Return of the Serpent

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Inspector Bishwa Lal Shrestha was 32 years old when he tried to arrest Asia's most notorious murder suspect for the killing of two backpackers in Kathmandu. Shrestha examined their corpses, interviewed eyewitnesses, called in handwriting experts, grilled his "restless" suspect, and was soon sure he had the right man. But in December 1975, Nepal was incredibly polite to foreign visitors so Shrestha's superiors told him to respect the do not disturb sign on the door of Charles Sobhraj's room at Kathmandu's smartest hotel. The inspector's men waited in the lobby for two days for Sobhraj to surrender like a gentleman. Instead, the half-Vietnamese, half-Indian French citizen slipped out the back with his Canadian girlfriend Marie LeClerc. They'd already crossed the border into India by the time the police finally broke into their abandoned suite.

Last week, Shrestha, now 59 and retired, finally got his man. After a Nepalese newspaper revealed that Sobhraj had returned to Kathmandu, police arrested him at a hotel casino. But no one on the force could remember the case or where the files were stashed. Then Shrestha stepped forward. He briefed his successors on his long-forgotten investigation, dug up the 28-year-old files and sat in on Sobhraj's interrogation. The police are now preparing a case they hope will, for the first time, convict Sobhraj of murder. Superintendent Kuber Singh Rana hails Shrestha's "compelling" investigation, saying, "The police have almost nothing to do today. The files establish who the culprit is." Shrestha says merely that it was his duty "to do everything I could not to leave this crime unsolved."

As for Sobhraj, he denies the murder accusations and says he's never visited Nepal before.

Shrestha admits he had long been haunted by Sobhraj's escape. He later learned that the fugitive—sometimes referred to as the "Serpent"—was suspected of preying on Western backpackers following the hippie trail through Asia in the 1970s. By feigning illness, assuming new identities and even once setting his prison van on fire, Sobhraj escaped jail or evaded arrest in Afghanistan, Thailand, Hong Kong, France, Greece (twice), Turkey and Iran. In addition to the case of the two murdered backpackers in Kathmandu, Sobhraj is also suspected of killing five tourists in Thailand and one in Pakistan. He was acquitted of two murders in India.

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Shrestha is particularly troubled by the deaths of Dutch tourists Henricus Bintanja and Cornelia Hemker whose burned corpses were found in Thailand a few days after the Kathmandu killings. Shrestha remembers the names well: when he interrogated Sobhraj and LeClerc in Nepal, they passed themselves off as Bintanja and Hemker, presenting him the two dead tourists' passports in which the pictures had been altered.

Swapping information with police around the world, Shrestha concluded that he had been bested by a brilliant criminal mind, a man who could speak seven languages and appear amenable and plausible in all of them. Sometimes Sobhraj had slipped sedatives into drinks, say police, but mostly such sleight of hand was unnecessary: young travelers warmed to him, shared his lodgings, and swallowed medicine willingly after he convinced them it would prevent headaches or stomach trouble. In reality, say police, it was poison. According to what Shrestha calls "the compulsions of his hobby," Sobhraj is then alleged to have strangled, drowned or burned his victims alive. Making people do whatever he wanted was "fun," Sobhraj told his biographer Richard Neville.

Shrestha was also appalled by the way Sobhraj celebrated his notoriety and manipulated the law even from behind bars. Jailed for robbery in India in 1978, Sobhraj engineered an escape eight years later—only to allow his recapture the next month. As a result, his prison term in India was extended until the statute of limitations on his five alleged killings in Thailand expired.

On his release and deportation to France, he relentlessly sought publicity, boasting of multimillion-dollar book and film deals.

Despite the fact that he is now sharing a 3-m by 3-m cell with up to five inmates, 59-year-old Sobhraj is "polite, calm and confident that nothing is going to happen to him," says Superintendent Rana. Shrestha, however, is convinced that this time there is no way out even for the master escapologist. "I saw him and he saw me and I saw something click in him, some fear, some guilt," he says. "Everything in life comes full circle, even for criminals. We could never afford to travel abroad to get him. But, eventually, he came back to us."