Charles Sobhraj, also known as Alain Gautier.
Because of multiple jailbreaks, he was dubbed Serpent.
After watching the show and checking the information, I found out, oh, the lives of more than 20 hippies in his hands are just a small footnote to Charles Sobhraj's life. So I went to see The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj again, and was quickly attracted by his crime career like an endless slide.
1.
Charles is a problematic young man with ills.
He was born in Saigon in 1944. His father was a wealthy Indian businessman and his mother was a Vietnamese. When he was young, his father cheated and his parents divorced. His mother married a lieutenant stationed in French India. After his father's tenure expired, at the age of 11, he was taken back to France by his stepfather.
But Charles is a stateless black house, India refused to give him a passport, and France is not prepared to accept him. He was placed in a Catholic boarding school in Paris after repeated refusal to attend school. Charles was not happy at school, his appearance became the object of racial jokes and insults. He felt that his stepfather and mother didn't care about him, and his mother was still lying to him that his biological father had passed away (actually, it was his mother who wanted to protect Charles from knowing that his biological father had abandoned the family and married another woman). So Charles made up his mind to go to Saigon to find his father.
In the summer when he was sixteen years old, Charles tricked his classmate Michel with fancy words and set off for Saigon privately (with a little shadow of "Walk with Me"). Charles hid in the lifeboat with his classmates, and when the sailors were about to set sail the next day, he climbed from the emergency ration to the ship alone. By then, Charles had already revealed his cunning. He would pretend to hang around in the restaurant during the day, meet different new friends, hide in the economy class to take a shower at night, and sleep on different decks to avoid the crew. And his friend Michel waits pitifully for him to bring back food in the lifeboat every day.
In fact, they are only one step away from reaching Saigon. When the ship docked in Djibouti (Djibouti does not need a passport to go to Saigon), they were still not discovered by the crew. However, in the town of Djibouti, they were reported to the police and sent on a boat back to France.
The failure of the plan did not break Charles' illusion of trying to escape back to Saigon. In order to raise enough money for travel expenses, he chose to rob. In the same way, he was captured again.
In desperation, his stepfather applied for a laissez-passer (laissez-passer) for him to go to Saigon. However, in the column of nationality, he still wrote "to be determined".
Charles finally successfully arrived in Saigon and met his biological father and his current family. Father asked Charles to help take care of the business at home, but he soon became tired of the daily life of the store. He began to skip classes and work, he discovered the black market and gambling, and began to plot smuggling.
A barber working on an ocean liner on the Saigon River agreed to provide him with duty-free perfume and cigarettes. In order to start his "business", Charles began to steal his father's things. However, his business was not long before he was sent to India by the Vietnamese government because of the expiration of his visa (if Charles wants to follow his father to naturalize India, he needs to understand Indian culture, so he was sent to study culture and language). But three weeks later, he reappeared at his father's house. His father lost his temper and complained about how he appeared at home again, stealing his own money and ruining his children.
Charles' father-hunting plan was finally shattered, and his father abandoned him. He can only return to France again.
2.
Charles is 18 years old when he returned to France. He still has no nationality. The French Immigration Service only gave him a temporary visitor card but refused his work permit. So, in order to accumulate money, he started stealing, mainly stealing cars. He was caught more and more times, sentenced to imprisonment, and is about to be deported.
But Charles was just as good in prison. He was good at chatting with guards and manipulating them secretly. This won him special treatment from prison officials, and he was also loved by the visitor Felix in the prison. Felix comes from the French upper class. His father was a prison volunteer and used his free time to help prison inmates. Felix also followed his father to participate in this volunteer activity. He met Charles and became friends with him.
With the help of Felix, Charles successfully obtained a French citizenship certificate through an appeal. After being released from prison, Charles relied on Felix to get to know some upper-class French people. At a party, he met his first wife Chantal. She grew up under the aegis of middle-class colonists. Her love for Charles made her easily a victim of his delusion. Felix once wrote to warn Chantal that she was about to put her life in danger. "The tragic fate I saw was shocking," he wrote. But Chantal didn't care. She thought her love could heal Charles and keep him away from crime.
In 1970, he and Chantal were married. After marriage, he worked as a waiter and sold matchboxes. However, due to his criminal record, the court required him to leave downtown Paris. Felix helped him apply for the lifting of the ban, but Charles still needs to report to the police once a week.
In less than four months, Charles's will was languished by the torment of steady work and frequent visits to the police station. He is free, but not completely free. He dreamed of starting a new life in Asia with his wife. He believes that all he needs is funding. He knew his only blood relative, his sister Nicole, was very rich. She runs a Parisian restaurant, the owner is her wealthy boyfriend. It would be great if he could borrow some cash for a few hours and then return it back profitably...
So he started his first crime after marriage. He first lied to his sister that her son had a car accident near his home. When he took Nicole to his home in the suburbs, Nicole was locked into the house. Charles drove to Nicole's restaurant again. "This is an emergency!" He said to the chef, "My sister asked me to bring her handbag and the check from the cash register." Charles forged Nicole's signature on the checkbook. , Took six thousand francs from her bank and rushed into the casino. He didn't even make money with profits, and in the end, he lost even a sou.
He did not go to jail again, and Nicole withdrew the prosecution under the persuasion of his family.
That summer, his biological father, whom he had not seen in eight years, came to France. Meeting his father again prompted him to speed up his plan to travel to Asia.
3.
In August, Charles and Chantal arrived in Mumbai.
The first thing he did was to join the Française alliance in Mumbai. This allowed him to reach out to foreign business leaders and their wealthy Indian friends. Chantal, her beauty and good education are an asset. Everyone likes her. The head of the alliance invited them to live in his own spacious apartment. Charles met here with a group of upper-class people and playboys full of consumer desires, they talked about Rolex, Cartier, these untouchable brand names (the Indian government prohibits the import of these products).
This became an opportunity for Charles to start smuggling on the black market. Charles knew the black market well when he was a six-year-old kid in Saigon. This is a question of connection and mobility, the goods appear in the right place at the right time. At the duty-free port, he used stolen traveler's checks to buy radios, watches, cameras and jewelry. All he needs to run his own business is to continuously provide passports and a series of disguise.
Charles rented an apartment overlooking the sea on the Malabar Mountains. Chantal gave birth to his daughter Madhu there. For Chantal, the hot days and nights pass as slowly as the air blown by a ceiling fan. Charles travels a lot, leaving for a few weeks at a time. However, Chantal can no longer ignore the fact that many of Charles' business activities are crimes, but now, so far away from home, she finds it easier not to account for his life. When she was forced to face his crime, she took a fluke that it was just a "prank", and Charles was still good at escaping all responsibility. When she found out that he was having an affair with a pregnant Indian girl, it was the girl who came to Chantal for a showdown, not Charles.
Although her husband is unreliable, she lingers in extramarital affairs. Chantal remains loyal to Charles and her upright belief in "bourgeois ideals of loyal mother and loyal wife"-Charles is unusual and must be considered for him. He is not bound by traditional laws.
Sometimes they don't even have money in their days, and sometimes banknotes are scattered in the apartment like waste paper. She strives to lead an optimistic life-day after day. However, on the eve of Madhu's first birthday, Charles had disappeared for four months. He went to Delhi and claimed that he was coming back with ten thousand dollars. She flipped through the newspaper half-heartedly. Her gaze was attracted by a headline: "Two Frenchmen were robbed in Delhi."
"In an unexpected raid, the Mumbai police arrested two Frenchmen who were suspected of participating in a sensational robbery at the jewellery shop in Ashoka Hotel, Delhi." Chantal skimmed the rest of the story. Just like the plot in a gangster movie. Henry Kissinger was still a guest of this hotel when the robbery occurred. This was one of the most dramatic and dramatic events in Delhi's history. A blonde flamenco dancer was kept in her room for three days, while Charles tried to drill a hole in the floor to the jewelry store below. The drill bit broke, so he forced the frightened dancer to use his best jewelry to lure the store manager into the room. Then Charles tied him to the bathroom. "
The story says that this beautiful flamenco dancer was fascinated by Charles' personality. He told her that he was a gentleman's jewelry thief. He even left her money to compensate for the trouble he caused, and ordered her to take a hot bath to calm her nerves. "You are born to dance," he said to her, "just like I was born to be a gangster." He fled the hotel with diamonds worth $10,000.
At the airport, he escaped the police — they said he was “missing” — and flew to Tehran, where he sold second-hand gambling equipment to a casino. Now he was caught.
4.
Before long, Charles tried to escape from prison.
He lied about appendicitis and was taken out of prison for appendicitis surgery. Chantal took Madhu to see him. In the night after the operation, he gave the guards sleeping pills and escaped from the room. However, a few hours later, he was found by the police at the train station and arrested again. This time Chantal was also sentenced to jail for helping to escape, but the prison did not calm her from the fantasy about Charles. She asked someone to bring Madhu back to France for the care of her parents, and she still stayed with Charles.
This is not the first time Charles has escaped from prison, nor is it the last.
After they were released from prison and left India, they went to Afghanistan.
There, they were arrested again on charges of not paying hotel bills, secretly renting a car, and attempting to cross the border illegally. Then Charles escaped from prison again. This time he imitated the symptoms of peptic ulcer and admitted himself to the hospital. He learned the technique of using a syringe to draw blood from the body and spit it out-this is a relatively simple method of disguise, after all, he does not have a second appendix that can be removed. After a successful escape, he spent three weeks detouring back to France and brought Madhu back from Chantal's parents (he tricked Chantal's parents to the hotel, then stunned them with drugs and took Madhu away).
He is now planning to escape for his wife, and decided to drive a car to Kabul, which was conscripted after his driver in Rawalpindi (Pakistan) died of anesthesia. He came to Tehran with his ingenuity and luck. He hoped to get help from the anti-Shah underground organization. He has been providing them with guns and stolen passports. But he was arrested on the spot by the Iranian secret police SAVAK. But he was still very cunning. In exchange for revealing the identities of two key Iranian underground leaders, he was deported to Turkey.
His next prison experience is longer. His brother Guy and he were imprisoned in a high-security prison in Athens. After his favorite vomiting trick failed to impress prison officials, he dug a tunnel, but was caught while escaping. This did not stop him from repeating the action of digging the tunnel, which led to him being arrested again and transferred to a fortress-like prison on the island of Aegina that has never been breached.
At this time, Chantal was finally released on bail. And Charles had wanted warrants from eight countries and he was still in an airtight prison. Chantal returned to France and vowed never to see him again, but they still maintained a marriage relationship.
However, Charles still didn't sit back and wait until his sentence expired. He managed to escape again. He met Mary, an Australian nurse, who was deceived by her rhetoric and brought him a wire wrapped in bread, a can of juice that was replaced with gasoline, and a Spanish pistol coated with butter.
A few days later, when he was escorted to a prison escort vehicle, he successfully spilled gasoline from the can and lit the escort vehicle. He ran away while the bewildered guard was still putting out the fire.
5.
We will all know the following things.
He appeared in Thailand. There, he wore a silk shirt and shiny leather shoes and dressed himself cleanly every day. He introduced himself as a jeweler, with a black-haired Canadian Quebec wife named Monique.
Charles and Monique live together in Kanit House, their apartment is number 504. Through the bedroom window, they could see a gleaming white tower between rows of red-roofed bungalows and shops, which was the symbol of the success Charles had always longed for.
He regarded that apartment as his business headquarters. He chose this place mainly because of its location, close to Bangkok's tourist area, close to the bars (Night Bazaar Street) of Patpong, and most large hotels and shopping malls. Their apartment is two rooms, one hall, and a small kitchen in the living room without much furniture. There are black leather sandbags hanging by the door, which are prepared for the guests who come here. The guests came to do business, but in the end they started playing with sandbags. The other prop he plans to use to distract customers is Coco, a little gibbon bought at a stall in the Sunday market.
Most of the time their apartment is always full of foreigners, young foreigners. Most of them are Western hippies who come here alone or in groups, with the simple enthusiasm unique to Westerners, and full of curiosity about the East. Charles is very hospitable, can talk to them, and open the door to welcome them for swimming, dinner and lodging. Monique will make a cup of coffee, milk, or tea for some of them, often wearing jewelry, or traveling alone, and those young people with illegal drugs. Sometimes, some young people have diarrhea or dizziness because of their physical hugs, and Charles generously allows them to rest in the apartment. He will also offer to send these young people to the nearby beach to play.
These young western faces appeared in the house and disappeared. The drinks they drink will take them to their next destination--
Heaven.
When his murder was revealed, he murdered those Western hippies in order to steal money, jewellery and passports. There are more than ten confirmed dead people alone. However, Charles escaped again, claiming that he was the man murdered by him in Hong Kong a few months ago, Alain Gautier.
Finally, in July 1976, in New Delhi, India, Charles and his criminal gang coaxed a tourist group of French graduate students into accepting them as tour guides. He repeated the old tricks and gave them a laxative but told them it was an anti-dysentery. When the drug worked faster than Sobra expected, the students began to lose consciousness. Three of the students realized what Charles had done, subdued him and contacted the police, eventually arresting him.
Although Charles was outspoken about his murder, he later denied everything he told the police, pretending that his actions were to avenge the "Western imperialism" in Asia. In the room before Charles was arrested, he left a copy of Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil", and he imagined himself as a kind of street only to fight imperialism.
"He never had a good answer. He implied that if'we' wrote a book, then the answer would be that all those white people had corrupted and destroyed Asia by trafficking in opium. Therefore, his reasoning is that today's white people have corrupted and destroyed Asia. Should die for this."
According to Richard Neville (the author of Charles’ biography), Charles explained these murders with " I have never killed a good person " and used "psychoanalysis, global politics and Buddhism to create a comfortable world of rationalization and mitigation" for himself Defense of the crime.
Charles’ prison life was not painful. The former jailer in his prison recalled: “He had a set of three cells. The warden introduced us to him and called him Mr. Charles. He made money by drafting court petitions for wealthy prisoners, and then bribed them. The guards maintained his lofty status. He tied a small tape recorder to his thigh to attract senior prison officials to chat with him and make secret recordings. Then, he took the tape to the supervisor, put it on the table, and declared: I am a criminal , You too, so we should cooperate. Everyone is afraid of him."
The sentence in India will end before the 20-year statute of limitations in Thailand expires. If Charles is extradited after being released from prison, he will almost certainly be executed for murder. Therefore, in March 1986, in his 10th year in prison, Charles organized a grand party for his prison guards and inmates, gave them sleeping pills, and then walked out of the prison. Mumbai police arrested him again in a restaurant in Goa, but as he had hoped, his sentence was extended by ten years.
On February 17, 1997, 53-year-old Charles was released. Most of his arrest warrants, evidence and even witnesses have long since disappeared. Since no country could extradite him, the Indian authorities allowed him to return to France.
Charles was still uneasy after he was released from prison. In 2003, he returned to Nepal, which is one of the few countries where he may still be arrested, and the authorities are still eagerly wanted him. According to the "Himalaya Times" report, Charles returned to Kathmandu to start a mineral water company. His return is believed to be the result of his desire to pay attention and overconfidence in his intelligence
On September 1, 2003, a reporter from the "Himalayan Times" found Sobra in a casino in Kathmandu. The reporter followed him for two weeks and wrote a news report with photos in the "Himalayan Times". The Nepalese police saw the report, raided the casino and arrested Charles, who was unknowingly, still gambling there. The police reinvestigated the two murders in 1975 and charged them with murder on August 20, 2004, and was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Kathmandu District Court.
In 2010, Charles had a third wife, the daughter of his Nepalese lawyer. She doesn’t believe her husband is the murderer. “Everyone has a good side and a bad side. Even a bad thing done with a good intention can be a good thing.”
From 2004 to the present, Charles is still being held in a Nepalese prison. He is 77 years old and has undergone several heart operations and is in poor health.
Ending
Charles is a typical serial killer liked by psychologists. He has a broken family, a sense of insecurity, the shadow of the colonial era, and stateless status. Then under these factors, the black seeds of evil grow wantonly. Everyone he met, knew, or made friends with was hurt by him. In Charles Sobhraj's life, there are no emotions such as friends, lovers or partners, only prey. When he wanted to fulfill his illusion, his brothers and sisters were also used and abandoned.
Although daily life is not monotonous, even just looking at his autobiography, these stories can make you feel intense adventures that you have never had before.
At the end of The Life and Crimes, the author wrote the following:
"Charles tells the story of an abandoned child who just wants to regain his lost youth and live the life he deserves. Felix (alias Alain Bernard in the text), a visitor to the prison, tells of a privileged The story of people trying to bring justice and opportunity to a smart young man who was hurt by an unfortunate childhood. Herman (Dutch diplomat) tells the story of this young diplomat fighting evil and corrupt forces. Nadine (Reporting Alain Gautier The story is about an innocent girl next door, she insists on what she thinks is the right thing. Chantal is a beautiful girl, she falls in love with a Superman, and Superman is actually an evil wizard. Marie-Andrée was also caught Destroyed. We told ourselves that as journalists, we should write books at all costs."
When we tell stories to others and we see new stories, what is the truth? Which person’s description is credible, or not credible. The Serpent TV series depicts a cold serial killer, but his autobiography tells you how he got here step by step, and how the women around him were deceived and deceived (PUA).
This is one of the reasons why I want you to see the full story of this story. People are changeable.
This is a good story, it is full of human complexity.
Hope you like it.
—————— Originally published in the personal public account: a mountain monster
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