He was known for identifying whatever a person’s deepest desires and frustrations might be and offering a solution before, often, asking them over to his apartment as a guest. Sobhraj was fascinated by psychology, and used a psychological technique called “characterology” to profile would-be victims. When Sobhraj eventually went to live with his father, things did not go much better. At one point, his mother falsely told him his father had died. From a young age, Sobhraj stole candies and toys for his younger siblings, and twice he attempted to return to the country of his birth by stowing away on a ship. And when his mother returned to retrieve him, the boy realized he could no longer speak his native language. At boarding school he was subject to racist jokes from his white classmates. Sobhraj’s father, who was Indian, left the family when he was a toddler and his mother married a French Army lieutenant who eventually brought the family back to France, where he would adopt Sobhraj’s younger sister but not Sobhraj himself. As recounted in Julie Clarke and Richard Neville’s book On the Trail of the Serpent, Sobhraj’s mother, a Vietnamese shop-girl named Tran Loan Phung, gave birth as the Viet Minh fought off occupying forces from Japan the bombs shook the hospital. It succeeds some of the time, but eventually gives in to the usual impulses that inevitably make these programs a conflicting watch.Ĭharles Sobhraj was born in Saigon on April 6, 1944, during World War II. Unlike many of those projects, however, The Serpent seems reluctant in its own luridness-determined to honor Sobhraj’s victims as well as the aforementioned diplomat, Herman Knippenberg, in lieu of glorifying the man behind the violence. As the series premieres on its new streaming home, it will fit right in alongside other murder-centric offerings like Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes and Night Stalker, which focused on the Richard Ramirez murders. The Serpent, which debuts on Netflix Friday, is a scripted series based on true events, which toggles between Sobhraj’s most active years as a serial killer and the tireless investigation led by one Dutch diplomat that eventually put him away. Charles Sobhraj-who operated under a number of aliases including “Alain Gautier”-was a fraudster who, as seen in the BBC One series The Serpent, befriended travelers on the “pot trail” through Southeast Asia before drugging and murdering them and stealing their passports and valuables. with killers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, another predator had begun to terrorize travelers abroad. In the 1970s, as the “ golden age of serial murder” began to take hold in the U.S.
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