In Kabul they were both arrested – for car theft again, and skipping their hotel without paying – but according to the show, Compagnon was soon released and returned to Paris, telling her husband, “We are never going to see each other again.” It is not clear at what point Compagnon began to strain against her loyalty to Sobhraj but by the time the couple fled to Afghanistan in a banged-up car in December 1971, she had sent their daughter back to Paris into the care of her parents. Sobhraj made off with a million rupees, sparking a nationwide manhunt that soon found him back behind bars.īy faking appendicitis, he managed to get himself transferred to hospital, from where he escaped back to Compagnon – “It doesn’t matter how good they are at catching me, I will always be better at escaping” he tells her in the show. On his release, the couple left Paris for Mumbai to start a new life with their baby daughter Usha (renamed Madhu in the show) – the show suggests Compagnon was already pregnant when she married Sobhraj.īut Sobhraj had no intention of leaving his crimes behind him: he was soon arrested for the Ashok hotel jewellery heist, during which he and an accomplice held hostage a flamenco dancer prisoner for three days while they drilled through her bedroom ceiling to a gem store below. The sight of her glowering parents in the background of the wedding ceremony is the show’s nod to the real Compagnon’s conservative, Catholic background – in marrying a mixed race ex-con, she was daring their disapproval.Īccording to Sobhraj’s biographers, he swore to Compagnon that he would go straight once they married, only to find himself hauled back to prison on their wedding day for car theft, for which he served a further eight months. Episode six of The Serpent flashes back to Paris in 1969, where a 24-year-old Sobhraj, fresh from a stint in prison, is marrying young Frenchwoman Chantal Compagnon, renamed in the show as Juliette. His long-term girlfriend and accomplice, played by Jenna Coleman, is a curiously ambiguous character: part active participant in his crimes, part pitiable victim of his emotional abuse.īut in real life, Sobhraj’s romantic entanglements were not confined to Leclerc – he has been married at least twice, and fathered at least three children.

For the first half of The Serpent, the BBC’s darkly stylish thriller about real-life killer Charles Sobhraj’s terrifying spree of attacks along the Hippie Trail in the 1970s, the only woman in Sobhraj’s life that the viewer encounters is Marie-Andrée Leclerc.

Charles sobhraj wife chantal compagnon