The Serpent - the ORIGINAL, REAL story of serial killer Charles Sobhraj told by Herman Knippenberg.

In 2003, retired Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg - the man behind the 2020 BBC and Netflix drama series also called The Serpent - gave a full account of how he turned detective to track down his nemesis Charles Sobhraj - aka the ’bikini killer’. This is his story. Sobhraj preyed on backpackers traveling the Silk Road of South East Asia in the 1970s. The actual Thai and Nepalese police officers, who investigated the killings are also interviewed for this 2003 National Geographic Channel documentary, The Serpent, along with the Indian policeman who caught Sobhraj and Bangkok Post reporter Alan Dawson who covered every twist and turn of the story at the time. Filmed on the tourist trails of Thailand, Nepal and the US, with dramatic reconstruction/re-enactment, The Serpent includes an interview with K.C. Ganesh, the Nepalese policeman who, as a boy, came across the bodies of Sobhraj’s victims. Names of the victims have been changed out of respect for the families of the victims.