I didn’t join my friends for dinner with The Serpent. Days later, I identified their burnt bodies. How CAN this psychopath have been freed?
By man who escaped clutches of the serial killer whose story became a hit BBC drama
THERE was a time when Charles Sobhraj was happy to brag about the way he preyed on unwary young backpackers from Europe and the U.S. who followed the ‘hippy trail’ through southeast Asia during the 1970s.
Drugging, poisoning and even burning his victims, he once callously referred to the murders he carried out as ‘cleanings’.
He excused himself on the grounds that he ‘never killed good people’ and, during an early prison stint in India more than 40 years ago, he chillingly insisted: ‘If I have ever killed or have ordered killings, then it was purely for reasons of business, just a job, like a general in the army.’
Sobhraj’s extraordinary life of crime, readers will no doubt recall, was brought to the screen two years ago in The Serpent, a gripping eightpart series starring Tahar Rahim with Jenna Coleman as his femme fatale sidekick, which showed in mesmerising detail how the fraudster turned murderer picked off his victims.
But having been released from prison in Nepal and flown back to Paris just before Christmas, the 78-year-old French national now says he is planning to sue both Netflix and the BBC for the way he was portrayed in the co-production.
Incredibly, Sobhraj now insists that he is not a serial killer at all. Despite a terrifying catalogue of crimes — police estimate he was responsible for up to 20 deaths — the cold-blooded killer has only ever been convicted of the two murders for which he served 20 years in prison in Nepal.
Sobhraj’s declarations of innocence — not to mention his latest claim that there were no witnesses to his crimes — have come as something of a surprise to those who helped put him behind bars two decades ago.
The Mail has spoken exclusively to two people who met both the killer and his victims in Nepal in 1975 and who, after Sobhraj burnt them alive, were forced to undertake the gruesome task of identifying their bodies. ‘I think he’s a psychopath and I don’t think he has any conscience,’ says Kent Anschutz, who was back-packing through Nepal in his early 20s when his path crossed with that of Sobhraj.
ARETIRED lawyer from Austin, Texas, Anschutz says he is stunned that the murderer has been released and believes he should have remained behind bars for the rest of his life. ‘In my legal career, I’ve certainly met people who lacked empathy but not to this depth or degree. This was a different level,’ says Anschutz.
Now, for the first time, and with the help of 70-year-old Anschutz and a female backpacker who was travelling with him, the Mail has a first-hand account of perhaps the most disturbing and evil episode of all in Sobhraj’s murderous career.
By the time he arrived in Nepal in 1975, Charles Sobhraj was already a seasoned killer, known to have murdered at least 12 people.
He earned his ‘Serpent’ moniker for the way he repeatedly managed to slip out of the hands of police as he travelled across Asia using stolen identities. He was also known as the ‘Bikini Killer’ because some of his female victims were found in their swimwear. The bodies of others were discovered burned and dumped by the roadside.
Sobhraj groomed his often vulnerable victims by posing as a wealthy gem dealer and offering to help them out with cash or a place to stay before giving them laxatives to make them ill and then, under the pretence of giving them medicine, poisoning them. He used passports, travellers cheques and cash stolen from his victims to fund a glamorous lifestyle and to travel under different aliases.
By the time he arrived in Nepal, Sobhraj had left behind a trail of victims in Thailand and India. It was there, in the capital Kathmandu, that a ‘hippy’ bus which had set off from Victoria Station in London several months earlier, arrived in December 1975, a union flag hanging in the back window.
Connie Jo Bronzich, a backpacker from California who struggled with drug addiction, had joined the bus in Delhi after travelling overland from Athens.
She was with Laurent Carriere, a Canadian dropout from the University of Winnipeg, hoping to spend Christmas trekking to Everest base camp.
The pair checked into the Oriental Lodge — the same hostel as Kent Anschutz and two female companions, one of whom also spoke to the Mail this week. ‘We, of course, had no idea of what had been going on in other countries,’ says Anschutz, speaking of Sobhraj’s previous killings. ‘We met Connie Jo and Laurent. They were staying at the hostel that we three were at. I remember Laurent had a guitar with him and Connie Jo was telling the girl about the jewellery she had bought from this guy that we now know was Sobhraj.’
Connie Jo met Sobhraj and his Quebecoise girlfriend, Marie-Andrée (the character played by Jenna Coleman), at the nearby upmarket Oberoi hotel, where he drew her into his confidence, showing her his gem collection and telling her she could earn good money by helping him find customers.
Anschutz’s female companion, who was 20 at the time and has asked not to be named, recalls the moment she first met the killer.
‘One day we ran into Connie Jo outside the hostel. She was talking with this fellow she had just met — a jeweller who was French-Vietnamese. He was a flashy guy, well-dressed, definitely not doing the overland backpacking trail.
‘I initially thought he was charming, then overbearing. He obviously had a hold on people who were vulnerable like Connie. He was talking about garnet mines. It all seemed a bit too good to be true.’
The friends hung out together for several days. ‘We were all in our 20s and in this magical fairyland of Kathmandu and happy as can be.
We never thought anything bad could happen,’ adds Anschutz. One evening, Connie Jo asked Anschutz and his companion if they wanted to come with her to have dinner with Sobhraj. ‘We said no and that was probably the night she died,’ says the woman.
When Connie Jo and Laurent disappeared overnight, Anschutz says that he and his friends weren’t concerned because ‘backpackers come and go’.
But three days later, the badly burnt body of a man, his hands tied and his throat cut, was found by the roadside. And, a day later, a woman’s burned and mutilated body was found in a wheat field, close to the airport.
She was naked except for a vest and had been stabbed several times in the chest. Her ankles were bound together with rope.
‘One day we were hanging out in the hostel and the Nepalese police arrived and asked about Laurent and Connie Jo and said some bodies had been found,’ says Anschutz. He and his two female travelling companions were taken to the morgue. ‘It was just a bare concrete room. We were taken in and there were the burned remains lying on a slab,’ recalls Anschutz.
‘It was shocking, very upsetting. In retrospect, we think what happened to them was what happened to others. They were slipped some drug and then they had their throats cut. Laurent was a powerfully-built guy. He would have had to be immobilised to be killed.’
WHILE Anschutz told police he believed that man might be Laurent ‘ because he was a big guy’, the woman identified Connie by her jewellery.
They were taken to the police station where the woman was asked if she could identify Sobhraj. It was here she and Anschutz found themselves face to face with the killer. During an interview, Anschutz and his friends told the police about Connie Jo’s meeting with a gem dealer at the Oberoi.
A guest matching Sobhraj’s description was registered there under the name of one of his Dutch victims and a white Datsun rented under the same name had been spotted by a farmer near where Laurent’s body was found.
Sobhraj and his girlfriend were stopped while trying to drive out of Nepal in the same car and asked to come to the police station as a formality. ‘Sobhraj and his girlfriend were in another room and I was very upset because they saw us,’ says Anschutz.
‘We were scared to death. We didn’t know if Westerners were being targeted and if we would be next. They took our passports and we had to stay there for a week, locked down in our hostel. An idyllic, beautiful time had been turned into a horrific experience.’
After killing Connie Jo and Laurent, Sobhraj had taken a day trip back to Bangkok using Laurent’s passport and re-entered the country along with Marie-Andrée, using the passports of two other victims and posing as Dutch citizens.
‘ He was very smooth, quite confrontational with the police saying, “How dare you, I’m a Dutch citizen”. He had lots of chutzpah,’ remembers the woman.
‘He just walked into the room where we were sitting and looked at us and obviously thought he could bluff his way out of it.’
In fact, Sobhraj did just that. He fled Nepal with Marie-Andrée and it would be nearly 30 years before Nepalese police got the chance to arrest him again.
In May 1976, Interpol issued an international arrest warrant for four murders in Thailand, but in July that year Sobhraj was arrested in Delhi after drugging a group of French post-graduate students in a bid to rob them. He was arrested by Indian police and charged with an earlier murder in what was then Bombay and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Marie-Andrée was also found guilty of drugging the students, but the verdict was later overturned following her diagnosis of ovarian cancer. She returned to Canada and died in 1984 aged 38.
Sobhraj was later acquitted but remained in jail for other crimes. Knowing that when that sentence was finished he would be extradited to Thailand, and almost certainly executed for several murders there, he escaped from prison after drugging his guards.
He was rearrested in Goa and had ten years added to his sentence, ensuring that by the time he was freed, the Thai 20-year statute of limitations on his crimes there would have expired.
Sobhraj returned to Paris in 1997 where he charged vast sums for interviews and sold the rights to a film based on his life for more than $15 million.
He might have lived out the rest of his life in suburban comfort but in 2003 made the bizarre decision to return to Nepal, where he was still wanted for the murders of Connie Jo and Laurent.
Some say he yearned for attention and couldn’t resist one last game of ‘cat and mouse’ with the authorities. Sobhraj later insisted that he returned on a business visa as an assistant producer for a French production company. He was spotted by a journalist from the Himalayan Times and arrested by Nepalese police in a casino. Kent Anschutz vividly remembers the day in 2003 when he received a call from Interpol at his law offices in Texas. ‘I almost fell off my chair,’ he says. ‘They had a copy of the statement I made in 1975 and they wanted me to verify it.’ Sobhraj was found guilty of the murders of Connie Jo and Laurent and sentenced to life in prison which, in Nepal, counts as 20 years.
Sobhraj’s release last month came, supposedly, after months of ill health and cardiac problems.
FLOWN to Paris via Doha, he told an AFP news agency journalist who managed to get on the same Qatar Airways flight that it was ‘great’ to be free at last.
The journalist, Atish Patel, says Sobhraj told him he was ‘innocent’, that he didn’t like being called a serial killer and that, having watched a few episodes of The Serpent, he planned to sue the BBC and Netflix.
According to his French lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, Sobhraj says it is ‘garbage first of all and 70 per cent of it is totally false’.
He is now hiding out in Paris, as slippery as ever while plotting his next move in what has been a lifetime game of snakes and ladders. Despite nearing 80 and supposedly in poor health, his appetite for celebrity is as strong as ever; he is believed to be planning a book and further film projects.
Anschutz and the woman he travelled with in the 1970s have remained in touch, still bound together by the horror of what they saw at the morgue in Kathmandu and by the terror of coming face to face with Sobhraj. They have no doubt he is guilty.
Anschutz, who says he was partly inspired to become a lawyer by what happened in Nepal, says: ‘He claims to be innocent but that is the bravado of a narcissist. I believe he is a psychopath and has no conscience about what he did.
‘I’m sorry that the authorities decided to let him go on humanitarian grounds because he showed no humanity to all the young people he murdered.
‘I think he richly deserved to die in prison.’