The Serpent Charles Sobhraj: who is serial killer’s wife Nihita Biswas - what happened to Marie-Andree Leclerc

Confessed French serial killer Charles ‘the Serpent’ Sobhraj has arrived in Paris after being freed from prison in Nepal.

The 78-yea-old was released after serving most of his life sentence for the murders of multiple American and Canadian backpackers. The serial killer and his life were recently dramatised in a series by the BBC and Netflix called The Serpent, which aired last year. In the show, Sobhraj was portrayed by Tahar Rahim (The Eddy, The Looming Tower).

This is everything you need to know.

Who is Charles Sobhraj - what did he do?

Sobhraj is a French serial killer and thief who has been named The Serpent, The Splitting Killer and The Bikini Killer for his crimes that he committed against Western tourists travelling along the hippie trail of South Asia in the 1970s.

Sobhraj was born in Saigon on 6 April 1944 and was raised by his mother and her French Army lieutenant husband. Throughout his childhood, Sobhraj moved back and forth between Southeast Asia and France.

Throughout his life, Sobhraj was in and out of prison for a variety of crimes, including things like armed robbery, car theft and burglary, serving time in France, Indian and Afghanistan.

It is believed that Sobhraj murdered at least 20 tourists in South and Southeast Asia, possibly even 30, although only 12 murders have been confirmed:

• 1975, Thailand: Teresa Knowlton, Jennie Bollivar, Vitali Hakim, Henk Bintanja, Cornelia Hemker and Charmayne Carrou, as well as at least eight more
• 1975, Nepal: Laurent Ormond Carriere and Connie Bronzich
• 1975, India: Avoni Jacob and Jean-Luc Solomon 

Sobhraj was arrested in July 1976 after attempting to drug a group of French tourists in New Delhi, however the tourists were able to attack Sobhraj and alert the authorities. Sobhraj was sentenced to 12 years in prison - however, his prison sentence in India was set to end before the 20 year Thai statute of limitations expired, meaning that he would have been extradited and almost certainly executed for murder in Thailand.

Sobhraj therefore decided, in March 1986, after 10 years in prison, to throw a party for the guards and his fellow inmates. He drugged everyone with sleeping pills and escaped from the prison. He was quickly recaptured and his prison was extended by 10 years, just as he had planned. In 1997, at 52 years old, Sobhraj was released from prison with almost all of his warrants, evidence and eye witnesses long gone.

The Indian authorities allowed Sobhraj to return to France, where he retired to Paris. In 2003, Sobhraj made his way back to Nepal, which was one of the few countries where he could still be arrested. Nepalsese police reopened the double murder case from 1975 and Sobhraj was arrested and later sentenced to life in prison by the Kathmandu district court in 2004 for the murders of Bronzich and Carriere.

Who was Marie Leclerc?

Marie-Andree Leclerc became Sobhraj’s partner in crime after the two met in Thailand in 1975. She was a medical secretary from Quebec, Canada, and became an accomplice in Sobhraj’s drugging and murder spree.

In 1976, she was arrested alongside Sobhraj in India, although she denied that she had ever taken part in any of Sobhraj’s crimes and hadn’t known that he was murdering people.

Leclerc was also sentenced to life in prison after the attempted drugging and robbery of a group of students in 1976, however this was later overturned following a terminal ovarian cancer diagnosis. She was allowed to return to Canada in 1983, where she died the following year at the age of 38.

In The Serpent, Leclerc is portrayed by Jenna Coleman (The Sandman, Doctor Who), who told Radio Times: “I think [the question of] ‘is she a victim of is she not’, how much of her was brainwashed, how much of it was a choice to be there and a choice to live in delusion; I think that’s what’s really interesting, to make the choices she made in keeping this reality in a way that she could so that she could keep existing and being with Charles.”

Is he married?

Sobhraj has been married multiple times in his life, and is father to three children. He had his first two children with a woman named Chantal Desnoyers, whom he was in a long term relationship with. Desnoyers gave birth to his first child, Prank, in 1964 and, five years later, to their daughter Muriel.

It was actually on the eve of his wedding to Chantal Compagnon in 1969 that his daughter Muriel was born. Together, Sobhraj and Compagnon had their daughter, Usha. In The Serpent, Compagnon was renamed as Juliette and was portrayed by Stacy Martin (I Love Greece, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain).

Very little is publicly known about Compagnon and her daughter with Sobhraj after they parted ways. Sobhraj told British journalist Andrew Anthony in 2014, from Nepalese prison, that he and Compagnon had continued to stay in touch, and that she had allegedly continued to support him financially.

Sobhraj later got married again in an official ceremony in 2008 to Nihita Biswas, his Indian-Nepali interpreter and the daughter of his lawyer, Shakuntala Thapa, whilst in prison in Kathmandu. According to India Today, Biswas, who is 44 years his junior, met Sobhraj after he requested an interpreter in prison.

The pair got engaged within three months of meeting and, at the time of their marriage, Biswas was 21 years old, and Sobhraj was 64. In a 2008 interview, Sobhraj said that it was love at first sight for the two of them.

In 2008, the same year they got married, Biswas told the Times of India that Sobhraj was innocent, stating: “He is a good man, I have seen the way he cares for his family. We have a good relationship. He is innocent. There’s no evidence against him.”

In 2011, Biswas competed in the fifth season of an Indian reality TV show called Bigg Boss, where housemates are eliminated each week and the last contestant standing wins a cash prize. Biswas was the first person to get voted out in her season.

Hindustan Times reported in 2017 that Biswas donated blood to Sobhraj when he underwent heart surgery at a Kathmandu hospital. A hospital source reportedly told the outlet that both Sobhraj and Biswas shared the blood type O-negative and that, ahead of the surgery, the hospital arranged for Biswas to donate blood in case it was required.

The source said: “She came and donated one pint of blood for him.”

Has he been released from prison?

Sobhraj has been released from prison in Nepal after serving most of his sentence for the murders of the American and Canadian backpackers. Sobhraj was driven out of Central Jail in Kathmandu on Friday (23 December) in a heavily guarded police convoy to the department of immigration, where he will wait for his travel documents to be prepared.

The country’s supreme court had ordered that Sobhraj, who was sentenced to life in prison in Nepal, be released because of poor health, good behaviour and having already served most of his sentence. Life sentences in Nepal are 20 years.

The order also stipulates that he has to leave the country within 15 days. Sobhraj’s lawyer Gopal Siwakoti Chitan told reporters that the request for the travel documents must be made by the immigration department to the French embassy in Nepal, which could take some time as offices are closed over the weekend for the Christmas holiday.

The court document said he had already served more than 75% of his sentence, making him eligible for release, and revealed that he has heart disease.

Following his release, Biswas said: “The main thing is that I want him to get back safely. We have been waiting for him all these years. We are going to receive him nicely, he is going to get a proper health check up.

“We’re trying to send him back to his family in France by evening for security reasons. After heart surgery, he had some issues. He might need another surgery.”

What has he said after his release?

He arrived on Saturday at Charles de Gaulle Airport in the French capital on a flight from Nepal via Qatar, said his French lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre. “I’m fine, I’m glad” to be in France, he told the Associated Press in a brief phone conversation after arriving in Paris. “We are going to have lunch.”

French filmmaker Jean-Charles Deniau, who spoke to Sobhraj on his arrival in Paris and is releasing a film and book about his life, said: “He’s doing well. He has medicines. He will live in Paris, and a little bit everywhere.” The French government did not respond to requests for comment on whether he could face judicial challenges in France.

Ms Coutant-Peyre welcomed his release, saying: “I’m very happy but very shocked that it took 19 years to obtain his normal freedom.” She claimed his murder conviction in Nepal was a “fabricated case” and said the French government did not do enough to help or defend him. She added that Sobhraj had watched The Serpent and said it was “garbage first of all, and that 70% of it is totally false”.