NAILED BY A DUTCH DIPLOMAT

The Serpent celebrates the genius of Herman Knippenberg (played by Billy Howle, below), a junior diplomat at the Dutch Embassy in Bangkok who set off the catand-mouse chase for Sobhraj.

Herman, then 31, was looking into the disappearance of two Dutch students, whose bodies were found strangled and burned. ‘They hadn’t written home in six weeks, and a parent said they’d met a Frenchman dealing in gems who invited them to Bangkok. Then a fellow diplomat told me about a gem dealer in whose apartment lots of passports had been seen, including two Dutch ones.

‘The pathologist at the morgue told me there was soot in their lungs so they were set on fire when they were still alive,’ says Herman, now 76.

Many officials were corrupt at the time, so Herman and his team undertook months of investigations, even searching Sobhraj’s flat.

There they found poison, handcuffs, passports and syringes – all the evidence they needed. ‘When I looked atalltheboxesof evidence I had, I thought, “My god – this looks like the setting of a movie,”’ says Herman. ‘But I never thought there would be this incredible TV series 45 years later.’