Journalist Joseph Nathan doesn’t expect to get the news of his life tonight in 2003 as he visits a casino in Kathmandu, Nepal. But Charles Sobhraj, who is wanted by the police, stands in front of him and quietly plays baccarat.
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He then devises a subtle encirclement strategy that will last nearly two weeks, during which the journalist will set up a system to be able to catch “The Serpent”.
“He looked like an old man. You wouldn’t have given him a second look. He looked harmless,” the journalist recalled to AFP. “It was pure luck that I recognized him. I think it was karma,” he said.
“The director of the casino was a friend, we watched him together through the surveillance camera,” says the editorial consultant of the newspaper “Himalayan Times”, of which he is the founder.
“I put a photographer in his hotel 24 hours a day, which was a budget hotel. Every night he played baccarat in the casino,” he says.
Charles Sobhraj, a French national with a Vietnamese mother and Indian father, began traveling the world in the early 1970s and found himself in the Thai capital of Bangkok.
Nicknamed the “Bikini Killer,” this suave and sophisticated man has been linked to more than 20 murders.
Arrested in India in 1976, he spent 21 years behind bars, marked by a brief escape in 1986 after drugging prison guards. He was eventually recaptured in the Indian state of Goa.
Released in 1997, he retired to Paris but resurfaced in Nepal in 2003, believing he had been acquitted.
But he was still wanted for the 1975 murders of two backpackers, and that’s when Joseph Nathan recognized him, even without his iconic beret.
After leaving his photographer on the casino premises to follow him, the journalist got to work himself: he managed to get a copy of Sobhraj’s passport from the hotel manager, even though he was registered under a false name.
“On the 12th or 13th day, I followed him to the bathroom and asked him if he was Charles Sobhraj,” Nathan continues. “He said, ‘He’s a Bollywood actor?’ That’s when I knew I had it.The same night I wrote the article “for the Himalayan Times” and the next day he was arrested by the police at the casino.
Sobhraj, 78, was released on Friday due to ill health and will be deported to France.
For the journalist, this decision by the Nepalese Supreme Court is correct.
“It was time to release him because he has already served his sentence under Nepalese law,” he said.
But like other characters of the hit series “The Serpent”, Joseph Nathan is dissatisfied with this staging of the life of the serial killer.
“That was a huge hit,” says Nathan. “But Netflix changed the name of our newspaper in their miniseries. We considered taking them to court.”