CHARLES SOBHRAJ THIEF, FRAUDSTER, KILLER
Charles Sobhraj was once asked what makes someone a murderer. “Either they have too much feeling and cannot control themselves,” he calmly answered, “or they have no feelings. It is one of the two.”
Sobhraj definitely falls into the latter camp. Born in Saigon in 1944 to an Indian father and Vietnamese mother (and brought up at a young age by his mother and her subsequent partner, a French Army adjutant sergeant stationed in French Indochina), he attracted notoriety due to a string of murders during the mid-1970s along the well-trodden ‘hippie trail’ that took western backpackers across southern Asia.
The dozen or so murders attributed to Sobhraj (some estimates put the number of his victims at more than double that figure) weren’t the result of an out-of-control bloodlust. His worldview was such that murder was a way of maintaining his transcontinental lifestyle. Boasting both good looks and ineffable charm, Sobhraj would befriend those he encountered on
