"He knows everything," he said. But presumably that's what his victims thought as well. Dominique Renelleau, played by Fabien Frankel in the. It was an era of porous borders and lax security, when the only contact with back home were poste restante letters that might take weeks to arrive. Death Stalks the Hippy trail! read one headline. I dont want to say more about that its a private matter. The couple married when Sobhraj was released and embarked on an epic crime spree across Europe and Asia, before settling in Mumbai with a newborn child and a profitable trade in stolen cars. With BBC drama The Serpent now streaming on Netflix in the US, Nige Tassell reveals the story of the brazen career criminal who graduated from petty theft to cold-blooded murder. For the poor Nepali inmates, its a question of survival life or death. "I risked my life for the war on terror," he protested, a little improbably, claiming that the CIA abandoned him when he was arrested. Charles Sobhraj, pictured in 1997, the year he was released after 21 years in a New Delhi jail. His pattern is to befriend, then drug and rob, or drug and murder, or, while in jail, manipulate and betray. So his greatest ever prison escape was foiled long before it could take off. "But I was also working for the CIA," he added, as I'm still trying to put the pieces together. Sobhraj turns 70 in April, by which time he will already have served half his sentence, so in theory he will be free once more. Humanitarian work? There seems little doubt that had the same quality of evidence produced in the Kathmandu court been put to a judge and jury in Britain, the case would have been dismissed. He called a friend, an ageing French-Vietnamese character whom he treated as a manservant-cum-bodyguard. He told me he thought that they were killed because they rejected his criminal entreaties. She got about 40,000. After politely sidestepping his offer, I got on to the question I'd been waiting a long time to ask: whatever made him come back to Nepal? After that, she cut contact with Sobhraj. There are disturbing descriptions throughout this episode. Forever enterprising, the first thing Sobhraj had done after his arrest was sell the rights to his life story to a Bangkok businessman, who sold them on to Random House, who asked Richard to immediately get to Delhi. I declined the offer but asked him to tell me why hed come to Nepal. I had never been much interested in serial killers but I happened to read Richard Nevilles and Julie Clarkes extraordinary account of the killings, The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, just before Sobhrajs release was announced. When we flew out of Delhi I had never felt so relieved. We sat in a booth, the two men on either side of me. Whether or not he was working for the CIA, surely he must have realised that there was a risk of arrest, given that he was wanted for two murders in Nepal. For all the moral grandeur of those words, at 75 he has spent more than half his life in prison. Having successfully persuaded a killer to acknowledge his guilt on screen in a previous documentary they had made, they were interested in making a film about Sobhraj.

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