Charles Sobhraj the Serpent breaks silence after prison release, denies ‘Bikini Killer’ murders

The sadistic conman — dubbed The Serpent — has a history of drugging and killing victims and has been linked to the murders of up to 30 backpackers on the hippie trail across Asia in the 1970s.

His shocking crime spree inspired the 2021 BBC drama series The Serpent, which starred Tahar Rahim as Sobhraj and Jenna Coleman as his girlfriend and accomplice ‘Monique’, as reported in The Sun.

But the French killer, 79, is now a free man after being released in December 2022 from a prison in Nepal, where he served 19 years for the brutal 1975 murders of Canadian Laurent Carriere and American Connie Jo Bronzich, in Kathmandu.

He has even been seen sightseeing in London in a crude disguise.

Now a new Channel 4 documentary, The Real Serpent, puts his crimes under the spotlight with unprecedented access to the man himself, who took part in a series of searching interviews over the course of months since his release.

Sobhraj, who posed as a gem dealer before drugging travellers, stealing passports and money and killing them, is questioned by two former homicide detectives, Jackie Malton and Gary Copson.

They are also joined by one of the UK’s leading forensic psychologists, Professor Paul Britton, in a bid to ascertain the true story of his “life and crimes” and determine whether he is still a danger to society.

The three-parter, which we have seen in an exclusive sneak preview, is a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a callous killer, who revels in his notoriety while displaying an arrogance that sees him demanding to be interviewed only by “the best from each field”.

As slippery as his reptile namesake, Sobhraj denies all the murders and shockingly tries to claim the media has “brainwashed” people into believing he is a monster – despite confessing to ten murders in a 1979 book for which he was paid £15,000, the equivalent of £90,000 today.

While he admits drugging and stealing from victims – who he chillingly refers to as “clients” – he dismisses accusations he killed the backpackers as “a lot of imagination.”

“I did wrong to some people and those wrongs were immoral but I didn’t go to the length of killing anyone,” he says. “I didn’t kill a single person.”

“I’m fed up with all the allegations so I decided I’m going to put forward my facts and (the public) can decide.”

The only ‘emotion’ he shows is at the mention of Marie-Andree Leclerc – AKA Monique – who died of cancer in 1983, after the couple were jailed in India.

“It’s because she was with me that it was not detected,” he says, wiping tears away as he breaks for the first time.

“That is the thing I will regret all my life. I’m really sorry … because she was such a nice person.”

The documentary also features interviews with witnesses including Nadine Geris, a neighbour and friend of the couple during their time in Bangkok, who claims “Monique” was too frightened to leave Sobhraj, telling her “he will kill me”.

Retired Detective Chief Inspector Jackie interviewed Sobhraj several times over the six months the film was being made.

“He’s a very complicated man. He’s highly intelligent, he’s very plausible, he wants to control the narrative,” she says.

“If he doesn’t like the question he goes off on a tangent and I found him a little dismissive of those people who died, whether he’s done it or not.”

Body in the boot

Sobhraj had an unhappy childhood shuttling between his father’s home in Vietnam and his mother’s in Paris, where she lived with her army officer husband.

After taking to petty crime as a teenager he was estranged from his family and, in interviews with Professor Britton, he refuses to delve into his relationship with his mother, who he calls a “very selfish woman”.

He will only say he felt “rejected by the family I was in” and that he “cannot bring myself to forgive” his mother, who is still alive at 100.

Jailed at 19 for an armed robbery, he married at 23 and, three years later, he and his pregnant wife Chantal Compagnon fled France to evade arrest for a series of thefts.

After daughter Usha was born and sent to live with Chantal’s parents, the pair were arrested in Afghanistan for an unpaid hotel bill but Sobhraj escaped after drugging the guard’s tea and left his wife in prison.

He then returned to France, drugging his mother-in-law’s tea to prevent her raising the alarm, before fleeing to Iran with his infant daughter.

Dutch woman Georgina Nunez, then an 18-year-old backpacker, met Sobhraj in Goa in 1972 and began travelling with him but she says he became controlling.

“He was very intense,” she says. “I had a ring in my nose and he pulled it out and there was blood everywhere. His eyes had no emotion. They were bad eyes. He had a killer stare.”

She was also a witness to the first suspected murder.

After their car broke down in Pakistan, Sobhraj turned up with a taxi which was stolen from a local driver – who was later found dead in the boot.

Charles claims a man called Fez stole the car for him and only later told him he had put the driver “in the back.”

He told the filmmakers the driver “died of dehydration” adding: “I didn’t feel I was part of that because I didn’t put him there” but said he felt bad, “as my daughter was there.”

But Georgina disputes the “pathological liar”, saying driver Mohammed was a “nice man with a number of children,” and that Sobhraj told her: “I’m going to give him sleeping pills and put him at the side of the road.”

He stopped several times on the journey to inject his victim, she says, adding that when she insisted on checking the boot herself: “I saw Mohammed in a pool of blood and I could tell he was dead. I flipped out”.

She alleges Sobhraj told her: “You better not testify against me because I will kill you.”

Victims drugged and murdered

The French conman met Marie-Andree Leclerc in Thailand, in 1975, shortly before the murders of the five backpackers.

He admits posing as a gem dealer and befriending travellers before inviting him back to his apartment, Kanit House, in the centre of Bangkok where he would drug and rob them.

But on October 18, the body of 18-year-old American Teresa Knowlton was found floating in the Gulf of Thailand, wearing a floral bikini – a detail that later saw Sobhraj dubbed the ‘Bikini Killer’.

Her traveller’s cheques worth £1,250 – or £29,000 today – were cashed in by Leclerc two days after she disappeared.

In chilling audio, recorded by authors Richard Neville and Julie Clarke for their 1979 book, Sobhraj confesses to her murder, saying: “She said ‘did you give me something because I feel very funny?’ I said ‘I’m sorry Teresa but I have to do something bad to you.’”

Another tape reveals his confession for the murder of Turkish man Vitali Hakim, whose charred body was found a few weeks later, at the beach resort of Pattaya.

Sobhraj’s confession, which he has now retracted, said: “I took one of his clothes, I put it on his face, I poured gasoline on it. I started running to the car because it will be a big flame and then whoosh.”

He even laughs as he adds: “I hope this stuff won’t hang me one day.”

Listening to the tapes, Jackie says: “He takes huge delight in saying that. There’s no remorse. He’s showing off.”

Hakim’s girlfriend, Stephané Parry, who came looking for him after he disappeared, was also strangled and found floating in the Gulf.

But it was the disappearance of the Dutch couple Henk Bintanja, 29, and Cornelia Hemker, 25 – allegedly drugged, strangled and burned by Sobhraj and his accomplice Ajay Chowdhury – which sparked the investigation by diplomat Herman Knippenberg and his wife Angela which would lead to his arrest.

Neighbour Nadine, who befriended Sobhraj and Leclerc before working with the Knippenbergs on the investigation – which featured heavily in the hit BBC drama – says she saw the Dutch couple in Sobhraj’s apartment and heard them moaning and vomiting and Leclerc told her they were “sick.”

After they were found dead, strangled and burned, on December 16, 2016, Leclerc showed Nadine a hosepipe smelling of petrol and headlines about the murders, telling her Sobhraj and Chowdhury were “killing people” and had returned that night with shoes caked in mud.

Nadine claimed Leclerc was terrified of Sobhraj.

“I was shocked,” she says. “She told me, ‘I have no passport. I have no money. So I said, ‘You can go to the embassy and get a new passport’. She said ‘He would find me and he will kill me.’”

Burned bodies

In the same month, Sobhraj and Leclerc travelled to Nepal, using the Dutch couple’s passports, where he stabbed Laurent Carriere, 26, and Connie Jo Bronzich, 29, to death before setting light to their bodies.

Their charred remains were so unrecognisable that fellow traveller Kent Anschutz identified 6ft 6in Laurent purely from his height and Connie could only be identified by her jewellery.

Although he was arrested by Thai police in March 1976, he was later released and fled to India where two tourists he met – Alan Aaron Jacobs and Jean-Luc Solomon – died.

In a raid on Sobhraj’s apartment, the Knippenbergs found a diary written by Cornelia, a book on Buddhism with the name Teresa written inside, Stephane Parry’s passport, a rubber pipe smelling of petrol, a syringe and ten passports.

With an Interpol arrest warrant out on Sobhraj, he was finally arrested in Delhi, in July 1976, when he drugged an entire party of 60 French students at a banquet, after persuading them the drinking water was unsafe and handing them doctored antibiotic capsules.

“We bought capsules of antibiotics and in it, we put the drugs,” he boasts. “As I almost reached the end of the 60 students, the first one started to fall down. The scene was like something in a horror movie.

“The police came and I got arrested so they took me to a police station then they realised I was the second most wanted man in the world. The first one was Carlos the Jackal.”

Sobhraj and Leclerc were jailed for the culpable homicide “not amounting to murder” of Soloman and acquitted for the murder of Jacobs.

Leclerc was allowed to return home to Canada after being diagnosed with cancer in 1980 and died in 1983.

While Sobhraj expresses grief over her death, Jackie dismisses it as “crocodile tears”, revealing he sent a letter to his mistress after Leclerc left, saying “she is gone so you don’t have to worry about her anymore”.

Avoiding execution

Sentenced to 12 years, Sobhraj was set to be extradited to Thailand on murder charges – which carries a death sentence – on his release.

But in a cunning ploy, he escaped from India’s Tihar Jail and, on being recaptured, was given an additional sentence of ten years – taking him past Thailand’s 20 year statute of limitations.

Released in 1997, four months after the Thai warrant expired, he returned to France but, inexplicably, decided to travel to Nepal, six years later, where he was still a wanted man.

He was arrested in Kathmandu and, in 2004, was convicted of the murder of Connie Jo Bronzich, with the conviction for Laurent Carriere’s murder coming ten years later.

Released on health grounds, two days before Christmas in 2022, he now claims he has been exonerated on all counts of murder “in court”, despite never standing trial for the five connected Thai killings.

When told he is connected to 30 murders he proudly corrects it to “37”, while simultaneously claiming his links to the deaths are coincidental.

Without a hint of irony, he tells the documentary that the person who committed the heinous crimes is a “lunatic and psychopath” and he wants to see this man caught “because he has caused me so many problems”.

“Whoever has done it deserves to be executed,” he adds.