Nearly half a century after he sowed fear along the 1970s “hippie trail”, French serial killer Charles Sobhraj, the “Serpent” of the hit TV drama series, still haunts the lives of those who crossed his path.
Now 77 and jailed in solitary confinement in Nepal since 2003, Sobhraj is suspected of involvement in at least a dozen murders around Asia in the 1970s.
His modus operandi was to charm and befriend his victims – many of them starry-eyed Western backpackers on a quest for spirituality – before drugging, robbing, and murdering them.
The TV series, made jointly by the BBC and Netflix, conjures the seedy, steamy Bangkok of the 1970s with sepia tones, flared trousers, and traffic-clogged streets.
French star Tahar Rahim plays Sobhraj, oozing mesmerizing, manipulative menace – in a frighteningly familiar way for one of those who knew him.
The neighbour
When Nadine Gires visited the set of the series in 2019, seeing Rahim in character as Sobhraj brought the past flooding back.
“I was terrified. I thought he had escaped from prison, that he was coming back to do evil,” she told AFP.
“Everything came back: anger, fear.”
Sobhraj – a Frenchman of Vietnamese and Indian parentage – arrived in Bangkok in October 1975 with his Canadian girlfriend and an Indian associate.
They moved into a flat in the same building as Gires, near Bangkok’s notorious Patpong red-light district.
What became the Serpent’s lair was demolished years ago, but the disused apartment block that stood in for it in the TV series has become a minor tourist attraction.
Gires, aged 22 at the time, was impressed by Sobhraj – not least when he told her he was a gemstone trader, a tactic he used to lure cash-strapped backpackers.
“He was cultured, courteous. As neighbours, it didn’t take long for us to get to know each other,” she said. But doubts soon arose.
“Many people were getting sick in his home. I jokingly said to Charles: ‘You’re putting a curse on them’.”
But Gires, now aged 67 and running a hotel by the beach in southern Thailand, says she had no idea what Sobhraj was really up to.
“We thought it was weird, but how could we imagine such a scheme?” she says.
But everything changed at Christmas 1975 when a young Frenchman staying with Sobhraj showed them a safe full of forged passports.
“He told us: ‘He poisons people’. He was terrified,” she explains.
“He was not only a swindler, a seducer, a robber of tourists, but an evil murderer. It had to stop.”
Together with Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg, she set about gathering evidence on the slippery Sobhraj, a conman with a hatful of different identities and adept at covering his tracks.
Gires searched Sobhraj’s apartment and went around backpacker haunts looking for clues about missing persons.
In one of the most dramatic, high-tension scenes of the TV show, Sobhraj bumps into her unexpectedly.
The moment in March 1976 that formed the basis for the scene is still seared into Gires’s memory.
“In a hotel lobby, someone tapped me on the shoulder,” says Gires, who traveled to London to help the show’s scriptwriters.
“It was him. It was the most terrifying moment of my life.”
Fearing for her life, she agreed to let him take her home, hoping to avoid arousing his suspicions.
“My heart was beating 100,000 times a minute but he didn’t notice anything,” she says.
Even now, barely a day goes by without Gires thinking about Sobhraj, and the fear lingers.
“I need to know he is held within four walls. The thought of him being free terrifies me. What could he do now that he knows I knew?” she says.
