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Charles Sobhraj: 'The Serpent' of the Hippie Trail

Jun 5
4 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

Charles Sobhraj built a career out of being underestimated. Charming, multilingual and impeccably dressed, he moved through 1970s Asia as a gem dealer, a guide, a friend to lost travellers — and, investigators believe, as a serial killer who left a trail of more than twenty young backpackers dead from Thailand to Nepal. He was convicted of only a fraction of those crimes, slipped through the fingers of police in several countries, and turned each escape into part of his legend. The nickname that stuck, 'The Serpent', captured exactly what made him so dangerous: he was almost impossible to hold. Because he is alive and has only ever been convicted of two murders, this account stays close to what courts and documented reporting establish.

More than any single crime, it is that slipperiness — the disguises, the stolen identities, the sheer nerve — that has kept the world fascinated by him for half a century.

A life between worlds

Sobhraj was born in 1944 in Saigon, then part of French Indochina, to a Vietnamese mother and an Indian father, and his early life was shaped by a sense of never quite belonging anywhere. His mother later married a French officer, and the family moved between Vietnam and France, but Sobhraj remained caught between cultures and nationalities. He drifted into petty crime as a young man — theft, fraud, smuggling — and discovered that he possessed two extraordinary gifts: a talent for languages and an almost hypnotic ability to charm and manipulate the people around him.

Those talents would become the engine of everything that followed. Where other criminals used force, Sobhraj used friendship, and it proved far more effective and far harder to trace.

The hippie trail

The 1970s sent thousands of young Westerners overland across Asia, following the so-called hippie trail from Europe through Iran, Afghanistan, India, Thailand and beyond in search of cheap living and enlightenment. Sobhraj moved among them like a predator in a herd, posing as a gem dealer or a fixer who could solve their problems. He would befriend travellers, win their trust, and then quietly take control — sometimes by drugging them under the guise of treating an illness, leaving them dependent and disoriented.

Once he had them, he robbed them, stole their passports and money, and used those identities to cross borders and assume new disguises. The travellers' very openness, their willingness to trust a friendly stranger far from home, was the vulnerability he exploited again and again.

The murders

Across Thailand, Nepal and India in the mid-1970s, a series of young foreign travellers turned up dead — some drugged, several burned, their valuables and documents gone. Investigators came to suspect that the genial gem dealer was behind a string of these killings, with the toll commonly estimated at more than twenty. Building a case, though, was a nightmare: the crimes crossed multiple jurisdictions with little cooperation between them, witnesses were scattered across continents, and Sobhraj was a master at vanishing before any net could close.

Brought down by a diplomat

One of the people who refused to let it go was Herman Knippenberg, a junior Dutch diplomat in Bangkok who began quietly assembling reports of missing and murdered travellers into a single, damning dossier. The 'Knippenberg file' connected crimes that the authorities had treated as unrelated, and survivors who had escaped Sobhraj's orbit added their accounts. Slowly, the picture of a serial predator operating in plain sight came into focus, even as Sobhraj kept moving.

Arrests and a famous escape

Sobhraj was arrested in India in 1976 after drugging a group of French tourists, and was imprisoned there for years. Then, in 1986, he pulled off the stunt that cemented his myth: he threw a party for his guards, drugged them with sweets, and walked out of prison. The escape may well have been deliberate — by getting himself re-arrested in India, he ran out the clock on a Thai warrant that could have carried a death sentence. He was finally released from Indian custody in 1997 and returned to France, apparently having outlasted the cases against him.

Caught in Nepal

Then, in an act of breathtaking overconfidence, Sobhraj travelled to Nepal in 2003 — one of the few places where he still faced open murder cases — and was recognised by a journalist in a Kathmandu casino. He was arrested for the 1975 murders of two backpackers and, in 2004, sentenced to life imprisonment, later receiving a further life term. He fought the convictions for years, insisting the charges were baseless and that he was no serial killer at all.

Release and legacy

In December 2022, Nepal's Supreme Court ordered Sobhraj released on grounds of age and ill health, after roughly nineteen years inside, and he was promptly deported to France. His story has since been retold in books, documentaries and a major television drama, all drawn to the same magnetic, repellent figure. But beneath the glamour of the master manipulator lies a far bleaker truth: a string of young travellers, full of hope and trust, who set out to see the world and never came home — and whose cases, for the most part, were never fully answered in any courtroom.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many people did Charles Sobhraj kill?

He was convicted of only two murders but is suspected of killing more than 20 young Western travellers across Asia in the 1970s; he denies being a serial killer.