Poppy #2
“This is where fate dealt her a hand. She was out shopping in Quebec, entered a store, and the glass door slammed behind her and shattered. A million shards of glass showered down on Aline-Claire, slicing her arms and hands, and the backs of her legs. A big piece of glass cut through an ankle tendon. Doctors thought she’d never walk properly again.
But she was very determined. She worked diligently at rehab, and insurance from the accident brought her a small windfall.
She was thirty at the time. She still dreamed of traveling to India, and felt it was a sign—a last chance.
A last dance, so to speak, before settling back into the rest of her gray life.
When she was healed enough, she persuaded her ex-fiancé to go with her.
They’d remained friends. She needed a companion—she was not brave enough to go on her own.
In Kashmir, just after they landed, while the couple was trying to rent a boathouse, they encountered Vincent Kapoor.
He immediately saw the naivete, insecurity, vulnerability in Aline-Claire. ”
“He targeted her?”
“Instantly. He’d just fled from Greece after his prison van escape at Piraeus.
He’d made it to Kashmir but had zero funds—nothing but the clothes on his back.
He approached them, posing as a disheveled, ‘artsy’ Paris Match photographer on vacation, and he organized for Aline-Claire and her man to jointly rent a luxury houseboat with him, plus two flight attendants he’d already started to con on his flight over from France.
While on the houseboat he set to work ‘love bombing’ her, drawing her slowly and fully into his world.
He told her she was beautiful, and that she should see herself how others saw her. He took photos of her. He wooed her.”
“What about the ex-fiancé?”
“Well, they returned to Quebec together at the end of their vacation. But Vincent was a true master of the long con. He never gave up on things, and he had patience. He wrote her letters of love and adoration, daily, pleading with her to return so they could try a life together.”
“She eventually did.”
“He wore her down. He allowed her to believe in her dreams. He fanned them. He allowed her to believe she could be beautiful. That she could be someone else. He sucked her deep into a world of luxury travel, gorgeous clothes, petty theft, gem dealing, fraud, passport theft, identity fraud, and ultimately murders. He needed a malleable woman, you see—particularly a Western-looking woman—to help him build legitimacy and trust among his foreign backpacker targets. His victims were mostly young travelers who flocked in the seventies to India, Thailand, Kathmandu—part of the Southeast Asia ‘Hippie Trail.’”
“And what made him target them?”
“He was primarily after their passports—which he’d use for identity fraud—and the ‘hippies’ almost always came with wads of traveler’s checks, which he’d later cash—after he’d disposed of them—by using their doctored passports.
Both the cash and passports would facilitate various other cons he always had on the go.
Above anything, Vincent was a predatory opportunist. And they were easy victims. Plus he saw himself as smarter and superior to them.
He felt that if they so easily succumbed to his false charm and wiles, they somehow deserved their own downfall. ”
“So he didn’t kill for sexual gratification, or pleasure?”
“His murders were primarily transactional. Born of convenience. Cold. Calculating. He killed when useful and without remorse. If he did derive pleasure, it was from the sense of power it gave him over these drifting, drug-taking, ‘dirty,’ free-loving Westerners. Vincent had deeply rooted psychological complexes over his own mixed-race heritage, his impoverished background, the fact his father never wanted him, and the fact he never belonged anywhere. And while he loved his mother intensely, and was continually desperate for her affection and approval, he was also conflicted by the shame and disgust he also felt for her. She was from a peasant farming family and worked as a prostitute in Saigon to support herself, and she was the paid mistress of Vincent’s biological father at the time he was conceived.
“In a nutshell, Vincent Kapoor could be defined as a superficially charming, narcissistic psychopath. He constructed glamorous personas in order to mask his deep insecurities. And he used people whenever and however he could.”
“And Bangkok was his base?”
“In the mid-seventies, yes. But his crimes started well before that. His childhood spent in Asia, Africa, France—throughout the forties and fifties—was turbulent, and that’s when his early petty thefts began, and when he began to realize he had a rather special talent for manipulation.
In the late sixties he graduated to international thefts, major cross-continent car-dealing scams, and charm-based cons throughout Europe and the Middle East. He used multiple passports, seduced and co-opted many women, and cultivated his suave ‘cosmopolitan’ persona.
In the seventies—in Thailand—he began to ‘collect’ people—a motley crew of acolytes—and he built a criminal family of sorts—”
“Including Aline-Claire?”
He nods. “She became pivotal to his operation. This is when he called himself André Gagnon and started drugging and robbing travelers along the Hippie Trail. The murders that we know about began in and around Bangkok.”
“A poison, theft, then elimination pattern?”
“Correct. His first known victims were Dutch. A young couple who’d just arrived in Thailand.
Their bodies were found burned beyond immediate recognition, and were at first thought to belong to missing Australians.
It was around this time that he was dubbed ‘the Naga’—after a shapeshifting creature in Thai mythology.
One that hides its true nature, and that can take seductive human form. ”
“So what was his connection to France, and Africa?”