10. The 1970s Hippie Trail Predator
Charles Sobhraj’s girlfriend eventually left him and returned to France. He then engaged in a variety of criminal schemes. One such enterprise with his brother backfired, and left his sibling serving an eighteen year term in a Turkish prison. Thereafter, Sobhraj grew steadily darker, and he began to pile up the bodies of murder victims all along the Hippie Trail. He is believed to have murdered at least twenty Western tourists in the 1970s, and the true body count is thought by many to be significantly higher.
Sobhraj was finally undone in 1976, when he tried to drug a group of French tourists in India. He miscalculated the dosage however. 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 resulted in a death sentence. Indian authorities decided to try him for crimes committed on Indian soil first, however. He was convicted of a variety of offense and imprisoned, but escaped in 1986 after he drugged his prison guards.
