The next day, Annabella told the Australian girls that her new friend had pronounced the gems to be inferior, that they had been swindled in Delhi. The small ruby that Laddie owned and carried wrapped in a soft cloth, pinned to his underclothes, was inferior and blemished. And so were the topazes and amethysts that Annabella had bought. “He told us it is easy to get taken,” complained Annabella to the Australians. So angry was Annabella that she vowed to return to the crooked merchant in Delhi and demand a refund. Charles promised to help her. He is an “extraordinary” man, Annabella told a group of young people on the night of December 20, as she ate a piece of pecan pie at one of the pastry shops. Beside her, Laddie was simmering over his imperfect ruby, morose and angry. Then someone brought the cheering news that the weather was improving, that the forecast was that Everest would reveal herself by Christmas. Only five days away! Laddie put aside his anguish over the ruby and bade Annabella to finish her pie quickly. One of the cafes that catered to young people was showing a film of an Everest expedition, provided the city’s erratic electricity would stay working long enough to power the projector. Annabella smiled and grasped Laddie’s hand and did as he asked. She admired her friend’s priorities. A mountain, the mountain, was more important than a ruby. Annabella understood that.
On the morning of December 22, in a terraced cornfield a few kilometers outside Katmandu, alongside the Chinese Highway just where the excellent road financed and built by Peking begins to climb and twist upward into a range of foothills leading to the Tibetan border, a Nepalese child ran after his errant dog. The little boy laughed and stumbled and threw small sticks at his pup, who was playing a frustrating game of running several yards, stopping to cock an attentive ear at his young master’s commands, then bursting out of the child’s grasp and dashing forth another fifty feet. Then the dog suddenly stopped and began to sniff at something odd. Smoke rose in curls from a blackened mass. At first the child thought his dog had discovered a dead cow. Then realization hit both boy and pet—the mass was a burning body—and, howling, they ran for help.
Quickly villagers gathered to view the gruesome sight; someone brought a brace of oxen and a bamboo sled to drag the corpse hurriedly from the field. Someone else ran to fetch a holy man who lived in nearby mountains, the worry being that murder by fire might curse the field and spoil the crop. But when the priest came and pronounced the body to be that of a Westerner (no Nepalese is more than six feet tall, as were the remains smoldering in the cornfield), he decreed that the omen was of no harm. It did not defile the crop. Besides, the first sun of the morning had broken through in a period when the valley was traditionally smothered in gray fog. The holy man stretched out his arm and pointed toward the Himalayas. Look! The Mother of the Winds was revealed in all her awesome glory. The holy man began to pray and the people joined him as oxen dragged the body of Laddie DuParr away.
The U.S. Consul in Nepal was fresh on the job, having been installed but a few weeks earlier. He was Al Eastham, a burly, red-bearded boy from Arkansas, seemingly plucked from the defensive line of a football team. He realized that Katmandu was not exactly the Court of St. James, but he hoped the post would be interesting. His were chores of diplomatic mundaneness—passport and visa processing, advice to American businessmen, an eye on the activities and pronouncements of the King (one of the few absolute monarchs in the world who controls everything in his country, from the airline to the choicest property), extricating the occasional American youngster who got in a legal jam. On this morning of December 22, toward noon, a group of youngsters came into the modest consulate and brought a disturbing rumor: word was going around that the body of an American had been found just outside the city. East-ham groaned.
When an American citizen dies abroad, it is the responsibility of the consul to protect the remains, make identification, determine cause of death, notify relatives, and arrange for the deceased to be shipped home, or buried locally, whatever is desired by the family. In a country like Nepal, the process has a certain urgency, for there are no morticians as known in Western society, no embalming, not even a cemetery. The country is 85 per cent Hindu and thus cremation is the custom. As he drove to the rural hospital where the corpse had been taken, Eastham told himself that if the body was indeed that of an American, please let there be adequate identification, and, God willing, a family somewhere easily located who would agree to local cremation.
The body lay on a wooden table in the autopsy room. Eastham could hold his gaze steady only long enough to see that fire had destroyed what life had once been within the mass of blackened flesh. Only one patch of white skin was uncharred, on the back below the shoulders, sufficient to establish that the corpse was indeed Western. No further identification was available—no papers, no passport. Fingerprints were taken, although the digits crumbled as they were dressed with ink and pressed to paper.
The next day Eastham returned to the hospital with a Polaroid camera, reasoning that, as identification would probably take weeks if not months, best he have a photograph should the need arise. He shot a full roll, wincing at the grisly task, then ordered his driver to return hastily to Katmandu. Eastham slumped in the back seat and closed his eyes, trying to erase the awful sight that had spoiled his morning.
Once again the fog was heavy and thick, and when the driver slowed the car, Eastham assumed that visibility was impaired. Then the driver spoke. “What’s that?” he wondered. “Over there.” He pointed to a group of villagers, gathered in a clump near the road, their figures looming eerily in the gray and mauve of the early morning. Nearby some Chinese Communist workers were building a brick plant and they were scurrying across plowed fields to look. Curious, Eastham got out of the car and stepped between a row of saplings, metal girdles about their trunks to keep the cows away. He walked thirty feet or so into the oozing marsh of a rice paddy. Steam and fog were rising from the wet earth, as if the field were a cauldron. Everything was in misted silhouette, like the painting of a French impressionist.
Politely, Eastham pushed his way though the Nepalese and came to the object of their attention. When he looked down, his stomach churned. Before him, on the rice field, lay still another corpse, also burned, blackened to such extreme that little could be told save the fact that it appeared to be a woman. Her eyes remained open in death and stared in horror at all those who approached. That night, Al Eastham, a strong man, could not sleep, nor think clearly. In office less than three weeks, already he had two unidentified corpses on his hands. He would say later, “I almost went bonzo.”
Police of His Majesty’s Government of Nepal fanned out in Freak Street to ask questions, for the pathologist’s initial findings suggested that both bodies were of young Westerners. The male’s throat had been cut, “not only cut, but cut away, almost to the point of decapitation,” said the pathologist. The female had been stabbed four times just below the left breast, the blade piercing the aorta and causing a fountain of blood to erupt. Then gasoline was poured over the bodies and set on fire. “These are the most terrible killings I have ever seen,” said the doctor, who in autopsies past had examined the remains of climbers mutilated from falls down mountains, and adulterous mates slain savagely in remote Himalayan villages.
Detectives stopped young people on the streets, interrupted meditations on the steps of pagodas, bent over to creep through passages leading to the Pleasure Room, questioned room clerks at those hotels—the Unity, the Monumental Lodge—that cater to the counterculture. At the Oriental, the desk clerk reported that two of the hotel’s guests who had shared Room 9 were missing. One was a Canadian youngster named Laddie DuParr, the other an American girl named Annabella Tremont. They were friends, probably lovers, and their mutual acquaintances were worried. The two had not been seen for forty-eight hours. The clerk suggested the police talk to the Australian girls who seemed to know the missing couple well.
Mattie and Cora tried to be helpful, but they knew very little. Laddie had vanished first, inexplicably,
and was gone at least a full day before Annabella grew concerned enough to go in search of him. Then she never returned. The only lead they could offer was that their friends had been spending a lot of time with “a Vietnamese-looking jewel dealer and his French wife” who drove a white rental car and who stayed in “some fancy hotel.” That narrowed matters down considerably. As the investigators began checking registries at the few “fancy” hotels in Katmandu, Al Eastham asked the Australian girls if they would accompany him to the hospital and view the corpses.
The remains of the male were insufficient for the girls to make a positive identification. “Possibly” it was Laddie, they agreed, but they could not be sure. How could they connect the Laddie they knew, a vertical six-foot-plus gentle giant of a man, with the horizontal lump of charcoal on the pathologist’s table? Satisfied that they were telling the truth, Eastham led them to another room to see the second victim. While they waited outside in the corridor for the body to be brought out, the Australians began speaking of Annabella, of the sadness in her life, the unhappy love affair in Delhi, the affection she felt for Laddie. Annabella had shared much of her life story with them. One of the girls recalled that Annabella had exquisite taste, how she had picked out a quite beautiful serpentine ring from a peddler’s tray in Delhi, buried in a glut of junk sparkle.
When they entered the examining room, Mattie took but one drawn-breath look at the awful sight before she turned quickly away and said, “It’s Annabella. I’m sure. Look! She’s still wearing the ring—the one I was just telling you about.” Eastham looked at the victim’s hand. Though the gold was darkened by the fire, and though there was little left of the finger itself, the serpentine ring was intact. The Australian girls also recognized part of a sandal Annabella often wore, a shred of blouse, and a piece of brassiere that had escaped incineration. Then they grew faint and had to be helped out of the room where hysteria engulfed them.
It now seemed to Eastham and the Nepalese police that Annabella and Laddie were murder victims, and thus it stood for a day or two. Then a startling piece of news was developed by the investigators, one which would throw them off the track for several weeks. In a routine check of airport entrance and exit records, a card was discovered among the departure documents. It had been filled in by one Laddie DuParr of Canada, and it showed that he flew out of Katmandu headed for Bangkok on the night of December 23, the same day that Annabella’s body was discovered. Two and two makes four in every language, and Nepalese police reasoned that DuParr murdered his girl friend and grabbed the first flight out of town. Thus was a “Wanted for Questioning” cable dispatched immediately to Interpol in Paris and thence to the capitals of Asia.
When he digested the news, Al Eastham accepted it, but he was nonetheless confused. If Laddie killed Annabella and skipped the country, then who was the first body found the day before the California woman was killed?
On the day after Christmas, in the California home of Annabella’s parents, her mother, Jane, was cleaning house, a little concerned that her wandering daughter had not called home on the holiday. It was not like Annabella to miss an important occasion like Christmas. Her parents had spent the entire day watching and waiting for the phone to ring. Now, as Jane vacuumed the rug, the telephone interrupted. A Western Union operator identified herself and asked, gently, “Are you alone? Is there someone with you?” Jane said that she was indeed alone, but what did it matter to Western Union? “I’m so sorry,” said the operator, “I wish to God I didn’t have to read this, but it’s my job. It’s from Katmandu, Nepal. Quote: ‘A PERSON TENTATIVELY IDENTIFIED AS YOUR DAUGHTER, ANNABELLA TREMONT, HAS DIED IN KATMANDU.’” It was signed Alan Eastham, U.S. Consul.
And thus was the first message of death delivered, the first of many to devastate families across the world.
Teku is a burial place beside the Baghmati River in Katmandu, whose waters begin as melting snow in the great mountains. Three small temples, called stupas, surround a brick floor approximately ten feet square. They look like wedding cakes or beehives and are not as tall as a man. They are very holy. Like thousands of the dead that came before her, Annabella was brought to Teku wrapped in a coarse gray cotton shroud and placed on a bier of sandalwood and camphor and straw. After brief prayers from the one Protestant clergyman in the country, the straw was set ablaze and quickly turned the sticks into fire. For five hours the body burned; the ashes that remained were put into a bronze box that Al had bought in the bazaar. Had Annabella been Hindu, a bone would have been saved to throw into the Ganges, which dissolves all and helps speed reincarnation.
It occurred to Eastham, the only mourner, as he watched the service and prepared to ship the bronze box home, per Annabella’s parents’ instructions, that the service was simple, appropriate, and, in its way, exceptionally beautiful.
Not until May of the following year, 1976, would the police of Nepal amass enough information about the confounding murders to issue arrest warrants and formally charge Charles Sobhraj, Marie-Andrée Leclerc, and Ajay Chowdhury with double murder. The investigators should not be blamed for their delay and confusion. Charles had performed with Machiavellian intrigue.
On the fateful evening of December 23, 1975, he did indeed fly hurriedly out of Katmandu for Bangkok, using the passport of Laddie DuParr, who was at that moment in the autopsy room of a country hospital. Now, follow this closely: Charles spent only one night in Bangkok, then turned around and returned to Katmandu, this time again using the passport of Henricus Bintanja, the murdered Dutchman, also still unidentified. Why did he flee Katmandu successfully, Marie-Andrée beside him, only to return in twenty-four hours? “It was extremely bold and clever,” said one of the Nepalese police officials many months later. “We think he left Katmandu in order to throw suspicion on Laddie DuParr. Another reason may be that he went to Bangkok to sell the ruby and other gemstones that the two victims owned. They were apparently worth about $2,000 combined. Then again, he may have wanted to make a quick check of the situation at home in Bangkok to determine if he had been linked to any of the murders there. Or, one further possibility, he might have gone to Bangkok and then started worrying about the murders in Katmandu. Some little detail might have started nagging him. The criminal, they say, always returns to the scene of the crime.… Whatever, the man left—and then he came back. It really takes your breath away.”
On the night he spent in Bangkok, Charles hurried to Kanit House and was stunned when he found his apartment dark and silent. The three French youths whom he had entrusted to be caretakers were in Paris, no doubt kissing the soil of France. Racing through the flat and finding no one, he picked up the phone and called Belle downstairs.
When she heard the familiar, sensuous voice and learned that he was back, just two floors above her, Belle’s hand began to tremble and she feared that her voice would break and betray her. She tried to remain calm and natural sounding. How was Katmandu? Weather nice? Empty questions rained from her mouth. Did Marie-Andrée buy any nice souvenirs? Perhaps the two of them would like to drop by several days hence once the Christmas social madness was over.
“Where are they?” cut through Charles. “Where did Dominique and the others go?” His voice was cold suddenly, and dangerous.
Belle had a story all prepared in case the need arose. Now she wondered if her voice would remain steady. “They said they received a cable saying to meet you in Hong Kong,” answered Belle. Oh God, let me sound routine, she prayed. “They left suddenly. A day or two ago.”
Charles did not seem convinced. “That can’t be,” he said. “They had no passports, no money.”
“Maybe their families sent them some, or maybe they did some business,” suggested Belle.
A low moan escaped from Charles. He was distraught. “But they needed me!” he cried. “They loved me! They were my family!” While Belle pondered the pathetic interpretation Charles was putting on this “betrayal” by his children, his voice abruptly turned ominous. “I will find them,” he
said. “I will find them and learn the truth.”
That night Belle lay terrified in her bed. It was 11 P.M. Raoul would not be home until after midnight. She propped a chair against the door. Her hands held the telephone, ready to dial Raoul or the police if anything happened. Then, out of the silence, footsteps approached her door. Soft ones. Like someone creeping on cat feet. Past her front door they moved, died away, then returned. Suddenly a knock at her door! Quietly at first, then urgently. Someone was pounding a fist, demanding entrance. She was too terrified to dial the telephone, fearful it would signal the person outside and confirm that she was within. Belle threw her knuckles into her mouth. Paralyzing moments. Not until the footsteps finally went away and the night returned to silence did she dare find a pillow and scream into it, praying that her terror was muffled.
In Katmandu, police methodically questioned the managements of the city’s best hotels, and of car rental agencies. A few interesting facts were emerging. One of the villagers who lived near the place where the two bodies were found told police he had seen a white car in the area and one number on the license plate was “5.” The Ghorka Travel Agency reported that a white Toyota was turned back in on December 23 by a slim woman with a French accent. The license number was 5001 and the records showed it had been rented by a tourist named “Henricus Bintanja,” who was staying at the Hotel Soaltee-Oberoi. In a routine search of the car, police found several items in the trunk: a pair of jeans, dark glasses, a cap, and a lens cover for a camera. That was enough to send officers hurrying to the hotel where Henricus Bintanja was supposedly in residence.
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