The bikini KILLER

She’s best known as the young Queen Victoria, who famously had nine children, and was most recently seen in The Cry as a mother whose world collapses when her baby son goes missing. But it’s safe to say the maternal instinct was sorely lacking in Jenna Coleman’s latest character.

In fact, playing Marie-andrée Leclerc has been one of her most terrifying and complex roles to date. Leclerc, an easily manipulated medical secretary from Quebec, Canada, fell head over heels in love with a mysterious Frenchman whose exotic looks and mesmerising personality lured her in and set her on a path to evil. That man was Charles Sobhraj – a serial killer and one of the world’s greatest conmen.

A psychopath, a thief and master of disguise, Sobhraj was the chief suspect in the unsolved murders of more than a dozen young Western tourists on the backpackers’ ‘hippie trail’ that stretched across India, Thailand, Nepal and the Middle East during the mid-70s. Having repeatedly slipped through the net as authorities worldwide went after him, by the time he was caught in 1976 he was Interpol’s most wanted man.

Now the astonishing story of how Sobhraj was brought to justice – and how Leclerc became his willing accomplice – is told in an eightpart BBC drama called The Serpent. From the writers of Ripper Street, the production company behind Victoria and the director of The Missing, the series has been seven years in the making and involved detailed research and interviews with the real people involved in the case.

Sobhraj financed his lifestyle by posing as either a gem salesman or drug dealer to impress tourists, who he then drugged, robbed and often murdered. It was in India in 1975 that Sobhraj met Leclerc, a naive backpacker who walked with a limp after a childhood injury, but who had a thirst for adventure.

She quickly became his accomplice, posing as a nurse or model, sometimes even his wife, and turning a blind eye to his crimes and philandering.

‘I was totally hooked by the writing from the beginning,’ says Jenna, 34. ‘It intoxicated me, and drew me into the dark, seductive world of Charles Sobhraj. I also read Richard Neville and Julie Clarke’s book On The Trail Of The Serpent, and Marie-andrée’s own diary, as well as all this amazing research material from the real-life photographs to the newspaper cuttings.

‘From the diary entries, I read how she met Charles and how the drugging of tourists began. She was a young girl who’d not really left Canada before, yet within a month of meeting this man she was on a

J EN NA COLEMAN TELL SHOW DISTURBING IT WAS PLAYING THE BESOTTED ACCOMPLICE OF A MACABRE MURDER ER ON THE 70 SHIP PIE TRAIL

journey of death and devastation with him. It’s amazing how this happened in such a short time and it shows you his potency, the power he could wield over people. I was totally engrossed.’

Sobhraj, played by Oscar-nominated

French actor Tahar Rahim, was known as The Serpent because of his skills at deception and evasion. He would drug his victims with a cocktail of laxatives

Left: Tahar and Jenna in the series. Above: the real Leclerc and Sobhraj and tranquillisers, then nurture them back to health to gain their trust. Once they were under his spell, he would rob them, steal their passports and kill them. Some were drowned, others strangled, stabbed or set alight.

The first victim was Teresa Knowlton from Seattle, who was found drowned in a tidal pool in the Gulf of Thailand wearing a floral bikini (when later bodies were found wearing similar swimwear, Sobhraj was also dubbed The Bikini Killer). The next victim was Vitali Hakim, whose burnt remains were found on the road to the resort town of Pattaya, where Sobhraj was staying. When he heard that Vitali’s girlfriend was coming to Pattaya to look into his death, Sobhraj feared he might be exposed so he murdered the two Dutch tourists who were staying with him and went on the run with Leclerc.

Leclerc claimed in her diaries that Sobhraj was exerting control over her by withholding her passport and her money. So how complicit does Jenna think she was? ‘She was controlled by him, but what was interesting playing her was where the line was between her willingness to stay and her desire to go. She wasn’t faint-hearted. She could be quite fiery and she did know what she wanted. So the question of whether Leclerc was a victim is a complex one. There are different ways of looking at her statements, so who knows what the truth really was. ‘My thinking about it was she needed to live in a delusional state, she needed to allow this to happen because she was so obsessive about

Charles and she needed to be with him. It’s the psychology of complete delusion. I don’t think she allowed reality into her consciousness at all. She pushed it away. That’s the only way she could exist with him. She’d created this whole new identity and it was a kind of addiction for her to not be the medical receptionist with a limp living a normal dull life.’

Sobhraj, who is now aged 76 and serving out a life sentence in Nepal, is a mystifying character. His childhood was marked by abuse and abandonment. At one point he headed a band of urchins on the streets of Saigon where he was born. His father was an Indian tailor but his Vietnamese mother married a French army lieutenant and they moved to Paris.

He received his first jail sentence for burglary in Paris in 1963, and after being paroled he split his time between Parisian high society and the criminal underworld, accumulating wealth through a series of burglaries, car thefts and scams, which led to years on the run using stolen passports. ‘He was a street kid, mistreated by his mum, abandoned by his dad,’ explains Tahar, 39. ‘He didn’t have any specific nationality. Nobody wanted him so he started as a little criminal and, you know, you meet the wrong people...’

Leclerc and Sobhraj were eventually arrested in Delhi in 1976 when a plan to drug a group of French students went wrong. Leclerc was jailed for life after being convicted of conspiracy to murder. In 1983 she was returned to Quebec for treatment for ovarian cancer and she died the next year, aged 38. Sobhraj served 20 years in an Indian prison for drugging, robbing and killing tourists. When he was released in 1997, he was deported to France.

Bizarrely, he lived a celebrity life there, charging fees for interviews and even trying, unsuccessfully, to complete a film deal. But when he was drawn back to Nepal, it sparked dozens of police raids which ended with his arrest for other untried murders and he was sentenced to life once more in August 2004.

‘To portray him was not easy,’ says Tahar. ‘He is so far away from me, from Jenna, from everybody. It was hard for me to find the soul of this man and I realised that he actually might be soulless. For the first two weeks I found it impossible to play someone with no empathy so I needed to understand Charles Sobhraj from the outside and the only way I could do that was to think of him as an animal – a serpent.’