When he came out they embarked on a manic crime spree across Europe and Asia. He promised her that he was a reformed character and they got engaged, only for him to go back to prison for car theft.īut like so many women who were to follow, she had fallen under his spell. A well-meaning prison visitor arranged work for him on the outside and also introduced him to a bourgeois young Parisian called Chantal Compagnon. He spent most of his adolescence in Paris in and out of youth offender facilities and then their adult version. Sobhraj did not settle in his new home and twice stowed away on ships heading to Africa.Ī bright but delinquent teenager, he was irresistibly drawn to crime – car theft, street muggings, and then holding up housewives with a gun.
His mother then married an occupying French soldier who, suffering from PTSD, returned to France with his young family. The child of an affair between an Indian businessman-tailor and one of his Vietnamese shop assistants, Sobhraj (played in the BBC drama by French actor Tahar Rahim) had grown up in Saigon during the Vietnamese war of independence from France. I couldn’t quite believe that someone who had confessed to a number of the murders to Neville, and against whom there was a wealth of compelling evidence, was free to walk the streets of a European capital.
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I had never been much interested in serial killers but I happened to read Richard Neville’s and Julie Clarke’s extraordinary account of the killings, The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, just before Sobhraj’s release was announced. Sobhraj wanted payment for the interview but I refused and, to my surprise, he agreed to talk. Sobhraj was represented by the infamous lawyer Jacques Vergès, nicknamed the “devil’s advocate” because his roster of clients included the Nazi Klaus Barbie, Slobodan Milosevic and the renowned international terrorist Carlos the Jackal.
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