So he mobilized a Dutch dentist based in Bangkok to assess the burnt bodies at the police morgue, using the missing couple’s dental records. Now, Knippenberg wondered if they were the Dutch couple mentioned in the letter. They had initially been reported as a pair of missing Australian backpackers – until that couple turned up alive. Weeks before, two charred bodies had been found on the roadside near Ayutthaya, about 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) north of Bangkok. “I thought, ‘That is quite bizarre,’” said Knippenberg, who was 31 at the time and a junior diplomat at the Dutch embassy. But many of his alleged murders remain unresolved – and for Knippenberg, the case still doesn’t feel completely closed. Sobhraj is now serving a life sentence in a Nepalese jail for killing two tourists in 1975. “The Serpent,” a new BBC/Netflix drama series coming to the streaming service in April, tells how for years, Sobhraj evaded the law across Asia as he allegedly drugged, robbed and murdered backpackers along the so-called “hippie trail” – and how for years, Knippenberg worked with authorities to capture him. Knippenberg would later learn the Dutch couple in the morgue were among at least a dozen people Charles Sobhraj admitted to killing – though he later recanted. “I had the feeling that I was stepping outside of myself – that I’m on the side, watching the scene,” he recalled in an interview earlier this year. He says it was the most shocking thing he saw in 30 years of foreign service, and sparked a decades-long personal endeavor to bring the alleged killer to justice. The scene at the police mortuary in Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, on March 3, 1976, remains clear in the mind of former Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg. Both were still alive when they were set alight. The woman’s brain had been bashed in with something heavy and the man strangled, a pathologist said. Light from a window at the back of the room illuminated who she was talking about: two badly burnt bodies that had been opened for an autopsy and stitched back together with surgical cable. “It’s them,” said a dentist, who had just inspected the mouth of a stiff body. The smell inside the morgue was overpowering, as disinfectant masked the odor of decaying corpses.
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