Angela Kane on tracking down ‘Serpent’ serial killer

• In the 1970s, Angela Kane investigated serial killer Charles Sobhraj in Bangkok and helped to secure his arrest.
• She is dissatisfied with how she is portrayed in the Netflix series “The Serpent”.
• The 78-year-old French criminal is scheduled to be released from a Nepali prison this week.

In the 1970s, Angela Kane, a German expert in disarmament, investigated serial killer Charles Sobhraj in Bangkok and helped to secure his arrest.

Now that the 78-year-old French criminal is scheduled to be released from a Nepali prison, Kane is “curious” to see what transpires.

As depicted in the Netflix series “The Serpent,” Sobhraj committed a string of murders across Asia.

On Thursday, he was still in prison despite a Kathmandu court’s order that he be released for health reasons.

Kane, who is now 74 years old, stated that she and her diplomat husband were living in Thailand when the Dutch embassy received a letter from the parents of two backpackers who had not communicated for weeks.

Kane told AFP from Vienna, Austria, where she is a nuclear disarmament specialist and vice-president of the International Peace Institute, that this is how the story began to “unravel.”

Kane and her husband eventually discovered that Sobhraj’s neighbors had spotted the missing tourists, she said.

The two amateur detectives were disheartened to discover that the murderer had fled, but they continued their investigation.

They compiled “a complete list of addresses,” discovered the handbag of a missing Dutch woman in the apartment where Sobhraj had stayed, and had Kane translate clues from a diary.

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They forwarded the information to Interpol, where Thai police officer Sompol Suthimai “took the case very seriously.”

Sobhraj was arrested in India in 1976 and ultimately spent 21 years in prison there, with a brief escape in 1986 and subsequent capture in the coastal state of Goa.

Sobhraj, who was released in 1997 and lived in Paris while conducting paid interviews with journalists, returned to Nepal in 2003 and was subsequently imprisoned.

Sobhraj has been connected to over twenty murders throughout Asia.

Before drugging, robbing, and murdering his victims, many of whom were Western backpackers on the 1970s hippie trail, he posed as a gem trader.

“Diplomat’s spouse”

Kane is dissatisfied with how she is portrayed in the Netflix series; she told AFP that she was much more than “the diplomat’s wife.”

“I was very instrumental in all of this, which I felt, to my great regret, was very much underplayed,” she said.

“I was a lot more feisty, and I was a lot more self-assertive than it ever comes through.”

Kane would eventually divorce her husband. She stated that it was essential “to move on… And not everyone felt that way.”

Her job took her to Nepal on multiple occasions while Sobhraj was incarcerated, but she never wished to meet him.

“He’s a despicable human being”, she said, adding that she finds it “reprehensible” that he can still make money through publicity.

She stated that she was “curious” about Sobhraj’s future.

She predicted, however, that interest in him as a serial killer and in him as a person will eventually wane.

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