Hotchand Bhaonani Gurumukh Charles Sobhraj was born in Saigon on April 6, 1944, to an Indian father who did not acknowledge him and a Vietnamese mother. He was moved between Vietnam and France as a child, acquired French nationality through his stepfather, and was in and out of French prisons for burglary from his teens. He was fluent in several languages, physically slight, and extraordinarily persuasive, which is the whole method of the case.
By the mid-1970s he was working the overland hippie trail through Thailand, India and Nepal, where thousands of young Western travellers were moving with cash, passports and no fixed itinerary, and where a missing backpacker could be assumed to have simply moved on. He befriended them, often after arranging the problem he then solved, drugged them with laxatives and sedatives so they became dependent on his care, took their money and their passports, and killed them when they became a risk. The bodies of several were burned. Others were drowned or strangled. He is credited with at least twelve murders and has been linked to around twenty, most of them in 1975 and 1976, and he was called the Bikini Killer after two victims found in the surf at Pattaya. He became known as the Serpent, for the ease with which he escaped custody.
Those named in the record are Teresa Knowlton, Jennie Bollivar, Vitali Hakim, Henk Bintanja, twenty-nine, and his fiancee Cornelia Hemker, twenty-five, Charmayne Carrou, Laurent Ormond Carriere, twenty-six, Connie Bronzich, twenty-nine, Avoni Jacob, Ajay Chowdhury and Jean-Luc Solomon.
He was caught in July 1976 in Delhi after drugging a party of French postgraduate students at the Vikram Hotel, intending to rob them; he misjudged the dose, several collapsed in the lobby at once, and the survivors held him until police came. He was convicted in India of drugging and of the murder of Avoni Jacob, and served twenty-one years in Tihar jail, where he lived comfortably, gave paid interviews and bribed his way to privileges. In 1986 he threw a party for his guards, drugged them all, and walked out. He was recaptured in Goa weeks later, which is what he intended: the additional sentence ran out the Thai arrest warrant against him, which carried a death sentence, and by the time he was released in 1997 Thailand could no longer take him.
He went back to Paris, sold his story, and lived openly as a celebrity. In 2003 he travelled to Nepal, the one jurisdiction that still had an open case against him, and was recognised in a Kathmandu casino by a journalist. He was arrested, and in 2004 convicted of the 1975 murder of the American traveller Connie Jo Bronzich and sentenced to life. A second conviction followed in 2014 for her Canadian companion Laurent Carrière.
On December 23, 2022, Nepal's Supreme Court ordered his release on grounds of age and ill health, and he was deported to France within days. He was seventy-eight. He has never given a consistent account of how many people he killed, and has at different times admitted, denied and boasted.