![]() Chowdhury moved in with Leclerc and Sobhraj, and the two men commenced murdering certain "guests." The "Bikini Killings" were especially gruesome, unlike any of Sobhraj's previous crimes. In 1975, he met an Indian boy named Ajay Chowdhury in a park. Sometimes he kept them sick for weeks, Leclerc administering a "medicinal drink" consisting of laxatives, ipecac, and Quaaludes, rendering them incontinent, nauseated, lethargic, and confused, while Sobhraj doctored their passports and used them to cross borders, spend their cash, and fence their valuables. ![]() He convinced them that the local doctors were dangerous quacks and that his wife, a registered nurse, would soon have them in the pink of health. They traveled up and down the countryside, drugging tourists, taking them in a semi-comatose condition to a spare apartment Sobhraj rented. Sobhraj rarely fucked her, much to her chagrin, and only when her common sense threatened to overpower her florid romantic fantasies. Upon her arrival, he ordered her to pose as his secretary or his wife, as occasion demanded. Leclerc quit her job, dumped her fiancé, and flew to Bangkok to join Sobhraj. Sobhraj had made himself an object of passion to a Canadian medical secretary he met in Rhodes, Greece-a woman named Marie-Andrée Leclerc, who was vacationing with her fiancé. In Bangkok, things had taken a grim turn. People he befriended over drinks woke up hours later in hotel rooms or moving trains, minus their passports, cash, cameras, and other valuables. He had passed himself off as an Israeli scholar, a Lebanese textile merchant, and a thousand other things while trawling southern Asia for tourist victims as a drug-and-rob man. He'd escaped from prisons in five countries. After a speed binge I knocked myself out with Mekhong, a virulent whiskey said to contain 10 percent formaldehyde and rumored to cause brain damage.Īt dinner parties with British and French expats who'd lived in Thailand since the Tet Offensive, I picked up more rumors about Sobhraj. After discovering that Captagon, a powerful amphetamine, was sold over the counter, I sat at my rented manual typewriter for 12 or 14 hours at a stretch, churning out poems, journal entries, stories, and letters to friends. ![]() It was a disorienting, smelly, traffic-crazy, scary city full of begging monks, teenage gangs, motorcycles, temples, murderous pimps, terrifying prostitutes, sleaze bars, strip joints, street vendors, colonies of homeless people, and mind-boggling poverty. Production delays in Bangkok left me to my own devices for several weeks.
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