Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERY: Charles Sobhraj: The Bikini Killer

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

In the mid-1970s, young Western travelers on the overland hippie trail through Southeast Asia began turning up drugged, robbed and murdered, several left on beaches in Thailand. The man investigators would eventually connect to the killings was Charles Sobhraj, a French citizen born in Saigon who moved between Bangkok, Kathmandu and Delhi posing as a gem dealer, befriending backpackers and collecting their passports. Thai press called him the Bikini Killer. He spent two decades in Indian prisons, escaped once, and was finally convicted in Nepal of murdering two travelers in 1975, Connie Jo Bronzich and Laurent Carrière. In December 2022, Nepal's Supreme Court ordered him released on health grounds and deported to France, where he lives today. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy examines the charm that made Sobhraj so effective on the road, the travelers who trusted him and never made it home, and the open question of how many people a man convicted of two murders and suspected of more than twenty really killed.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hey everyone, Carter here. I am hosting a new show called What the Fact with my co-host, Connor Tomlinson, who you might know and love from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum. Every week we take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Connor brings the tangents and an infectious energy that will make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on Earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube. at What the Fact Pod. This is Crime House. In the early morning hours of October 18th, 1975, a farmer was walking on the shore along the Gulf of Thailand

just outside a beach town called Pataya. The town was a hotspot for young travelers looking to enjoy the crystal clear water, cheap hotels, and nightlife. Out in the shallows, the farmer noticed something drifting on the surface. At first, it seemed like a bundle of clothes, or a piece of fishing net, but when the man got closer, he realized what he was actually looking at. It was a young woman floating face up a few yards from shore.

She was wearing a flowered bikini. The Thai police took one look and decided she must have been another tourist who had too much to drink and ended up drowning while going for a swim. The file was closed about as fast that it was open. Her body went into a morgue drawer with no name on it, and by that afternoon the beach was full of sunbaters again. But that wasn't the end of the story. Over the next two months, four more young travelers were found dead in the same region. One was another young woman pulled out of the water near that same beach town, strangled hard enough to break her neck.

And yet, nobody sounded the alarm. There was no manhunt, no warning to travel. No one in Thailand treating those five deaths as pieces of the same puzzle. Officially, nothing was happening at all. Meanwhile, the victim's families were on the other side of the world, still waiting on letters, still picturing their kids, having the trip of a lifetime. They had no idea that their children had all crossed paths with the same man, a sharp-dressed stranger who called himself a French gem dealer.

and at that very moment, he was still out there hunting for his next victim. This is the case of the bikini killer. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon. And we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is murder, true crime stories.

a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come on every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please, rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time,

plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering cases with questions that I can't get out of my head, the ones where the evidence points in multiple directions, and every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video.

Just search for Crimehouse Studios, and be sure to like and subscribe. Before we start, keep in mind that this story has a lot of, well, tricky pronunciation. So I'm going to do my best. I always want to get them as right as I can. But sometimes I make mistakes. Feel free to reach out and let me know when I get them wrong. Always trying to learn and do better. Now, this case comes from the hippie trail,

the route that thousands of young Western travelers followed across Asia in the 1970s looking for adventure. In the fall of 1975, that trail got a. dark new reputation when some of those travelers started turning up dead. The man behind it all is believed to have murdered at least 20 people across Asia, but it wasn't police work that unmasked him. He was exposed by a backpacker, he was slowly poisoning, a 21-year-old neighbor, and a junior diplomat who wasn't supposed to be investigating anything at all.

But those three uncovered is the only reason he was ever convicted of murder. but it took almost 30 years for that to happen, and he didn't stay locked up for long. The man known as the bikini killer is free today, while most of the families who lost someone never got a verdict at all. So how did he pull it off? All that and more coming up.

In the mid-1970s, there was a route stretching from Europe all the way to Southeast Asia. The young travelers called the Hippie Trail. It ran east by road and rail through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Nepal, and for a lot of people, it ended in Bangkok, Thailand. The whole point was to travel slow and cheap, you'd ride buses, sleep in dollar-a-night guest houses, and stretch a few hundred bucks across an entire year. Thousands of young people from the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Europe are out there at any given moment. And most were in their early 20s, chasing music, temples, drugs, and some version of a more meaningful life. It was a beautiful way to see the world.

It was also in ways nobody wanted to think about a dangerous one. There were no cell phones, and international calls cost a fortune. The only reliable way to reach your family was a letter that took weeks to arrive. Travelers drifted from country to country on no particular schedule. So if one of them went quiet, nobody panicked. A backpacker could vanish for a month before anyone even thought to worry. In the fall of 1975, one of the travelers on that trail was a 21-year-old woman from Seattle named Teresa Knowlton. Teresa had done a lot of partying and struggled with substance abuse issues.

Now, she was searching for something steadier, and she seemed to find what she was looking for in Buddhism. She was going to travel to to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, and studied Tibetan Buddhism at a place called Khopan monastery, high in the Himalayan foothills. Her plan was to live and work there for a while, giving lessons to the local children. For a young woman who'd fought her way through some dark years, it was more than a trip. It was a whole new chapter of her life, and she'd crossed an ocean to start it. On her way there, she stopped in Bangkok. The city was the great crossroads of the trail, and travelers pass tips to each other constantly, where to

eat, where to sleep, and which people were worth knowing. In October 1975, one of the names going around the backpacker scene belonged to a wealthy French gem dealer. He was charming, generous, and impossibly worldly. He spoke several languages, dressed beautifully, and seemed to know how to get anything in Bangkok. He lived. in a modern apartment complex called Connett House in Apartment 504 with his girlfriend, a soft-spoken French-Canadian woman, who went by Monique.

They also had a younger Indian friend named Age, who was usually there. The three of them had an open-door policy for young travelers on the hippie trail. Plus, if you stopped by, you could take a look at the cases of sapphires and rubies the gem dealer had around. He'd show the stones

to anyone who was interested and would trade with tourists looking to bring something precious home. Department 504 was basically a non-stop party. Travelers came through for drinks and dinner, swapped stories from the road and played with the tiny pet monkey the couple kept in the apartment.

For kids living out of backpacks and evening in a real home hosted by a rich, glamorous couple and felt like winning the lottery. Sometime in mid-October, Teresa got an invitation. She was staying at the Malaysia Hotel, a backpacker hub just a few blocks from Knit House, when Aege befriended her and brought her to one of those parties. She fit right in, she told travel stories, laughed with the other guests, and hit it off with a host

who introduced himself as Alon Goethe. Before the night was over, the gem dealer had invited her to do that. join him for a weekend at the beach in the town of Patier about 90 miles away. For a young woman, weeks away from entering a monastery, must have sounded like one last taste of freedom. She said yes. A few days later, the gem dealer picked Teresa up from her hotel. He said there had been a small change of plans. Monique couldn't make it, so Aege would be coming instead. Then the three of them drove south to the coast. together. That was the last time anyone can say for certain what happened to Teresa

Knowlton. The young woman that farmer found floating off Patti on the morning of October 18th, 1975, the one in the flowered bikini was her. Thai police wrote it down as a drowning and moved on. No one connected her to the American girl who checked out of the Malaysia Hotel and never checked in anywhere else. Somewhere in Seattle, Teresa's family assumed she'd made it to the monastery. Her body went unidentified and unclaimed for months. Back in Bangkok, the parties at Knit House rolled on like nothing had happened. Travelers kept coming through apartment 504, and most of them left with nothing worse than a hangover. With another wealthy couple, the gem dealer was a fellow businessman with a gold watch. With a group of American

Hi, he was the guy who knew where to find the best hash in the city. Whoever you were, the gem dealer was somehow exactly the friend you'd been hoping to make. Every once in a while, someone's passport would go missing from the apartment, but on the hippie trail, that was easy to write off. Backpackers lost things all the time. There had been uglier incidents too, though none of the partygoers knew it. A few months earlier in the summer of 1975, An Australian couple named Russell and Vera Laptorn had befriended a wealthy French couple at a Thai beach resort. Days into the friendship, the Australians came down with food poisoning so severe, they ended up in a hospital getting their stomachs pumped.

When they got back to their room, all their valuables were gone. And so were their glamorous new friends. The Laptorns filed reports with the local police and the Australian embers. embassy, absolutely certain they had been drugged. Nothing ever came of it. But the couple who robbed them had used the names Jean and Monique. In late October, a new guest appeared at Apartment 504. He was a sharp-dressed young Turkish man named Vitali Hakim, and by some accounts he wasn't an ordinary tourist. He was rumored to be a courier moving drugs and money along the trail, and he may have come to Bangkok to do business with the gem dealer himself.

Whatever brought him to Knit House, one thing is clear, Vatali walked into that apartment, and no one on the outside ever saw him alive again. A short time later, on the road leading into Patsya, someone found the body of a young man, he had been beaten and burned beyond recognition, and the case went nowhere. A forensic detail from his autopsy would surface much later,

and it's one of the most chilling facts in this entire story. When his body was examined, there was evidence that he had still been alive when the fire started. At the time, though, nobody knew his name, so nobody could miss him. Well, almost nobody. Vitale had a girlfriend back in France, a young woman named Stephanie Perry,

who was also called Charmaine Carew in some sources. And Vitaly went quiet, But Stephanie didn't wait for answers. She flew to Thailand to look for him herself, and by December 1975, she had traced his last known movements in Bangkok into the crowd around Knit House. She never got answers. How long after she arrived? Stephanie's body was found in the water near Pagia. She had been strangled so violently, her neck was broken. When the Bangkok Post reported the discovery, the headline read, European girl murdered.

The article pointed out something odd. Back in October, another young woman had turned up dead in those same waters in a flowered bikini, two dead women in the sea near the same beach town, a burned man on the road nearby. Nobody could name a single one of them, and nobody in Thai law enforcement was treating them as connected crime. But the murders were only part of the story, because while bodies were surfacing along the coast, there was a young man living inside apartment 504 who couldn't leave if he wanted to. His name was Dominique Renalow, a French backpacker in his early 20s. He met the friendly gym dealer months earlier and come down with a brutal stomach illness almost immediately after.

Ever since, his generous host had been giving him. medicine and a place to recover. The strange thing was, no matter how much medicine Dominique took, he never seemed to get better. We all experience petty grievances in life. A bachelorette party that resulted in a runaway bridesmaid. A neighbor who has trained their dog to poo in your yard. An ex-friend who writes a semi-autobiographical book about your friend group and then kills off your character.

Maybe these aren't completely relatable, but they are all petty crimes we've investigated on our podcast. I'm Griff. biracial farm-raised queer actor and retired model who's living and looking for love in Los Angeles. And I'm Kira. I'm an S&L writer, a movie writer, a comedian, and I'm the only person pettier than Griff. Petty Crimes is a true crime comedy podcast that exclusively investigates non-crimes, meaning real life, low stakes, petty drama that's submitted each week by our listeners and ruled on by us. Some weeks, we're joined by comedian friends like Ego Wodom, Gianmarco Saracie, Chloe Feynman, Sarah Sherman, Jeremy Cole Hayne, Carl Tart, Lacey Mosley. But most of the

time, you're just stuck with us. If you're the type that tells your boyfriend to shh, so you can ease drop on the tea unfolding at the table next to you, you found your people. Subscribe to petty crimes wherever you get your podcasts. By December, 1975, three travelers were dead and nobody had connected them to each other or to the apartment they had all walked through. And inside that apartment, Dominique Renalow was still fighting the illness that had suddenly hit him months earlier. The gem dealer, Monique, and Agey were looking after him. Dominique was weak, dizzy, and constantly sick to his stomach. He figured he'd picked up dysentery somewhere on the road and was grateful to the couple who kept nursing him.

They held on to his passport for safekeeping, gave him his daily doses, and told him he'd be back on his feet soon. Then in the second week of December, two new guests moved in and everything started to unravel. They were a Dutch couple, 29-year-old Hank Bintanya, and his fiancé, 25-year-old Cornelia Hempker, who everyone called Kaki. They'd been on the road for months and planned to get married when they got home to Amsterdam. They were also careful. Twice a week, every week, one of them sat down and wrote to their families back in the Netherlands, so nobody would worry.

They'd met the gem dealer in Hong Kong. while shopping for sapphires, and he'd been wonderful to them, so when he invited them to stay with him in Bangkok, they happily accepted. Within days of arriving, Hank and Cocky came down with a violent stomach illness of their own. Their host and Monique nursed them around the clock, but the couple got worse and worse until they could barely stand. Dominique watched all of it from across the apartment and something cold settled over him. He knew those symptoms. They were his symptoms. Two healthy people had walked in the door, eaten the food, taken the medicine, and collapsed just like he had. For the first time, Dominique let himself think the unthinkable. Maybe they weren't sick at all.

Maybe all three of them were being poisoned. Within a week of the couple's arrival, the gem dealer and Ajay announced they were driving Hank and cocky to a high. hospital. The couple was carried out of apartment 504, two-week to walk on their own. On December 16, 1975, two burned bodies were found dumped beside a rural road near the old city of Autea, about 50 miles north of Bangkok. A local newspaper ran a photo and guessed they were Australian tourists, though the article noted one of the shirts had been made in the Netherlands. Two days after those bodies were found, the gem dealer told Dominique that he, Monique, and Ajay were leaving on a sudden business trip. On his way out the door, he did two things.

He fished Dominique's passport out of a drawer and handed it back, then he tossed him a pair of mud-caped pants and asked him to clean them. Just like that, Dominique was alone in the apartment for the first time in months. He stood in the kitchen holding those muddy pants, wondering how they'd gotten so filthy. When he finally worked up the nerve to look in the guest room, his stomach dropped. Hank and Cocky's luggage was still sitting there. People being treated at a hospital don't leave behind every single thing they own. Then Dominique saw the newspaper with a photo of the two burned bodies on the muddy road. roadside. One of them was wearing a long, floral skirt. Dominique had seen cocky in one just like that.

Mud on the road. Mud on the pants. A chill ran through Dominique as he understood all at once, what kind of house he had been living in. The man who had been spooning him medicine for months might be a murderer. Dominique was a witness. Dominique needed help, and he found it. Two floors down. A 21-year-old French woman named Nadine Gir lived in the same building with her husband. She'd become friendly with Monique and dropped by apartment 504 a few times a week, and for a while now, the place had bothered her. The endless parade of naive young travelers, the guests who got sick,

the well-dressed Turkish man she'd watched walk into that apartment weeks earlier and never walk out. when Dominique told her what he suspected, Nadine didn't need much convincing. While the tenants at 504 were away, the two of them went in and searched it. What they found erased any remaining doubt. Stashed around the apartment were syringes, bottles of pills and liquid sedatives, handcuffs, and a thick stack of passports belonging to other people. many of them doctored with swapped photos. Mixed in with it all was a necklace they recognized as Vitale's,

Stephanie Perry's passport, and a packet of birth control pills from a Dutch pharmacy. Dominique and Nadine had more than enough evidence. The question was, who could they go to for help? The local police had a reputation for corruption and the gem dealer seemed friendly with half the officials in town. If they reported him and word got back, Nadine would be trapped in the same building as a killer,

and Dominique was a half-poisoned witness with nowhere to hide. So they came up with a plan. Nadine lent Dominique money for a one-way ticket to Paris. In late December, 1975, he flew home carrying everything he knew, determined to put it in front of Interpol, the International Police Organization headquartered in France. Meanwhile, Nadine stayed in the building, kept smiling at her neighbors, and waited for a chance to bring the whole thing down.

But the people in apartment 504 still weren't back. They were more than a thousand miles away in Kathmandu, Nepal. Investigators would later determine that the gem dealer and Monique had flown there on December 18th, traveling on Hank and Cocky's stolen passports. Catnandu was another major stop on the hippie trail, full of exactly the kind of travelers the gem dealer like to meet. Two of them were Connie Joe Bronsich, a 29-year-old American from California,

and Laurent Carrier, a 26-year-old Canadian who worked as a mine surveyor. They'd met on the road and hit it off. two friendly faces a long way from home. Right around December 22nd, 1975, both of their bodies were found on the outskirts of Kathmandu that had been stabbed and burned. This time, though, the killer got sloppy.

Nepalese police identified Connie quickly, traced her movements, and started looking for a foreign couple she'd been seen with. People living near one of the crime scenes remembered a white sedans making a strange U-turn on the mountain roads late that night, so police set up checkpoints around the city.

Within days, officers stopped that white sedan and questioned the foreign couple inside. The man handed over a Dutch passport and calmly explained that he was Hank Bintanya, an academic from Amsterdam. The police had no way of knowing that the real Hank Bittania was lying in a Thai morgue, or that the man in front of them had helped put him there.

The paperwork looked fine, so they let the couple go while they kept investigating. By the time, officers raided the pair's hotel room on December 28th, and they found some empty pill packets, a few scattered gems, and no trace of their suspects. The couple had slipped out in Nepal and headed south into India. Six weeks later, in early February 1976, a letter arrived at the Dutch embassy in Bangkok. It came from the family of Hank Bentanya and Kaki Hemker, and it landed on the desk of a 31-year-old junior diplomat named Herman Knieppenberg. They hadn't heard from the couple in a month and a half, and they were frantic.

Missing backpacker inquiries crossed Hermann's desk all the time, and they almost always ended up with a backpacker turning up at an oshram or on a beach somewhere. This one felt different. Hermon remembered a new story from December about two charred bodies found near Ayatouya, the ones the paper had called Australians. He also read through the couple's letters home, where they described a French gem dealer who had involved, invited them to stay with him in Bangkok.

That detail snagged on something. A Belgian diplomat had already passed Hermon a strange piece of embassy gossip. There was a gem dealer who lived somewhere near the tourist district. His apartment was supposedly full of other people's passports, and his houseguests had a habit of getting sick. Hermon pulled on that thread. He tracked down dental records for the two burned bodies and had them checked against the Dutch couples.

By the end of February, he had his answer. The bodies were Hank and cocky. Then he went to the morgue records and learned the detail that would haunt him for the rest of his life. There was soot in their lungs. Like Vitali Hakim before them, they had still been breathing when they were set on fire. There's no longer a missing person.

person's case. None of this was his job, and colleagues reminded him of that more than once. Diplomats aren't detectives, and a junior officer pushing a murder theory through tie bureaucracy was risking his own career to do it. Hermann kept going anyway, and he didn't work alone. His wife, Angela, helped him gather statements and organized a growing evidence until their home looked like a war room. Through the diplomatic great... Vine, he found his way to the one person who knew that apartment from the inside, Nadine Giers. The tenants of 504 had returned to Bangkok by then and settled back into the apartment, as though nothing had happened, which meant Nadine was once again living two floors below a killer.

She told her on everything about Unique, about Vitali and Stephanie, about the passports and the syringes. She kept feeding him information for weeks, all while playing the part of the friendly neighbor. By early March, Hermon had pulled everything together into a dossier and pushed it in front of the Thai police. On the night of March 11, 1976, officers finally raided apartment 504. They didn't find anything. The gem dealer handed over an American passport in a name they weren't looking. for. He answered every question calmly, and the police believed him. Within days, he left Thailand. Hermann was devastated, but the raid accomplished one thing no one fully appreciated in the moment.

The file, the aliases, the photographs, and the fingerprints all started moving through Interpol, and when investigators finally matched everything up, the Phantom of Knit House had a real name. The man Bangkok knew as Alon Gautier wasn't a gem dealer. He wasn't even Alon Gautier. His real name was Charles Sobrarge. And once police started digging into who

Charles Sobrarge was, they understood they weren't chasing an ordinary criminal. They were chasing a man who had spent his entire life learning how to disappear. According to statistics, the average person walks past 36 murderers in their lifetime. Oh my God, she was murdered.

It was a murderer. Unlike in Hollywood movies, they're not easy to spot. Where is she, buddy? Where is she? The devil made me turn her to ashes. They seamlessly blend into our everyday lives, assuming roles as friendly neighbors, helpful colleagues, or even the person

lying beside you each night. I wanted to be out of jail. I couldn't wait until I got out. I was in there with someone who was clearly psychopathic. Using investigative research and primary audio, Morbidology is an award-winning true-crime podcast that shines a light on the darkest corners of humanity. Through our investigation, we have attained evidence which we are not releasing at this time, which leads us to believe Jolene is not alive.

June into morbidology each week across all podcast platforms. By the spring of 1976, investigators across Asia finally had a name for the man suspected of murdering young travelers in Thailand and Nepal. Charles Sobrage. His story had started 32 years earlier in a city at war, and everything about the killer he became traces back to it. Charles was born in Saigon, Vietnam on April 6, 1944, to a Vietnamese mother and a wealthy Indian merchant father.

His father never remarried his mother and drifted out of his life when Charles was small, or rejection he never got over. When his mother later married a French soldier, the family began settling between Vietnam and France, and young Charle felt like he didn't belong anywhere. Literally, because he'd been born in a war-torn French colony to unmarried parents, no country would fully claim him. For years, he had no nationality, no passport, nothing official with his name on it. The first document that ever recorded his existence was a criminal one.

Schall ran away constantly as a teenager and at 19 he went to prison outside Paris for burglary. There he learned how to charm guards, work the system, and read people. After his release, he married a young Parisian woman. Within a year, she was pregnant and in 1970 they headed east on false documents. They robbed the travelers they befriended along the way to pay for the trip. That route eventually put them in India where they settled in Bombay and their daughter was born. Bombay was also where Charles built his first real criminal operation running stolen cars and smuggling. It fell apart in 1973 when a jewelry store robbery at a Delhi hotel landed him in prison.

He managed to escape and took his family northwest. into Afghanistan. Kabul was full of young Westerners heading down the hippie trail, and Charle went back to what he knew, drugging and robbing travelers. When Afghan police finally caught him, he escaped custody a second time and made his way to Iran without his wife and daughter. She took the little girl home to France and never went back to him. By the time he settled into Knit House as Alon Goode, Boutier, the gem dealer, Charles had been running the same play for years, and he'd perfected his methods. By now, he wasn't just taking people's money, he was also taking their passports.

With a stack of other people's identities, he could cross any border. The world had told Charles Chalbrage he was nobody. He'd turned being nobody into a weapon, and he wasn't working alone. Monique was actually Marie-Andre Leclair. She was a medical secretary from Quebec who'd met the dazzling Alon while vacationing in India in 1975 and given up her whole life for him. That was the man investigators were now chasing. In the spring of 1976, Interpol warrants began circulating with his real name on them, and Cheryl could feel the net. closing. He and Marie Andre made their way back to India. Meanwhile, their accomplice, Ajay Chaudhry split off during a trip through Malaysia and was never seen again. To this day, Ajay has never been

found, and some investigators believe Charle killed him too. In India, Charles kept working. He recruited two Western women drifting through Bombay to help run his cons, During one robbery that summer, a French tourist named Jean-Luc Solomon was poisoned so heavily that he died. Then, on July 5, 1976, Charles finally overreached. In New Delhi, he attached himself to a tour group of about 60 French graduate students posing as their local fixer. At their hotel, he warned the whole group about the dangers of Indian tap water, and generously handed out pills he described as anti-dissentary medicine. They were actually sedatives, and the plan was for 60 students to pass out in their rooms

while Charle collected 60 passports. But he got the dose wrong. Students started collapsing right there in the hotel lobby, dropping in the middle of conversations. The one still standing did the math fast. Three of them tackled the helpful guide and pinned him down until the police arrived. After more than a decade of slipping through every trap ever set for him, 32-year-old Charles Sobrage was taken down in a hotel lobby by a group of grad students. In custody, his new recruits cracked almost immediately and told the police everything.

Indian courts convicted Charles of drugging the students. For Jean-Luc Solomon's death, they convicted him of culpable homicide, which is basically the Indian version of manslaughter. He killed him, but the court didn't think he planned to. He got 12 years in Delhi's Tihar prison. Marie-Andre was convicted for her role in his Indian crimes as well. But Indian prosecutors weren't finished yet. In 1982, Charles and Marie-Andre were both convicted of murdering an Israeli tourist named, Alan Jacobs, who had been drugged to death in India back in 1975.

Meanwhile, thanks in large part to the file Hermann Knieppenberg had built, Thailand charged Charles with five murders. They included Teresa Nolten, Vitali Hakeem, Stephanie Perry, Hank Ben Tanya, and Kaki Henker. Then they started fighting to get him extradited. If Thailand won, Charles would be. be facing execution. A Thai interpol officer named Sampo Soutimai even flew to Delhi to question Charles about the Kinnit House murders.

What stayed with him, even decades later, was how calm he was. The man suspected of burning travelers alive, sat across from him, relaxed and friendly, chatting like none of it had anything to do with him. By then, the press had given Charles two nicknames. that would follow him forever. Because of the swimsuits on the women found near Patti, he was the bikini killer. Because of how he slid through borders,

identities, and courtrooms, he was the serpent. The story should end there. Killer caught, case closed. But with Charles Chobrage, the story never ends where it should. Thailand's murder charges came with a 20-year statute of limitations. meaning if Charles could stay out of Thai custody until the mid-1990s,

those five murder cases would evaporate. His 12-year Indian sentence wasn't enough to run out that clock, and by late 1985, India had agreed to hand him over to Thailand when his term ended. The math was simple and terrifying. Finish his time in India, get shipped to Bangkok face execution. So Charles decided to add time. Inside Tihar, he had bribed and blackmailed his way into a comfortable life, good food, a typewriter, and guards who treated him like a celebrity.

Reporters came to interview him, and over the years, he admitted to around 10 killings, describing some of them down to what his victims said before they died. He also taped prison officials. talking about their own corruption, then he used the recording to squeeze the superintendent for more privileges. On March 16, 1986, he threw himself an early birthday party and handed out sweets and cakes to the prison staff, all of them, laced with sedatives.

As the guards slumped over, Charles walked out the front gate with a small group of fellow inmates. The escape made him famous. around the world. Three weeks later, he was having dinner in a beach town. A police inspector named Madhukar Zenday found him at a well-known restaurant in the state of Goa. Zendai walked up to the table and said, quote, you are Charle. He arrested him on the spot and took him back to Delhi. A lot of people, including Indian officials, came to believe getting caught was the whole point. The escape added roughly 10 years to his Indian sentence, and by the time he finished serving it, the Thai statute of limitations had expired.

The five murder cases in Thailand, the strongest cases anyone ever built against him, were gone. He walked out of Teharr in February 1997 at 52 years old. France, the country that had refused to claim him as a boy, was now the only. place obligated to take him. He flew to Paris and started selling his story. Reporters paid just to sit down with him, and he reportedly made good money doing it. Then in 2003, he did something nobody has ever fully explained. He got on a plane to Nepal. Nepal was the one country on earth with living murder warrants against him for the murders of Connie Joe Bronsich and Laurent Carrier, and no statute of limitations. Some think he believed the old case files had been lost. Others think he had gotten

away with so much for so long that he thought he was untouchable. Whatever the reason, a journalist named Joseph Nathan spotted him at a Kathmandu casino and tipped off police, and this time there was no talking his way out. In 2004, a Nepalese court convicted six-year-old Charles Sobrage of murdering Connie Joe Bronsic nearly 30 years after her death. A decade later in 2014, he was convicted of killing Laurent Carrier as well. The old evidence that helped tie him to Nepal came once again from Hermann Knieppenberg, who had held onto his files for decades. Hermann carried that archive to every diplomatic posting of his career.

He found out that Charles had finally been arrested on his first day of retirement. But even from a Kathmandu jail cell, Charles stayed a celebrity. In 2008, at 64 years old, he announced his engagement to Nehita Bishwash, the 20-year-old daughter of his own Nepalese lawyer. The two later claimed they'd married in a ceremony inside the prison, which officials did not. ever took place. Then in 2021, a BBC drama series called The Serpent introduced his crimes to a whole new generation, with Hermon himself advising the production. Tens of millions of people met a dramatized version of the man while the real one sat in a jail cell. Charles spent 19 years in a Kathmandu prison, and even that didn't stick. In December,

In 2022, Nepal's Supreme Court ordered him released, citing his age, his heart condition, and time served. He left prison in a police convoy, masked and ringed by officers under orders to leave the country within 15 days. On the flight out, the 78-year-old told a reporter, quote, I feel great, I have a lot to do. I have to sue a lot of people, including the state of Nepal. Since then, he has lived free. He sold a memoir and let a documentary crew film him strolling past tourists in London. He also started denying the murders, including the ones he had described in those prison interviews.

Charles Sobrage is 82 now, and no court anywhere is waiting for him. The rest of the people in this story met very different fates. In 1983, an appeals court throughout the Alan Jacobs conviction against Charles and Marie-Andre LeClerc. She had also just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and was allowed to go home to Quebec. She continued to insist that she never knowingly helped kill anyone. She also claimed she felt like she was Charles's slave. She even wrote a memoir making that case, and she was still making it when she died in April, 1984, at 38 years old. Dominique Renalot made it home to France and lived a quiet life.

One of the very few people to be poisoned by Charles Sobrage and survived to tell it. Nadine Giers and Hermann Knieppenberg, the neighbor and the diplomat who did the work no institution would do, watched the man they exposed outlive nearly every consequence. The victims at the heart of the story deserve their name said, one more time. Theresa Nolton, Vitali Hakeem, Stephanie Perry, Hank Betanya, Kaki, Hankmer, Connie Jo Bronsich, Laurent Carrier, and Jean-Luc Solomon. Investigators believe the true list is far longer, stretching across a decade and as many as 10 countries.

Before we get out of here, this is the part of every murder mystery Friday where I tell you what I think. This is, Carter calls it. Well, there's no, who done it here. We know who did it. The questions that stick with me are why he did it, how many people he killed, and whether he ever really answered for it. And then there's the passport. That might be the strangest part of the whole story. Start with why, because Charles has spent 50 years selling his own answer. In interview after interview, he says the killings were business. His victims were players in the drug trade, and he was settling scores. I do not believe a word of it. That whole story comes from one source, and the source is Charles Sobrage. Teresa Nolton was on her way to a monastery. Hank and Kocky were

shopping for sapphires. The drug story does one thing for him, and that's why he tells it. It turns him into something other than a murderer. What I see is simpler and uglier. Charles drugged and robbed travelers for years. The killing started when people became a problem. The courier who could identify him, a girlfriend asking questions, a couple who would have talked the moment they got better. He killed witnesses and he kept killing them because it kept working.

As for how many? We'll probably never know. He'd pick people who could disappear for months before anyone came looking, and that was the whole point. Somewhere out there is a family who never learned that the kid who stopped riding home in 1975 met a charming gem dealer in Bangkok. So did he ever answer for it? Barely? And only because three people with no business investigating a murder. decided to. A poisoned backpacker got on a plane with borrowed money. A 21-year-old neighbor spied on a

killer living two floors up. A junior diplomat ignoring his own government and building the case himself. The professionals had him twice and let him go both times. Kathmandu released him while he was carrying a dead man's documents. Bangkok raided his apartment and let him talk his way out of it. Without those three, Charles Sobrage would have died without ever being convicted of murder. To me, that's the legacy of this case. Which brings me back to the passport. Charles held on to Dominique's papers for months. It was the one thing keeping a witness in the country.

Then, on his way out the door, he handed it back. Maybe he figured a man he'd been poisoning for months couldn't hurt him. If so, the great manipulator finally misread someone. Dominique flew to Paris, not being paid for the ticket, and the unraveling started there. Charles is an old man now, telling anyone with a camera that he's the one who is wronged. I don't think so. And if you see it differently, if you buy the drug trade theory or you think you can explain the passport, tell me in the comments.

With this man, the only thing I'm sure of is that we never got the whole truth. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder. True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of another murder and all the people that affected. Murder, True Crime Stories is a Crime House original, powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crimehouse on TikTok and Instagram.

Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday, completely ad-free, no waiting for part two, plus ad-free and early access to every show across Crimehouse and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com, or if you listen on Apple, podcasts, tap try-free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Tuesday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler,

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