The Serpent : Questions We Have After Watching the Netflix True Crime Series
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The story of criminal mastermind Charles Sobhraj has captivated true crime followers for more than 40 years. The serial killer left a trail of bodies mostly young European and North American backpackers across Asia in the 1970s, then stunned everyone when he escaped from prison not once but at least four times.
(Caution: Spoilers ahead! Do not read until you have watched “The Serpent.”)
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Now on Netflix, the devious con man’s story is an eight-part docudrama from Mammoth Screen first shown on BBC, created by Tom Shankland and Richard Warlow. The creators decided to frame the story around Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg, who spent years on the trail of Sobhraj and was key to his eventual arrest. They interviewed Knippenberg along with several other real-life figures who are still alive. However, they did not speak with the im
The Serpent investigates the unbelievable life of criminal mastermind Charles Sobhraj
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The true story behind Netflix s newest crime drama was too bizarre for TV
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Tom Shankland took me out some time late in the summer of 2013. He had a story, so he said, something he thought I should write…
The sequence of events that entwined the lives of Charles Sobhraj and Herman Knippenberg is a tale that worms its way into you. There are circularities, coincidences and synchronicities so awful and outrageous you gape. But, at the end of that night, Tom had me. I was in.
Three years later, I had the great privilege of meeting Herman for the first time. There is nothing awful or outrageous about him. Which I was grateful to have established for me in the flesh because it was the discovery of Herman s part in the Charles Sobhraj story - and his altogether more straightforward character - that had allowed me to see a way through the lysergic maze of swaggering claim and counter-claim that had always distinguished accounts of his crimes (most of it, it must be said, driven by the man himself).