![]() ![]() They took him in for questioning but the killer was prepared, according to “The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj,” a biography by journalists Richard Neville and Julie Clarke based on hours of interviews with him. Knippenberg told the police and, that evening, officers stormed Sobhraj’s apartment. On the morning of March 11, 1976, Gires had some bad news for Knippenberg: Sobhraj and his girlfriend Marie-Andrée Leclerc, a Québécoise also known as Monique, were planning to go to Europe for some time. Knippenberg alerted the Thai authorities, but also continued his own inquiries. She also said she remembered seeing the Dutch couple come to his home. ![]() Upon meeting Knippenberg, Gires revealed how other people working for Sobhraj had fled after finding a collection of passports belonging to missing people, fearing he’d killed them. After some persuading, Siemons gave him a name – Nadine Gires, a Frenchwoman who lived in the same Bangkok apartment building as Sobhraj, and who introduced clients to him. The day after his trip to the morgue, Knippenberg called Siemons and demanded to know where he’d heard about the gem dealer. In a time of laxer border security, he often adopted his victims’ identities and used their stolen passports to zigzag across Asia. ![]() On the run and posing as a gem dealer in Bangkok, the French thief, conman and killer had for years been befriending travelers – then drugging and robbing them. The story seemed too outlandish.īut as both men would later discover, Alain Gautier was one of multiple aliases used by Sobhraj. From Thailand PoliceĪt the time, Knippenberg thought his friend had lost it. Their bodies were found burned that year. Two of the passports were said to be Dutch, but Siemons refused to reveal the source of his information.Ĭornelia Hemker (left) and Henricus Bintanja went missing in Thailand in 1975. The dentist was unequivocal: it was a match.Īs Knippenberg thought of the mutilated bodies, he remembered a strange story his friend Paul Siemons, an administrative attache at the Belgian embassy, had told him a few weeks earlier – a French gem dealer named Alain Gautier had apparently amassed a large number of passports in his Bangkok apartment belonging to missing people who had allegedly been murdered. So he mobilized a Dutch dentist based in Bangkok to assess the burnt bodies at the police morgue, using the missing couple’s dental records. Now, Knippenberg wondered if they were the Dutch couple mentioned in the letter. They had initially been reported as a pair of missing Australian backpackers – until that couple turned up alive. Weeks before, two charred bodies had been found on the roadside near Ayutthaya, about 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) north of Bangkok. “I thought, ‘That is quite bizarre,’” said Knippenberg, who was 31 at the time and a junior diplomat at the Dutch embassy. But many of his alleged murders remain unresolved – and for Knippenberg, the case still doesn’t feel completely closed. Sobhraj is now serving a life sentence in a Nepalese jail for killing two tourists in 1975. “The Serpent,” a new BBC/Netflix drama series coming to the streaming service in April, tells how for years, Sobhraj evaded the law across Asia as he allegedly drugged, robbed and murdered backpackers along the so-called “hippie trail” – and how for years, Knippenberg worked with authorities to capture him. Knippenberg would later learn the Dutch couple in the morgue were among at least a dozen people Charles Sobhraj admitted to killing – though he later recanted. “I had the feeling that I was stepping outside of myself – that I’m on the side, watching the scene,” he recalled in an interview earlier this year. He says it was the most shocking thing he saw in 30 years of foreign service, and sparked a decades-long personal endeavor to bring the alleged killer to justice. The scene at the police mortuary in Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, on March 3, 1976, remains clear in the mind of former Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg. Both were still alive when they were set alight. The woman’s brain had been bashed in with something heavy and the man strangled, a pathologist said. Light from a window at the back of the room illuminated who she was talking about: two badly burnt bodies that had been opened for an autopsy and stitched back together with surgical cable. “It’s them,” said a dentist, who had just inspected the mouth of a stiff body. ![]() The smell inside the morgue was overpowering, as disinfectant masked the odor of decaying corpses. ![]()
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