In October 1975 the body of a young American woman was found in the surf at Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand, still wearing a bikini. She was Teresa Knowlton, a traveler who had been passing through Bangkok. Within months more young Westerners on the overland route through Asia were dead: drowned, strangled, beaten or burned. Many of them had last been seen in the company of a charming gem dealer who lived in a Bangkok apartment block and collected young travelers around him. He was Charles Sobhraj. The press would call him the Bikini Killer and later the Serpent, for the ease with which he slipped out of police hands. He was linked to more than twenty killings, and it would be nearly thirty years before a court anywhere made a murder conviction against him stick.
He was born Hotchand Bhaonani Gurumukh Charles Sobhraj in Saigon on April 6, 1944, to an Indian businessman who did not acknowledge him and a Vietnamese mother who later married a Frenchman. He was moved back and forth between Vietnam and France as a child, took French nationality through his stepfather, and from his teens was in and out of French prisons for theft; his first arrest, in Paris, came in 1963. Over the following years he picked up charges in France, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Thailand and Malaysia, and escaped from custody in several of them. He spoke several languages, was slight and well dressed, and was unusually persuasive.
By 1975 he was working the hippie trail, the overland route through Thailand, Nepal and India along which thousands of young Westerners traveled with cash, traveler's checks and passports and no fixed plans. A missing backpacker could easily be assumed to have moved on. Posing as a gem trader, Sobhraj befriended them, sometimes after creating the problem he then offered to solve, and drugged them with laxatives and sedatives so that they fell sick and came to depend on his care. He took their money and, above all, their passports, which he used for his own journeys. Those who became suspicious or inconvenient were killed. His companion Marie-Andrée Leclerc and an Indian associate, Ajay Chowdhury, were with him through much of it.
The dead named in the investigations include Teresa Knowlton; Vitali Hakim; Henk Bintanja, twenty-nine, and his fiancée, Cornelia Hemker, twenty-five, a Dutch couple; Charmayne Carrou; and, in Nepal, an American, Connie Jo Bronzich, twenty-nine, and a Canadian, Laurent Carrière, twenty-six. Ajay Chowdhury himself later disappeared. Nadine Gires, a neighbor in the Bangkok building, later described him as cultured and courteous, and said she came to fear him.
His end in Asia came in July 1976. In Bombay a French tourist, Jean-Luc Solomon, died of poisoning. Days later, on July 5, in the lobby of a New Delhi hotel, Sobhraj and his associates tried to drug a large party of French engineering students in order to rob them, and misjudged the dose. Students began collapsing together, the others realized what had happened and held him, and the police arrested him. An Indian court convicted him of the culpable homicide of Solomon, of poisoning the students, and of passport forgery and theft, and he was sentenced to about twelve years. In May 1982 an Indian court gave him a life sentence for the murder of an Israeli tourist, Alan Jacob, but he was acquitted on appeal the next year for lack of evidence.
He served twenty-one years in Tihar Jail in Delhi, where he lived comfortably on bribes and blackmail, with a television, decent food and a typewriter, and gave paid interviews. In 1986 he held a party for his guards, drugged them and walked out. He was recaptured in Goa within weeks. The escape added to his Indian sentence, and by the time he was released in 1997 the Thai warrant against him, which could have brought a death sentence, had lapsed. India deported him to France.
In Paris he lived openly, sold his story and gave interviews for money. Then, in 2003, he went to Nepal, where the cases of Bronzich and Carrière were still open, reportedly to set up a shawl export business under a false name. He was spotted playing baccarat in a Kathmandu casino by Joseph Nathan, a founder of the Himalayan Times, and arrested on September 19, 2003. In August 2004 the Kathmandu District Court convicted him of the murder of Connie Jo Bronzich and sentenced him to life, which in Nepal meant twenty years; the conviction was upheld on appeal. In 2014 a second court convicted him of the murder of Laurent Carrière. He insisted throughout that he was innocent and that he had never been to Nepal before 2003. In 2008, in prison, he married Nihita Biswas, a Nepali woman forty-four years younger.
After open-heart surgery in 2017, he petitioned for early release on grounds of age, health and good conduct. On December 21, 2022, Nepal's Supreme Court ordered him freed under a law allowing the compassionate discharge of bedridden prisoners who have served three-quarters of their sentence, and deported within fifteen days; he had served nineteen years of the twenty. He was released on December 23 and flew to Paris, barred from returning to Nepal for ten years. He was seventy-eight. On the plane out, by way of Doha, he told an AFP reporter that he felt great and had "to sue a lot of people. Including the state of Nepal." His French lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, met him at Charles de Gaulle Airport and said he would now rest. From a Paris hotel he later told a reporter that he had never killed anybody, that he had only taken passports and stolen money, and that he planned to sue Nepal and the makers of the television series The Serpent. In 2023 he published a memoir in French, Moi, le Serpent. In 2025 Netflix released Inspector Zende, a film built around Madhukar Zende, the Bombay police officer who recaptured him in Goa after the 1986 escape. He lives in France and faces no outstanding charge.