If you watched The Serpent on Netflix and came away thinking Tahar Rahim’s smirking, shades-wearing conman couldn’t possibly be real, I have bad news. If anything, the show toned him down. Here’s the real Charles Sobhraj: who he was, what he did, how he kept getting out, and why he’s walking around free today.
Who he was
Hotchand Bhawnani Gurmukh Sobhraj was born in 1944 in Saigon to an Indian father and a Vietnamese mother, grew up stateless and shuffled between Vietnam and France, and was in and out of French prisons by his twenties. He was charming, multilingual, and completely without conscience, and by the early 1970s he’d worked out that the Hippie Trail, the overland route of young Western backpackers through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Nepal and Thailand, was full of trusting, cash-carrying people a long way from anyone who’d miss them quickly.
Bangkok, 1975–76
His base was Kanit House, an apartment block in Bangkok, where he lived with Marie-Andrée Leclerc, a Quebecois woman who’d fallen for him, and a young Indian accomplice, Ajay Chowdhury. The method was always the same: befriend travellers, drug them (he’d tell them it was medicine for the dysentery he’d secretly given them), steal their passports and money, and, when they became inconvenient, kill them.
At least a dozen people died. The ones that made him infamous were two young women found on beaches near Pattaya in bikinis, which is where the press nickname “the Bikini Killer” came from. A Dutch couple, Henk Bintanja and Cornelia Hemker, were strangled and burned. He used his victims’ passports to travel, which is also how he was eventually tracked.
The diplomat who wouldn’t stop
The Serpent’s real hero is Herman Knippenberg, a junior Dutch diplomat in Bangkok who started looking into the missing Dutch couple and refused to drop it when his superiors told him to. He and his wife Angela, with help from Sobhraj’s neighbour Nadine Gires, gathered enough evidence to get Thai police into Kanit House. Sobhraj was arrested, and then, because this is Sobhraj, he was released on bail and gone within days.
India, Tihar, and the escape
In 1976, Sobhraj drugged a tour group of French students in Delhi, badly enough that they realised what was happening and held him until police arrived. He was convicted in India (not of the Thai murders, which Thailand couldn’t get him for) and spent twenty years in Tihar jail, where he lived unusually well, by all accounts, charming guards and running the place like a hotel.
In 1986 he escaped, throwing a birthday party for the guards with drugged sweets. He was caught in Goa a few weeks later. A lot of people believe he wanted to be caught: a fresh conviction in India meant more years, and by the time he got out in 1997, the Thai arrest warrant had expired. He went to France a free man and sold interviews for serious money.
Nepal: the mistake that ended it
In 2003 he turned up in a casino in Kathmandu, which remains one of the most baffling decisions in true crime. Nepal still had open cases from 1975, the murders of American backpacker Connie Jo Bronzich and Canadian Laurent Carrière. A journalist recognised him. He was arrested, convicted in 2004, and sentenced to twenty years.
And then he walked out
In December 2022 Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered his release on age grounds (he was 78) and deported him to France. He gave interviews on arrival. He’s still alive, still giving interviews, and still denying everything.
What The Serpent gets right (and wrong)
- Right: Knippenberg’s obsession, Marie-Andrée’s slow collapse, the horrible charm. The show’s fragmented timeline is annoying but it mirrors how hard the case was to piece together.
- Wrong, or compressed: Several victims are composites. The timeline of the Thai investigation is tidied up. And Sobhraj’s own voice is almost absent; the real man talks constantly, and the lies are half the point.
If you want the fuller picture, Richard Neville and Julie Clarke’s book The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj is built on interviews with him and is deeply unsettling.
Have you watched The Serpent, and what do you make of a convicted killer being free and giving interviews? I’d love to hear where you land.
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