Hippies Who Befriended This Dude Were in for a Scary Surprise
Charles Sobhraj’s girlfriend eventually left him and returned to France. He carried on with a variety of criminal schemes. One of them, in which partnered with his partner, backfired and left his sibling locked up behind bars to serve an eighteen year sentence in a Turkish prison. From then on, Sobhraj’s crimes grew steadily darker, and he began to pile up the bodies of murder victims all along the Hippie Trail. It is believed that he murdered at least twenty Western tourists, but the actual body count is thought by many to be significantly higher.
In 1976, Charles Sobhraj was finally undone when he tried to drug a group of French tourists in India. Fortunately for them, he miscalculated the dosage. His victims became violently ill, but were still conscious enough to realize what Sobhraj had tried to do. They managed to overpower and seize him, until police arrived. Thai authorities sought his extradition for a murder committed there – which likely would have earned him a death sentence. However, Indian authorities decided to try him for lesser crimes committed on Indian soil, first. Found guilty of a variety of offenses, Sobhraj was imprisoned, but he escaped in 1986 after he drugged his guards.
