw a party for his friends, prisoners and guards alike. But he had acquired a quantity of sleeping pills and when everyone at the party fell asleep, he simply walked out of prison.
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But his plan was not to escape. He wanted to be recaptured and have some more time added to his sentence. It worked and by 17 February 1997, when he walked out of Tihar prison a free man, aged 52, the world had forgotten about him.
He returned to France something of a celebrity, hired an agent and charged journalists large sums of money for interviews. He was reportedly paid upwards of $15 million for a film based on his life
However, a return to his past habits never seemed too far away. He seemed almost to be preparing himself for a return to his old life. ‘I have already taken from the past what is best for me,’ he said, ‘what helps me live in the present and prepare for the future. If I play back a murder, it will be to see what I have learned from the method. I won't even notice the body.’
His penchant for gambling never left him and its tendency to get him into trouble was evident again in September 2003, when he was arrested at the Casino Royale in Kathmandu. He was charged with entering Nepal in 1975 using a fake passport and questioned about the deaths of a couple of backpackers, Californian Connie Jo Bronzich and her Canadian boyfriend Laurent Ormond Carrièrre. Their burnt bodies had been found in a field on the outskirts of Kathmandu in 1975. He denied even being in Nepal at that time but was found guilty of murder in the summer of 2004 and sentenced to life in prison.
As he prepared his appeal Sobraj tried to escape, using his old technique of drugging the guards, but this time he was foiled.
In December 2007 Nepal’s Supreme Court was due to deliver a decision on whether the judge’s sentence was correct. If they find it was, Charles Sobraj will spend the rest of his life in prison, although it would be a foolish man who would bet on it.
Adolf Eichmann
Germany
When an ordinary man commits extraordinary crimes, perhaps it is time for us to stop and consider the question of what each of us is capable of as an individual. Philosophers and psychologists have debated this question for years. Does each of us have the potential to be an Adolf Eichman, to do what he did, to switch off our consciences, ignore morality and abandon compassion? Could we say we were ‘just obeying orders’, as did this slender man with bow-legs and an all-too-predictable liking for the compositions of Richard Wagner? Eichman claimed to neither agree nor disagree with the tenets of the Nazi doctrine. Rather, he claimed he was just pursuing a career and, given the stops and starts that he made in his civilian career, even after the war, one can certainly understand his decision. But, what a career decision – to accept a role in which he would be responsible for the deaths of millions, making Adolf Eichman, perhaps, the ultimate professional killer.
Otto Adolf Eichman was born in Solingen in Germany in March 1906, to an industrialist, Adolf Karl Eichman, and his wife, Maria. He had five brothers, but, in spite of that, as a child he was withdrawn and solitary. When he was eight years old, his family moved to Linz in Austria, but there he still remained something of a problem child. His dark complexion and distinctive facial features led his schoolmates to taunt him with the nickname ‘der kleine Jude’ – the little Jew – and, neglected by his parents and faring badly at school, he became ever more difficult and moody.
His education suffered as a result and his lack of academic achievement forced him to leave school early to train to be a mechanic. As was to happen so often in his life, this job did not work out and, aged 17, he joined his father’s business, a mining company, as a sales clerk. He changed career yet again in 1925 and worked for two years for the Oberösterreichische Elektrobau, before taking a job as a district agent for the Vacuum Oil Company.
Although he had no political ambition, Eichman was seduced by Hitler’s idea of a Thousand-Year Reich. In 1932 he joined the National Socialist Party and the SS in Austria, on the advice of a friend, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was Gauredner (district speaker) and Rechtsberater (legal consultant) of SS division VIII. For Eichman it was an opportunity. He was a nobody, trapped in a life of mediocrity, and the Nazi party offered him a chance to be somebody, which he desired more than anything. It would also provide him with a career after the numerous failures he had so far experienced.
He was accepted as a full member of the SS in November 1932, serving in a mustering formation that was based in Salzburg. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933 persuaded him to return to Germany and he applied for active duty in the SS. In November 1933 he was promoted to the rank of Scharführer and was assigned to the administrative staff of Dachau concentration camp. He was responsible for cataloguing items taken from Jewish prisoners and began to learn the basic principles of Naziism, that the state was more important than life itself. As he said at a later date: ‘If they had told me that my own father was a traitor and I had to kill him, I’d have done it!’
A year later he applied for a position with the Sicherheitspolizei, by this time a powerful force in Hitler’s Germany. His application was successful and he went to work in the organisation’s Berlin headquarters. In 1934 he was promoted to the rank of Hauptsharführer and later that year, having ascertained that she was of the proscribed racial purity – mandatory for wives of SS members – he married Veronika Liebl. It was a marriage that produced four sons.
In 1937, now an SS-Untersturmführer, Eichman was sent on an important mission with his superior, Herbert Hagen, to the British mandate of Palestine. Their objective was to assess the potential for the forced migration of German Jews to Palestine. Their mission stalled, however, when the British authorities refused them entry into Palestine.
Eichman returned to Austria in 1938, following the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany. His role was to organise the SS in Vienna, work that earned him another promotion, to SS-Obersturmführer. It also led to his being selected to create the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, the department with responsibility for forcibly deporting and expelling Jews from Austria. Eichman threw himself into his work enthusiastically, reportedly becoming a student of Judaism, to the extent that he tried to learn Hebrew. ‘I did not greet this assignment with apathy,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘I was fascinated with it.’ His assiduousness earned him a reputation as the Nazi who understood the Jewish people.
He impressed his superiors with his effectiveness. In his first eight months in the job, having first stripped them of all lands and possessions, he forced 45,000 Jews out of Austria and by the end of the year, 150,000 Jews had disappeared. He estimated that by the time he ended his assignment, he had removed almost a quarter of a million people, many being sent to the extermination camps and others fleeing the country with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in.
He held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer – equivalent to captain – at the start of the Second World War, when he returned to Berlin as head of the notorious Section IV B 4 of the Gestapo, the department that, with cruel efficiency, would organise the extermination of millions of people in the next few years. Eichman now wielded real power and he used it ruthlessly. By 1941 he had risen to the rank of Obersturmbannführer.
He played a crucial role in the Wannsee Conference, held in 1942, which formulated Germany’s anti-Semitic measures into an official policy of genocide of the Jews – the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. Richard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office which included the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst and Kripo Nazi police agencies, invited Eichman to the conference as recording secretary and he was also given a key role in the genocide process – Transportation Administrator. He would control all the trains that would carry Jews to the concentration camps in occupied Poland.
Camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka and Buchenwald were little more than death factories, killing 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Some of them were capable of killing 10,000 people a day. And like ordinary factories, they were expected to turn a profit. The victims were robbed of all possessions, no matter how small. Human hair was removed to be used in commercial products and tons of gold were ripped from the teeth of the dead to be melted down and reused.
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Eichman delivered to these camps the raw materials – millions of innocent and terrified Jews and Gypsies from Austria, Holland, the Baltic countries, France and Yugoslavia. They were ‘resettled’ in Poland, the Warsaw ghetto becoming a particularly ferocious killing ground with tens of thousands starving to death and others being shot, or gassed in mobile gas chambers. 316,322 Jews were killed in that city alone. Eichman, by now a stranger to reality, wrote later, ‘Jewry was grateful for the chance I gave it to learn community life at the ghetto. It made an excellent school for the future in Israel – basically most Jews feel well and happy in their ghetto life.’
The demands on his logistical skills were increasing. He was responsible for delivering people to no fewer than 164 camps in Eastern Europe. He improved efficiency, making the death trains larger, to accommodate more people. They travelled often huge distances without food or water and thousands died on the trains even before arriving at their destinations.
Eichman also used his organisational skills to improve the efficiency of the killing. Vast, windowless rooms disguised as shower rooms, served as gas chambers. He considered the carbon monoxide gas used not cost-effective and advocated the use of the cyanide-based insecticide, Zyklon B.
An incident in France in 1942 shows Eichman’s cold efficiency, his absolute abandonment of humanity. He had ordered a round-up of Jews in Paris which yielded a total of 7,000 people, 4,051 of them children, planning to transport them all to the camps in the east. However, the city powers objected and days of negotiation took place while the Jews were held in a cycling stadium, without food or water. After six days of talks, he won the day. The adults were taken to Eichman’s trains and shipped to the east. Several days later, the children, too, were put on trains and transported to Auschwitz and the gas chambers. Eichman’s response when questioned about the incident later was to deny responsibility. ‘Once a shipment was delivered to the designated stations,’ he told the Israeli police, ‘ . . . my powers ceased.’