Chemical weapons and movie deals: the Parisian life of The Serpent killer Charles Sobhraj
What happens to a serial killer once they’ve been caught? A life sentence? Obscurity? Public condemnation? Not for Charles Sobhraj, better known as the Serpent, the title of a new BBC drama series about his crimes and eventual capture. After 20 years in a New Delhi jail, the man who had confessed to the murder of at least a dozen people spent the late Nineties living it up in Paris, as a media sensation, local celebrity and – strangest of all – a free man.
The Serpent, which stars Tahar Rahim as Sobhraj and Jenna Coleman as his accomplice girlfriend Marie-Andrée Leclerc, follows Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg’s tireless attempt to uncover and convict the man who preyed on the young, difficult-to-trace tourists who thronged Southeast Asia’s Hippie Trail in the 1970s. The meat of the drama takes place in that period in Bangkok, where Knippenberg, attached to the Dutch embassy, becomes determined to find the man responsible for a growing body count.
It is only at the very beginning and end of the series that we get a glimpse of Sobhraj’s often overlooked later life in Paris, via a dramatic recreation of an interview he gave to an American television crew in 1997. “Did you commit murder?” asks the interviewer, mildly. “The courts [they] have decided ‘no’” replies Sobhraj impassively. It is disconcerting to watch a well-known murderer calmly defend himself on television. But this interlude – from early 1997, when he was released from New Delhi, to late 2003, when he was arrested again in Nepal – is one of the strangest and most disturbing in Sobhraj’s strange and disturbing life.
So how did he end up out of prison, despite being known worldwide as a serial killer? The answer lies in police incompetence and international cooperation failure in a pre-internet era in which corruption was rife and communication patchy. By mid 1976, Knippenberg had amassed enough evidence to convict him, but a combination of incompetence and uninterest from the Thai police gave him plenty of time to flee the country. He was eventually arrested in New Delhi when he attempted to drug 22 French tourists, presumably in order to rob them. Some of the group managed to alert the authorities, and he was handed a 12-year prison sentence for the manslaughter of two.
An extradition order to Thailand to face murder charges – which at the time would most likely have meant the death sentence – would be considered by the Indian authorities only once he had served his time in India. Knowing this, Sobhraj managed to escape prison on the eve of his release, only to hand himself back into custody 22 days later, hoping to have his sentence extended and thereby remain safely in India until the Thai arrest warrant had lapsed. His efforts were successful: he was given another 10 years and by the time of his 1997 release, the Thai extradition order was moot. He walked free.
Sobhraj’s life in Paris sounds like a grimy existence disguised as a glamorous one. Much was made by the press at the time of a plan to make the story of his life into a Hollywood film. French film star and producer Yves Rénier made a serious attempt to get the project off the ground and gave multiple interviews about it. “His murders don’t interest me but I would like to lift the veil from his career, try to understand why an intelligent, sensitive man with real charisma should use all his qualities to serve evil” he told this newspaper. Director Oliver Stone and Robert de Niro were two other names linked to a possible film. Sobhraj went about talking loudly to anyone who would listen about how much money he expected to be paid for the rights: $10 million according to The Telegraph, $15 million said the LA Times.
But barely a mention of the film appears after 1997, despite the screenplay reportedly being in the hands of Sobhraj’s agents. Perhaps it proved as unreadable as his prison memoirs. According to Farrukh Dhondy, a British writer who Sobhraj claimed a distant family connection to, he appeared at his London office one day in 1997, asking for an introduction to a literary agent. In a piece for The Wire recalling the incident, Dhondy wrote that he set up a meeting with “one I thought wouldn’t baulk at representing a murderer’s memoirs” but a week later got a call telling him the manuscript was “unreadable, in dubious English and was a long boast, without a single hint of his having committed any crime.”
Money and the desperate desire for it seems to have motivated much of Sobhraj’s behaviour over the next six years. There are reports of him charging “fans” $5,000 to have lunch with him, while barely a journalist managed to get near him without demands for cash. The Observer's Andrew Anthony refused and was granted an interview anyway but this newspaper’s Susannah Herbert was told firmly by his agent “It’s 1997. No money, no meeting.”
When his cinematic and literary endeavours failed to bear fruit, Sobhraj turned to rather less salubrious money spinning schemes. Dhondy says that he asked him to lease a London shop for him, which would pose as an antique European furniture dealership, as a front for international arms sales. He claimed to be using an off-shore company operating out of San Marino to buy up abandoned weapons from former soviet republics for peanuts and sell them on to organisations like the Taliban. Dhondy refused.
Next, Dhondy says Sobhraj milked him for CIA contacts, in order to sell information on terrorism and arms dealers. Finally, he got a phone call from Sobhraj asking him to explain the nature and uses of red mercury because he had been approached by “some Arabs” hoping to buy it from him. Dhondy explained that it was rumoured to have uses as a nuclear weapons trigger. When the Iraq war broke out, Dhondy smelled a scoop – if the “Arabs” turned out to be Iraqis, Sobhraj might be sitting on evidence that Saddam really did have Weapons of Mass Destruction.
He called Peter Oborne, a writer for the Spectator, and arranged to have breakfast at his Islington home. Soon after he arrived, Boris Johnson, who was then the editor, turned up on his bicycle. But the future Prime Minister did not stay long. He “clearly remembers making a clear decision not to proceed” he told GQ in 2014. “It was a good enough story to bring Boris to my house so it must have been tasty,” recalled Oborne. “But it was too hot.”
Eventually, Sobhraj seems to have grown tired of his failing schemes. When he turned up in Nepal in 2013, one of the few countries in the world in which he could still be arrested, people around the world were bewildered. Why, after so long spent brazenly avoiding capture, did he effectively hand himself in?
“I think, in essence, his downfall is that he is the born gambler,” the real Herman Knippenberg told The Telegraph last year. “This is in line with Nietzsche, that the only thing in life is to live as dangerously as possible – the tightrope-walker, building your house on the slopes of Vesuvius. So you push your luck as far as you can because you are different.”
In the end, freedom proved too safe – and, perhaps, too impoverished – for the Serpent.
