Caught in the serpent’s tale
UK journalist and Listener columnist Andrew Anthony, left, gives his account of meeting notorious serial killer Charles Sobhraj, variously known as “the Bikini Killer” and “the Serpent”, for a face-to-face interview.
UK journalist and Listener columnist A A gives his account of meeting notorious serial killer Charles Sobhraj, variously known as “the Bikini Killer” and “the Serpent”, for a face-to-face interview.
Serial killers have existed throughout history but the term itself dates back only until the mid-1970s, which happens to be when the serial killer I know was operating. Charles Sobhraj is one of those characters whose story seems too far-fetched for real life, so it’s no surprise that it has been frequently fictionalised. The latest adaptation, The Serpent, is an eightpart Netflix/BBC production, starring French actor Tahar Rahim, due to be broadcast in 2020. It follows the extraordinary spate of murders that Sobhraj committed along the so-called “hippie trail” of South and East Asia in the 1970s. And it focuses on the role of New Zealand resident Herman Knippenberg, back then a junior Dutch diplomat in Bangkok, in exposing Sobhraj as a multiple killer.
In countries such as Thailand, Pakistan and Nepal, Sobhraj murdered at least 12 people, most of them young travellers. He stole not just their money but also, frequently, their identities – often leaving the country using the passport of one of his victims.
The Serpent focuses on the role of New Zealand resident Herman Knippenberg in exposing Sobhraj as a multiple killer.
In an era of limited communications and technology, especially in the developing world where Sobhraj operated, his tactics were so effective that he not only eluded capture but sometimes his victims were not even reported dead – because there were records of them travelling after their unidentified corpses were found.
Sobhraj was handsome, charming, multilingual and a homicidal psychopath. I first met him in 1997 in Paris. He’d just been released from jail in India, where he had served a 20-year sentence for kidnapping. In fact, his sentence in India had been considerably shorter, but he had escaped from Delhi’s infamous Tihar Jail – by knocking out the guards with spiked sweets – and intentionally got himself re-arrested to extend his sentence. It meant that by the time he was free, murder charges laid against him in Thailand had lapsed, because of the statute of limitations. He had been wanted in Thailand for five murders, for which he would have been executed had he not delayed his release.
Sobhraj had plenty of experience of drugging people. He would often hand travellers a soft drink and the next thing they knew they’d fall
ill. He and his girlfriend, a French-Canadian nurse, would then “look after” the unsuspecting backpackers at their apartment in Bangkok, holding them captive perhaps for weeks on end, before Sobhraj would kill them, sometimes in the most brutal fashion.
The Thai police at the time were hopeless, corrupt, inept and all too readily swayed by Sobhraj’s sangfroid. Had it not been for Knippenberg, who now lives in Wellington, Sobhraj might have evaded detection indefinitely. As it was, thanks to Knippenberg’s doggedness in investigating a couple of missing young Dutch travellers, Sobhraj had to flee Thailand. He ended up India, a familiar hunting ground for him, where he was caught by police while trying to drug a coachload of French rugby players.
He stood trial for that crime, and while in custody he gave an extended confession to the Australian counterculture writer Richard Neville, who, with his wife,
Julie Clarke, wrote a gripping account of Sobhraj’s epic crime spree and his eventual capture. I happened to read the book, The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, a couple of months before I read that Sobhraj had been released. Through a contact in Paris, I spoke to his lawyer, Jacques Vergès, known as the “Devil’s advocate” because he had defended the Nazi Klaus Barbie, Serbian politician Slobodan Milošević (for crimes against humanity) and terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Through him, I managed to arrange an interview with Sobhraj.
It’s not every day that a renowned serial killer is free to talk. He was staying at the Hôtel Lutetia on the Left Bank, which had been requisitioned by the Nazi secret service during World War II. Everyone wanted to interview him, and he was asking a lot of money for the privilege.
But he didn’t ask me for any payment, which was just as well because I had none to give.
I turned up at his hotel on a beautiful spring afternoon and stood outside his room, feeling just a little trepidatious. After I knocked, the door opened and there the killer stood. He was 53 at the time and still in good shape: short, lithe, with jet black hair and surprisingly unlined skin. The illegitimate son of an Indian tailor and his Vietnamese mistress, Sobhraj had been born and spent much of his childhood in war-torn Saigon before going to live in France with his mother. He’d barely spent any of his life in France, and most of that brief period was in and out of jail, but he was a French citizen, so France was obliged to take him when he was deported from India.
He welcomed me into his small room and suggested that, because of the warm weather, I must be thirsty.
“Here,” he said, handing me a bottle of Coke that had already been opened, “have a drink.”
I looked him in the eye. There was the smallest glint of a challenge. Was it a joke? Some kind of psychological test? I wasn’t sure, but I politely declined the offer.
He told me that he wasn’t prepared to speak in the hotel – he was concerned about unscrupulous members of the media tracking him down. So, he got his sidekick, a silent Vietnamese friend who looked like the loyal retainer out of a James Bond movie, to drive us to a mystery location. We drove all around Paris, and out beyond the Boulevard Périphérique, until I had no idea where we were.
This was in pre-mobile-phone days, so I had no means of contact with anyone. I was completely in his hands, which he seemed to enjoy.
He took me into an empty restaurant next to what seemed like an abandoned industrial estate. There were no other customers. We sat down at a semi-circular booth, Sobhraj on one side of me, his driver on the other.
“Now,” he said with a knowing smile. “What was it that you wanted to ask?”
Sobhraj suffered a horribly dislocated childhood. He was born in Saigon during the Japanese occupation, then lived through the French colonial war.
His father didn’t want to recognise him as his son at first, and then when he did, Sobhraj moved back and forth between his parents, both of them becoming ever more exasperated with his precocious delinquency. His mother married a French soldier and moved to France, eventually calling for Sobhraj to join her. But he was unhappy in France and twice stowed away on ships that were bound for Africa – only to be sent back when he got there.
As a teenager, he took to stealing, using a gun to hold up suburban housewives. That landed him in juvenile prison and then the adult version. In prison he was befriended by a volunteer visitor from a bourgeois background. On Sobhraj’s release, this Good Samaritan introduced him to a young upper-middle-class woman, Chantal Compagnon. Within weeks, he had proposed to her. But before they could marry, he was sent back to prison for car theft. Unperturbed, she waited for him and they married when he came out. They then sped off for a manic crime spree across Europe and Asia.
In Greece, he was captured and sentenced on various charges to 18 years in jail. He escaped by swapping identities with his younger brother, who was left to serve the term. Compagnon gave birth to a baby girl, whom she sent back to France to live with her parents. In Afghanistan, the pair were imprisoned for car theft and not paying a hotel bill. Ever the escape artist, Sobhraj drugged a guard and broke out, leaving his young wife behind bars. He then returned to France to kidnap his daughter from her grandparents. When Compagnon eventually got out, she reunited with her daughter and moved to the US.
Sobhraj’s lawyer, Jacques Vergès, was known as the “Devil’s advocate” because he had defended the Nazi Klaus Barbie, Slobodan Milošević and Carlos the Jackal.
Heartbroken, or so he claimed, Sobhraj went on to hold a flamenco dancer hostage in her New Delhi hotel room, so he could break into a gem store located beneath her floorboards. The escapade made him a famous outlaw in India. Not long afterwards, he met a French-Canadian named Marie-Andrée Leclerc, who fell utterly under his spell. She would later write from her own jail cell: “I swore to myself to try all means to make him love me, but little by little I became his slave.”
Eventually, he and Leclerc ended up in Bangkok, where he reinvented himself as a gem dealer. Although he had already killed a Pakistani taxi driver, and possibly others, it was in Thailand that he began a spate of frenzied murders. Among them were a couple of Dutch students, Henricus Bintanja and Cornelia Hemker. The pair
In Greece, Sobhraj was captured and sentenced to 18 years in jail. He escaped by swapping identities with his younger brother, who was left to serve the term.