‘Kathmandu!’ a voice rang out from the back of the bus as it rounded a hill and the passengers saw tattered prayer flags flapping from poles; but the cry was premature. It was just another village of terracotta clay on the edge of the Himalayas. The bus pulled up at a scruffy hut and the overland travellers scrambled out for bottles of Fanta and the home-brewed soda sold in old Coca-Cola bottles.
The bus resumed its precarious crawl on the rollercoaster road from Pokhara, a town in the west of Nepal, to its capital city. For hours now, the scenery had been a relentless spectacle of great gorges, roaring rivers, vistas of terraced hillsides. The road was so sinuously death-defying that one false twist of the wheel by the jovial Irish driver would have plunged them into a ravine. The bus had set out from London months ago, and now, 14 December, it was nearing its destination. Among its youthful passengers, most of whom had climbed aboard at Victoria Station, the excitement was reaching a crescendo. There was laughter and cheers at the children squatting on the roadside to pee. Hash smoke wafted along the aisle, someone played a flute, and a hip flask of Gurkha rum travelled from mouth to mouth. Through the window they could see women winnowing wheat, wearing fist-size lumps of coral and turquoise around their necks, babies tied on their backs.
With her long dark hair parted down the centre, a red kurta and jangling collection of Asian jewellery, twenty-eight-year-old Connie Jo Bronzich looked like a Nepalese hill woman herself, although she was Italian-American. She had joined the bus in Delhi, after travelling overland from Athens. She looked scruffy and run-down, as would be expected after so many miles on the overland trail.
On the road, chance acquaintanceships turn into fast friendships overnight. At the last stop, three students had joined the bus, and were now responding to Connie Jo’s weary, dislocated conversation with the wry indulgence of the captive listener. Connie was stoned; that was obvious, or she wouldn’t have been talking so much.
She had her own house, Connie said, in the redwood mountains of Los Gatos outside Santa Cruz in California. It was so beautiful, but she had to get away. Too many bad vibes. The mountains frightened her. It was a heavy heroin scene around Santa Cruz, and in those mountains most roads weren’t even on maps. The police just left it alone. ‘Sure,’ said one of them. Luke, a journalism student at University of Texas, had teamed up with the two girls sitting next to him. Sally and Katy were law students from Australia. ‘Santa Cruz. Murder and drug capital of America.’
Connie, it seemed to him, was freaked out and a bit desperate.
‘Yeah, my old man was in the smack business, but after a time it gets you down,’ she told them. ‘All these scumbags kept coming to the house trying to do deals. Man – it was heavy! In the end it all blew up, and I had to get away.’
She had come to the East to break her heroin habit, she said, which to Luke made as much sense as going to Mexico to give up chilli peppers.
‘I’m down to my last hundred dollars,’ she confided. ‘When my sister comes to Kathmandu for Christmas, I’ll probably have some more, but, anyway, this is gonna have to be a business trip.’
The Kathmandu Valley, surrounded by the peaks of the Himalayas, looked as green and ordered as an opera backdrop. Connie stopped talking as suddenly as she had begun and spent the rest of the journey staring out the window.
Finally they reached Kathmandu – which in 1975 was a city leaping headlong into the fourteenth century, and the ultimate summit of the international freak scene. Those in the bus were cheering and singing and two girls unfurled a Union Jack and hung it out the back window.
Shaky wooden two-storey houses and shops leaned into the narrow streets. Lamps and candles lit windows of dark, tiny bare rooms like tableaux from the Middle Ages – blacksmiths hammering, tailors sewing, small children mending shoes. In the gutter a butcher disembowelled a side of buffalo. Beside him, a woman crouched in a long crimson skirt beside her fruit stall, where a half-dozen passion fruit lay in a line.
The bus crawled the cobbled streets into Durbar Square, almost nudging the men in loincloths carrying huge bundles of firewood and straw. Meandering in the ancient square, flanked by palaces and pagodas, were dogs, goats, chickens, holy men and snake charmers. The bicycle rickshaws whizzed past, their drivers hissing to warn the crowds. As soon as the bus pulled up children surrounded it, whispering through the windows the endless litany of the road: ‘You want hash? Grass? Thai sticks? Best cocaine from Colombia?’
That night, Connie stayed at the ramshackle Star Hotel with the bus driver, and the next day she moved on to Freak Street, checking into the Oriental Lodge where her other three friends from the bus had taken rooms.
Like most Nepalese buildings, the doors and ceilings of the Oriental were so low that Western visitors had to hunch up while inside. Its stairs were dark and precipitous, and even during the day the only source of light was a candle which burned on the reception desk. Connie’s cell-sized room contained only a narrow cot. A tiny window looked down on the grubby stone courtyard. It cost ten rupees a night – about a dollar. The hotel lobby led into Freak Street.
In 1975 genuine Tibetan treasures were still on sale in hole-in-the-wall stalls along this fabled alleyway. As well, there were versions of Tibetan and Nepalese national costumes which were run up by busy tailors for the hordes that arrived ready to swap their precious blue jeans for strings of amber, and their sneakers for red felt boots embroidered with flowers.
If only she had money, Connie said as she browsed with Luke, Sally and Katy. So many beautiful things. She was crazy about jewellery.
It had been fourteen months since hashish had been half-heartedly proclaimed illegal in the Kingdom of Nepal, under international pressure, but on Freak Street its heady aroma billowed out from the upper windows of cheap hotels. In the tea shops, where hash was optional in biscuits and chocolate cakes, loudspeakers blared the music of Bob Dylan and the Doors.
In the twilight of the Don’t Pass Me By restaurant, the four new arrivals sat down and giggled over the menu. ‘It must be the worst food in the world,’ Luke said in a Texan drawl. ‘Well, what will it be? Buffalo balls or yak-butter toast, or buffalo balls on yak butter toast?’
As they waited for their order, he told them about the Bangkok newspaper stories he had seen about some young tourists burned by the roadside.
‘Yep, burned black – two Aussies – like crispy critters.’
‘Don’t freak us out, Luke,’ Sally said.
Later in the day, Connie persuaded Katy to accompany her on a visit to one of Kathmandu’s landmarks, the Pie and Chai Shop. As they walked along the ancient streets, they passed shrines wreathed with marigolds and smeared with a sticky red paste. Candles burned beside statues, and rats scuttled up and down their elaborate silk costumes.
A low doorway led into a room of six tables. It was dirty and bare, and a tiny girl was crouching on the floor, washing dishes in a bucket. The pies were lined up on a shelf behind the fly-screen and there were more on the counter: lemon meringue, apple, banana, custard, pumpkin and chocolate meringue – an anomalous array, and a legend from Bali to Istanbul. Connie went to the back of the shop and spoke to a man. A few minutes later, with the dexterity of a hardened junkie, she shot herself up with morphine.
A portrait of Connie Jo at the age of seven still hung in the comfortable living room of her parents’ home in Saratoga. Wearing a light-blue dress and her hair in long brown pigtails, she was beaming at the white puppy she held in her arms. Her bedroom was a confection of pink nylon curtains and fluffy stuffed animals to which she returned to do her homework after piano and ballet lessons. The adored only child of a prosperous business couple, the pretty dark-eyed girl with the eager grin was just one of the gang in high school and enrolled in Stanford College to become a radiology technician.
But before graduation she was asked to leave. She took a job with a local doctor but suddenly left that too without explanation. Some people who knew her at the time say it was because she had begun using hard drugs.
She was twenty-six when she married John Bronzich, a motorboat salesman who drank and loved motorcycles. It was a garden wedding, California style. Connie wore traditional white, and the bridegroom wore a tailored leather suit. Now she had turned up alone in Nepal, wearing a lot of turquoise and coral, with a thirst for friends and a taste for morphine and smack.
Luke, Sally and Katy didn’t see much of Connie Jo Bronzich until three days later, 18 December. In one of the larger rooms of the Oriental Lodge, a group of the young guests was sitting around on the three beds, passing joints and listening to a guitarist and a harmonica player warming up for a jam session. Connie joined them around a hash pipe. They had managed to avoid her company. Her morphine habit depressed them.
‘I feel great today,’ Connie said. ‘I’ve had my first hot shower in weeks.’ Her long dark hair was smooth and shining, and she looked fresher and more alert than she had since her companions had met her. ‘It was the first real luxury bathroom I’ve seen since Istanbul.’
‘How did you manage that?’ one of her friends asked.
‘I met this guy, a gem-dealer, he’s really amazing. I had drinks back at his room in the Oberoi, and—’
‘Connie! You mean to say—’ Sally broke in teasing.
‘No, you jerk. His wife was there too. He showed me some stones. They were incredible. He buys them at the mines in Thailand and sells them cheap! I might stay with them if I go to Bangkok. They were both really nice, even bought me drinks. They’ve got a car, too. He said he’d take me to visit the garnet mines sometime.’
Now another man entered the room, bending low to get through the door, wearing a checked flannel shirt, hiking boots and jeans.
‘Hi, Laurent,’ Connie said. ‘Come and meet my friends.’
The Australian girls were surprised. Connie had not mentioned that she was expecting anyone to join her, and the burly Canadian man who soon began talking about the trek he planned to Everest Base Camp was an unlikely boyfriend. Connie could only trek as far as the nearest morphine fix.
A cassette of bluegrass music was playing, and others joined in with the harmonica and guitar. Luke, the conscientious journalism student, liked to hear travellers’ tales and he listened to Laurent.
‘You get a better education out of six months travelling than five years of polisci and psych,’ the Canadian was saying. Luke agreed. Laurent had dropped out of the University of Winnipeg, got his mining papers, and for the past four years had taken summer jobs and travelled during the winter.
‘This way I will have seen the whole world in another eight years. But Everest, wow, I’ve wanted to see that since I was a kid. This is going to be the best Christmas of my life.’
‘So you’re raring to go,’ said Luke, liking his enthusiasm.
‘And glad to get out of Delhi. What a shit-hole.’
‘Well, Kathmandu’s a bit of a shit-hole too,’ said Luke. ‘It’s the people here who make the difference. They must be the gentlest people in the world.’
At midnight, when the batteries in the cassette player had run down, Laurent and Connie said goodnight to the others and drifted off to their room.
‘Those two just don’t seem to go together at all,’ Luke said. ‘He’s got his trip together down to a tee. Money, maps, return tickets, and poor old Connie’s down to her last hundred dollars …’
‘There’s something tragic about that woman,’ Sally said.
‘Yeah,’ Luke agreed. ‘She’s got tombstones in her eyes.’
It was 22 December, and in the leafy enclave of the US embassy compound, behind a high brick wall, an assistant hurried into First Secretary Alan Eastham’s office. ‘They found the body of a Western man yesterday on the road to Dhulikhel, sir,’ he said. ‘It could be an American.’
Eastham sighed. Kathmandu was considered a hardship zone by US diplomats posted overseas.
On Christmas Eve a battered military vehicle drove along Freak Street and pulled up outside the Oriental Lodge. Luke was sitting in the lobby when he saw three Nepalese men in suits, one obviously a police superintendent, walk upstairs to the room shared by Sally and Katy.
Has the impossible happened? Luke asked himself. A drug bust on Freak Street?
The raised voices of the girls echoed through the tiny hotel as they followed the police onto the landing. The faces of the police were shocked and sombre.
‘We have to go to the mortuary,’ Sally called out to Luke as they walked down the stairs. It seemed that two bodies had been found and the police wanted help in making an identification. Luke climbed into the police Jeep with the others.
The small square building looked like a weather-beaten bunker. Luke suggested the girls wait outside as he followed the moon-faced Superintendent Chandra Bir Rai, who looked more like a guru than a senior policeman, into the building. Two men at the doorway saluted.
On a stone slab, Luke saw a charred corpse. All the clothes were burned off the body, except for a piece of checked cotton fabric around one wrist. Before he had time to absorb the sight, the superintendent was beckoning Luke into another part of the building. This time he saw the blackened corpse of a woman, with deep gashes in her chest.
‘Did you know her?’ he asked.
‘Oh Jesus, it just might be – Connie,’ gasped Luke, looking down at the naked, mutilated figure. She was so badly burned even her jewellery was charred. Luke turned away, trying to stop himself from vomiting. He would have to ask Sally to confirm the identification. She had talked the most with Connie Jo Bronzich.
As Luke walked back towards the door, he stopped again at the mutilated corpse of the tall Western male.
‘Who’s this?’ he asked Superintendent Rai.
Looking supremely apologetic, Rai shook his head. It had been found three days before, in a gully about 35 kilometres from Kathmandu. It had not been identified.
From the body’s size Luke realized that it was probably Laurent. The throat was cut from ear to ear, so deeply the head seemed decapitated. My God, Luke thought, horrified, it would take five men to hold him down to do that. The blackened skin was peeling back in places, revealing red tissue. The scrap of fabric seemed to have been used to bind the wrists together.
As Luke forced himself to look at the corpse as a journalist would, objectively looking for clues, he hoped it wasn’t the slow-talking Canadian. The reasons for the burning were obvious to him. The murderers had tried to render their victims unidentifiable. In the case of the male victim they had succeeded. Luke told the police superintendent that although there was a good possibility that the corpse was that of Laurent Carrière, a Canadian friend of Connie Jo Bronzich, he could not make a positive identification.
‘Is it Connie?’ the two girls asked, shivering as they stood outside the door.
‘Maybe. I can’t say one hundred per cent. Prepare yourselves for something awful,’ he warned them. Sally walked into the mortuary and Katy stayed outside talking with Luke. There was no need for both girls to go inside.
Huddling in the doorway, looking miserable, was Sushil Mathema, a Nepalese student who worked as the receptionist at the Oriental Lodge. He had been unceremoniously wrenched from his economics class by police, and as a matter of course would spend the next few days in jail in case he was concealing anything. Already he had told the police what he knew. Four days before, Laurent Carrière had come downstairs early in the morning wearing a backpack, saying he was going off to visit Dhulikhel, an ancient town 45 kilometres to the west. He was alone. Two days later, when he hadn’t come back, Connie mentioned to Sushil that she was going off to look for him. That was all he could tell the police except that, once, an Indian boy with a small moustache came to the desk to ask for them both.
Sally rejoined her friends. ‘It was Connie, all right,’ she said. ‘I could tell by the earrings.’
Luke put his arm round her and she sobbed on his shoulder. Superintendent Rai came out from the mortuary and walked over to the three young travellers, standing with them in a gesture of compassionate solidarity.
Half an hour later, the old Jeep drove the three students up the ramp of the police headquarters building in Durbar Square. A young man, bowing low in the presence of the superintendent, brought them a tray of biscuits and tea. Luke, Sally and Katy told Rai everything they could remember about Connie. They had last seen her on 22 December, the night before her body was found, when she had asked them if they wanted to join her for a trip to the Pie and Chai Shop.
‘She talked about meeting a gem-dealer at the Oberoi,’ Sally recalled. ‘She said he was Vietnamese-looking – maybe he knows something?’
‘Have you ever seen this gem-dealer, Miss Sally?’ the superintendent asked gently.
‘I’m not sure,’ she answered. ‘I bumped into Connie on Freak Street once and she was with some people who could have been the ones. She said this guy had offered to drive her to the garnet mines.’
The superintendent gave the travellers a notebook found in Connie’s room. They looked through it and came across a name and address in Bangkok. ‘This must be the man,’ said Sally, pointing to the name: Alain Gautier, 504 Kanit House. The superintendent thanked them for their help.
That night Katy, Sally and Luke went out to Aunt Jane’s restaurant, where they had chocolate cake for Christmas dinner and tried to forget what they had seen at the mortuary that day. But they couldn’t and they knew they never would. Later at the Oriental Lodge, Sally vomited, and they sat up together all night, counting the hours until they could leave the city which had symbolized the dream of the overland trek to all of them.
Christmas morning dawned cold and foggy as they shouldered their packs and walked through the streets of Kathmandu. At 8 a.m. they boarded the bus which would take them to the Indian border.
The same morning, a white Datsun drove across the bridge over the Bishnumati River and headed towards the sacred hill of the 2,000-year-old temple, Swayambhunath. From its gold spire the eyes of the all-seeing Buddha looked down on the inhabitants of Kathmandu. All around the wooden pagodas on the sandy banks of the river, the saffron robes of the monks lay out to dry.
A Jeep overtook the car and two men in the back motioned them to stop. Superintendent Rai walked over to the Datsun and politely greeted its occupants. He asked for their names and nationality. Charles smiled. He had returned from his deserted Bangkok apartment that morning, leaving Ajay to deal with the locked safe. He got out of the car and shook hands with the Nepalese policeman.
‘My name is Henricus Bintanja – Henk, for short – and I’m from Holland,’ he announced, explaining that he taught sociology at the University of Amsterdam and introducing his wife, ‘Cocky Hemker’. Behind her sunglasses, Marie-Andrée managed a tight smile and a nod.
Rai thought he knew exactly who they were. Following the Australian girls’ lead about the gem-dealer with Vietnamese features, he had found a guest matching the description was registered at the Soaltee Oberoi as Henricus Bintanja.
‘If you have been to Holland,’ the driver of the Datsun was now saying, ‘you will already know my wife, Cocky. She’s a celebrity – always on television.’
Rai showed them a photograph of Connie, taken from her visa application. Did they recognize the picture?
Both of them shook their heads.
‘Is there something wrong, superintendent?’ Charles asked.
‘We will just take a small look in your car if you don’t mind,’ nodded the superintendent.
‘By all means,’ Charles agreed.
Two young assistants made a cursory search of the back seat and boot of the car and handed Rai a pair of baggy jeans.
‘Are these jean pants yours, Mr Henk?’
‘I’ve never seen them before.’
‘I am deeply sorry, but I must ask you to remain behind in Kathmandu until we complete our investigations.’
‘But we are due to be in Delhi in two days.’
‘I am very sorry. And now I must ask you to follow me to the police station. Just a formality. I am very sorry.’
‘Oh well, superintendent, perhaps it is fated. I welcome this chance to remain in your beautiful country.’
One hour after the bus left Kathmandu with Luke, Sally and Katy, it was stopped at a police checkpoint. The three travellers were asked to accompany police back to the headquarters.
‘We have found a man who looks Vietnamese although it appears that he is Dutch,’ Superintendent Rai said to them. ‘I wonder if you would recognize him as the man you saw with Miss Connie?’
‘I’ll try, superintendent,’ Sally agreed nervously.
Just then some other people came into the room. Sally looked up and saw a pair of black eyes glaring at her from a sallow, cruelly sensuous face. With him was a woman with long black hair and sharp features. Why did that glare frighten her so much? Was it the same man she had seen briefly with Connie on Freak Street?
‘I couldn’t be sure, superintendent,’ she said, averting her eyes from Sobhraj.
‘I must say I am becoming impatient with all this,’ Charles said, glancing at his gold Omega watch. ‘And it is not nice for my wife.’
‘You must excuse us, Mr Bintanja.’
‘Yes, of course, you are doing your job. But may I now return to the Oberoi?’
‘Certainly, yes.’ The superintendent bowed slightly as ‘Mr Bintanja’ left the room.
Sally wished the police had warned her he was already there. The cold dark eyes had bored right through her and she was still shaking from the menace in his gaze.
‘Maybe you should watch him,’ she said to Rai after Charles had left the room. The three travellers suddenly felt scared, as though trapped in a web of ill-defined conspiracy.
‘You could be in some danger here now,’ said the superintendent quietly. Because their presence would be required in Nepal for a few more days, he assigned them a police bodyguard.
‘When you feel the heat, go straight to the kitchen,’ Charles had often said, and on the morning of 26 December, he walked into the office of Superintendent Rai and asked for the return of his pen, which he had left behind the previous day.
Over tea, Chandra Bir Rai asked ‘Mr Henk’ whether he had read about the cases of the burned bodies found in Thailand a few days before.
‘I never look at newspapers, superintendent,’ he said. ‘And especially not ones in Bangkok. As a sociologist I have observed the Thais to be a bloodthirsty race, not like the sensitive Nepalese. I’m touring Asia with my wife, and we have no stomach for such horror stories.’
After Charles had left the office in a pantomime of smiles and handshakes, Rai weighed the evidence against the man he thought of as Henk Bintanja. He did not display the usual qualities of a criminal. Quite the opposite. He was gracious, and apparently carefree. There was no firm evidence against him. In fact, he had produced receipts from the restaurant at the Soaltee Oberoi with meal times marked on the back, and other witnesses had verified his constant presence in the hotel casino.
There was another suspect. Records showed that Laurent Carrière had shared a room with Connie Jo at the Oriental Lodge and had then flown out of Kathmandu. Could Carrière have killed Connie and the other unidentified victim and then fled?
And yet a farmer from the spot where the man’s body had been found had noticed a car turning around late on the night of the murder. The first digit of its number plate was 5, matching the one on the white Datsun rented by Mr Henk Bintanja. There were not many modern white cars in Kathmandu. And the baggy pair of blue jeans found in the boot of Mr Bintanja’s car had been identified by the two Australian girls as probably belonging to Miss Bronzich.
Lining the shelves in Rai’s office were old Sherlock Holmes books. He had used them to teach himself both English and police investigatory procedure. In this case, the circumstantial evidence was powerful and there was something a little too methodical about Mr Bintanja’s hotel receipts. In the morning, he decided, he would bring the couple back in for further questioning and search their room.
Kathmandu closed in on Sally, Luke and Katy. News of the couple found burned in Thailand had already cast a pall across the Asian trail, and now this atrocity in the Kingdom of Nepal, the birthplace of Buddha, had intensified the general paranoia. As the forlorn trio walked to and from Aunt Jane’s each day, other travellers seemed to disappear down alleyways as if avoiding them.
Street talk centred on motive. A huge amount of heroin from Thailand had just hit the city and was being pushed in Freak Street. Was the timing a coincidence, or connected with the murders? Day and night in candlelit dives, overlanders, huddled like conspirators in old oil paintings, talked of nothing else.
‘Whatever’s going on around here, it must be mighty big,’ Luke said to the girls.
Sally nodded. ‘Connie’s notebook made me realize that,’ she said. When they had looked through her papers at the police station, the two girls had found a hand-scrawled note: ‘Go [?] miles along the road to Dhulikhel’ – they couldn’t make out the number – ‘and pick it up.’ There were also some names and addresses of well-known drug dealers.
Still, they kept assisting the police with their inquiries. It was as if Superintendent Rai, sensing this was an incident outside local traditions, sought their advice. Later, in acknowledgment of their help, Sally, Luke and Katy were presented by police with a vial of hash oil.
Charles was not disturbed by the inevitable investigations into the killings. He knew he was invincible. He believed he had perfected a combination of charm and psychology, sleight of hand, strength, and pharmaceutical expertise, that allowed him to dominate any human situation. The Nepalese police, in their traditional breeches and peaked caps, were just a joke, he thought. His day-trip back to Bangkok, using the passport of Laurent Carrière, was enough to confuse them for weeks. They would assume that Laurent had killed Connie.
Several years later, Charles would claim that Connie Jo Bronzich died because her name had been given to him by his criminal employers in Hong Kong. She had been hired, he said, to fly to Bangkok and return to Kathmandu with a consignment of heroin. Two friends, one of them her so-called ‘sister’, Dor, from Santa Cruz, were to meet her around Christmas, and then carry the contraband back into America. For this they would be paid $5,000. As for the burly Canadian, on his way to see Mount Everest for the first time, Charles characterized him as a courier too who had been engaged in London.
Brutality, however, had reached a new extreme in these murders, the first to involve a knife. They were intended to create a ‘big show’, Charles would boast, but Ajay ‘had overdone it a bit … These Indians … they stab fifteen times when once would do.’
After Connie’s body was identified by Sally on Christmas Eve, US First Secretary Eastham drafted a telegram to Connie Jo Bronzich’s parents in Los Gatos. It said a body had been tentatively identified and asked for Connie’s dental records. He would wait a day before sending it. Guarded by two marines, her body was in the embassy refrigerator, which was ready to switch to a portable generator in case of a power failure, a common occurrence in Kathmandu.
Laurent Carrière’s unidentified body remained on a slab at the mortuary. There was no room in the small British cemetery, the only one in Kathmandu.
Later, the American consul Allan Eastham would describe Connie as ‘a nice young kid who had the worst luck anyone could have’. Mysterious deaths, however, had been part of Connie’s life for years. Ten weeks before she left California, her estranged husband, John Franklin Bronzich, was found dead at her home. The coroner’s report stated the cause of death as morphine poisoning, although his own family did not agree with this verdict. The amount of morphine found in his body was not normally enough to cause death. On the night he died, John Bronzich had been in a car with Connie on his way to a restaurant in Santa Cruz. He was not living with her at the time and, according to his family, had looked forward to the reunion. The couple had a fight, and John jumped out of the car.
The next morning he was found sprawled on the floor in the mobile home attached to Connie’s house, dead. There was a syringe on the floor, some small balloons, and an overturned chair. It is not known how he travelled the 65 kilometres from the city of Santa Cruz to Connie’s house in the mountains. His back was sprained, and he was wearing a surgical brace, which would have made walking down the long driveway to the mobile home impossible.
At the time of his argument with Connie, she had been dating a man with a long police record as a notorious Santa Cruz drug dealer. Some said there was animosity between Connie’s estranged husband and the new boyfriend.
Perhaps it was no accident that John Bronzich’s best friend, Frank Santa Cruz, was also found dead at the same address. One night he had come to Connie’s house, taken off his boots and fallen asleep on top of her bed. When she woke up in the morning, Connie told police, she saw a strange grin on his face and tried to wake him. He was dead. This time the coroner’s report was less positive in its conclusions. The cause of death was listed as ‘undetermined’.
At dawn on 28 December, Superintendent Rai led a police raid on Room 415 of the Oberoi Hotel. When no one answered the door, his men forced their way inside. No one was there. Several suitcases were over-turned, their contents strewn about the floor. In the debris, police picked out eleven empty tins of Regulets (chocolate-flavoured laxatives), boxes of coloured pencils and a protractor (part of Charles’ passport-forging kit). There was crumpled black nylon lingerie, a portable fire extinguisher, and some cassettes for learning Spanish. Sapphires and amethysts were scattered on the floor. Among the jumble of paperback books was The Secret of the Aura by Lobsang Rampa, A Book of Life by Martin Gray, a French inspirational writer, and Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche.
Through the plate-glass windows of the hotel room, Rai could see the city decked out with flags and flower garlands for the next day’s royal birthday celebrations. His Majesty King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev was considered the living reincarnation of Vishnu, the Hindu deity worshipped as the restorer of Karma, the moral order. The rising sun tinted the peaks of the Himalayas, which for aeons had encircled the valley as a protective wall. An awesome force had breached this citadel, Rai thought to himself. Now, somewhere out there, a man of prey was at large.
It was Charles’ sixth sense again. Just as he used to sniff out the presence of police when he was a little boy stealing from shops – and a hundred times since – so Charles knew that the Nepalese police had been planning that dawn raid. At midnight he and Marie-Andrée had wrapped their necessities in a bed-sheet and thrown them out of the window to Ajay, waiting on the grass below. Then they had tiptoed down the back stairs and into a taxi.
For Marie-Andrée the escape was a further descent into her increasingly delusional attachment to Charles. ‘It is a new start,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Spiritual, physical connection, tenderness, glow, complicity; everything is shared, and we make only one person … I belong to him, I feel I am desired, loved for myself, that he needs me, my presence, my smile to live. At last I am happy. I make plans and think only of our baby …’
Charles used Hakim’s passport while Marie-Andrée had a page from the passport of the dead Canadian, Laurent Carrière, which contained an entrance visa to India, inserted into her own passport. That same day the three of them crossed the border into India.
When they reached the holy city of Varanasi a few days later, Charles spent hours watching the bodies burn on the ghats of the Ganges.
Here Charles befriended Alan Aaron Jacobs, an Israeli tourist who had worked as a crane-driver to save for this holiday. He was happy to meet a group of friendly fellow travellers like Charles, Monique and Ajay, and to share a room with Ajay at a small hotel. The next day, after burning a batch of incriminating passports, Charles, Marie-Andrée and Ajay moved on to Goa, the bohemian enclave on the west coast of India. That same day Jacobs was found dead in his bed in the hotel room.
Charles later insisted this was an accident. ‘I only wanted his passport,’ he said, blaming the death on Ajay. ‘That Israeli was the only one I felt sorry for. He’d told me how hard he had worked.’
In Goa, Charles met a party of Frenchmen at Anjuna Beach. He passed round a bottle of malt whisky and entranced them with talk of gems and his childhood adventures in Asia until the sun rose. One of the travellers, Eric Damour, described the experience in his journal as ‘A night of excitement without end’.
On 9 January 1976, Charles, Marie-Andrée and Ajay rode south with the French party in their transit van, stopping for the night at a small beach resort. Charles ordered four chickens from the villagers, bought fresh crabs from the fishermen and mixed a whisky cocktail for his new friends, who were sprawled on the beach by a fire. At 9 p.m., the three Frenchmen passed out. Eric Damour and his two friends were thrown into the back of their van, now stripped of all its valuables, and Charles and Ajay put a rock on the accelerator and jumped out, leaving the drugged occupants to be the apparent victims of a car accident followed by looting. But the travellers were saved by villagers, who appeared seemingly from nowhere.
Charles and his friends moved on. In Madras, Ajay left them, saying he was returning to Delhi to visit his family. Charles and Marie-Andrée flew to Singapore, and then Hong Kong on 31 January. There they met an American school teacher, David Allen Gore, and invited him back to their room at the Sheraton Hotel, where he was drugged. The haul from Gore included cash, cheques and credit cards, with Charles proudly showing Marie-Andrée a letter of credit for $8,000, which he cashed. He presented her with a gold Bulova watch and bought a diamond ring for his new Thai mistress, Roong. For himself he planned to buy a Jaguar, and a luxury apartment in Bangkok.
While he could have moved on to any number of cities, Charles saw no reason why he should. Although he had recently murdered ten people, he did not live in fear of arrest. He was used to being on the wanted list. His gem business was thriving and he planned to keep up such a show of affluence that he would be above suspicion, or immune from its effects. While the murders didn’t add to the complications of his external life, he also experienced no qualms of conscience. ‘If some ask me whether I feel remorse I answer: Does a professional soldier feel remorse after having killed a hundred men with a machine gun? Did the American pilots feel remorse after dropping napalm on my homeland? No. Society condoned the soldiers, telling them: You have the right to kill; it is your duty to kill – the more you kill the bigger the promotion. Don’t I have the same right? In the interest of my own minority?’
The difference was that Charles’ minority consisted of one, himself. And to him, morality was a word-game. ‘I can justify the murders to myself,’ he would often say. ‘I never killed any good people.’
And so he planned to return to Bangkok. The very boldness of the act would be enough to dispel danger, he believed, and at the worst, the police could be bought. The only problem was Nadine Gires. How much did she know?