A 33-year-old male found dead a few days ago. Someone amongst them is our killer. This is the story of a killer, a man so elusive he slipped from the law’s grasp a half dozen times.
A chameleon constantly changing identities, allowing him to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 across three different countries. Close on his trail, a global crime-fighting organization called Interpol.
When crimes are committed, an international organization unites police officers to deliver justice. Interpol investigates. The story that will span 28 years begins in the lazy resort town of Pattaya, Thailand, in the mid-1970s.
One morning, a fisherman in a longboat finds the body of a woman floating in the water. He alerts the Royal Thai Police, who rush to the scene. The coroner examines the young victim and questions the fisherman.
With no identification and no signs of foul play, the woman is most likely a Westerner who’s had a swimming accident. The coroner fingerprints and examines the victim but still can’t identify her.
A toxicology test reveals alcohol and hashish in her system. The medical examiner has seen several cases like this in her career: an unsuspecting tourist falling prey to the waters off Pattaya. What she doesn’t yet realize is that there’s a killer on the loose.
The police canvas area hotels to see if anyone has reported a foreigner missing. But foreign tourists come and go all the time without notice. No one reports her missing.
It’s as if she never even existed.
After two months, another discovery grabs the attention of the Royal Thai Police. A worker driving his truck near the very same beach notices something unusual in the brush. He finds the body of a second young Western woman, murdered.
Police comb the area but find few clues. She’s a young woman, perhaps a student on an overseas vacation, but she has no identification, no purse, no wallet, no passport. Police don’t connect her to the earlier victim.
In the beginning, there was no alarm raised over this. Covering the two deaths, reporter Alan Dawson noted, “People didn’t really correlate for a while the appearance of one body and then another.”
But one person paying attention is Somporn Suthisamphop, a lieutenant colonel in the Thai police department and also the head of Interpol in Thailand. The similarities of the cases don’t catch his eye; the differences do. They were both found near the ocean, but the conditions of the bodies were different.
The police report stated that the second woman was murdered, deliberately drowned. This discovery raises doubts about the first young woman. Perhaps her death was no accident either.
A sinister pattern of anonymous female victims could be developing.
John Mofhof, former director of Interpol’s US office, explained the challenge: “The Thai officials have a problem on their hands. They have dead bodies, they have no identification associated with them. They know they have an investigation that they have to pursue criminally, but one of the key steps to getting that started is the identification of the victim.”
The morgue releases pictures of the victims to the Bangkok Post. Tens of thousands in Southeast Asia start their day with this English-language newspaper. Police hope that one of those readers could provide a lead.
But days later, the two women in the morgue remain unidentified.
Pattaya, known as the Riviera of Thailand, caters to Westerners. Young men and women come here looking for a good time in a safe but exotic land. It’s not a place you’d expect a killing spree.
The young people were attracted to Thailand. They thought that it had so much to offer compared with their culture, and they would soak it all up.
A popular travel route for young tourists unofficially begins in Pattaya. It leads through Thailand, India, and Nepal. Travelers come for a taste of Eastern philosophy and a ready supply of hashish and alcohol.
But the relaxed atmosphere conveys a false sense of security, and this would make them especially vulnerable to the predators who were on the trail.
The day after the body of the second victim was found in Pattaya, villagers find two more bodies. This time, a man and a woman. Like the others, they’re clearly young Westerners and undoubtedly murdered.
They’d been set on fire. The bodies were still burning when they were discovered. This was a horrific crime scene.
Flames had scorched the faces of both victims.
Police look for anything, some sort of identification, some kind of lead. All they can find is a tag on the woman’s clothing that reads “Made in Holland.” The Thai police now have four dead Westerners, no leads, and no motive.
They rely on forensic clues to reconstruct the latest murders. The woman was beaten with a hard object. The man was whipped and strangled until he couldn’t breathe.
The coroner also finds soot in both of the victims’ air passages. The couple was burned alive.
This is a terrible, inhuman act. The person who did this has an evil heart. Out there among the fun-loving tourists stalks a killer without a conscience, a predator with no motive and no limits.
Three women and one man, all between 18 and 25 years old, are dead. Police hope that word flies along the tourist trail and that someone somewhere might have crossed paths with any of the victims long enough to provide a lead.
But the killer travels faster than the news, striking almost 14,400 miles away at the end of the trail in Kathmandu, Nepal. Both Nepal and Thailand recently joined Interpol, but the rudimentary communication between the countries fails to alert Nepalese officials that a killer is on the loose.
Then police discover two bodies outside Kathmandu. A pair of Nepalese boys stumble upon the grizzly scene, an unforgettable sight for both the children and the investigators. The woman had a wound on her chest, and the man had a wound on his neck.
They were so damaged it was difficult to see much more.
Kathmandu detective Bishwa Lal Shrestha investigates both murders. “When we saw the dead bodies, the faces were burned, they were naked. We had no idea who could have done this.”
Securing the crime scene, the police turn the boys back, but too late to protect them from the gruesome scene that lay before them.
The Nepalese police surmise that the anonymous couple traveled together, adventurous Westerners soaking up the culture of Nepal. And in Kathmandu, that almost certainly means a visit to the tourist Mecca of Jhochhen Tole, also known as Freak Street. Investigators begin their search there, in the hotels and hostels that cater to travelers.
At one lodge, a clerk remembers that a pair of guests had not returned for several days. Their names: Pierre Bontemps and Vanessa Wilson. When police search the room, they find most of the travelers’ belongings but not their passports.
They also found a diary. Inside it was written the name Alain Gautier from Bangkok.
Guests in the room next door come by when they hear the police activity. Can you identify these two people? First concerned about the missing couple, they tell police everything they can.
One remembers seeing Vanessa Wilson with a man who claimed to be a gem dealer from Bangkok. The police ask the travelers’ friends to come to the morgue. They identify the bodies of Pierre Bontemps and Vanessa Wilson.
The body count now grows to six, but the two police departments still aren’t in communication. What will it take for Interpol to stop this serial killer?
In the Far East, police find six young Westerners murdered under similar circumstances, 1,400 miles apart. As separate investigations continue in Thailand and Nepal, police don’t realize they’re chasing the same man. Charles Sobhraj is trailing the stage for crimes in India.
John Mofhof, former director of Interpol’s US office, explained Sobhraj’s method: “Charles can present a persona that is what the people want to see, not what he really is. So if he wants to assume a false identity, he’s practiced this for a long time.”
The woman killed in Nepal met with a gem dealer named Alain Gautier, an alias used by Charles Sobhraj throughout Kathmandu. Officers search for more leads. At one hotel, a clerk remembers a guest matching the description but not registered under the name Alain Gautier.
The clerk claims he was a Dutch national by the name of Carl Gascogne. The clerk recalls that Gascogne drove a white car.
It isn’t much to go on, but police must run with it. They search throughout Kathmandu, setting up checkpoints, stopping dozens of cars, and interviewing the occupants. An officer pulls over a car that matches the description.
The driver calmly produces passports identifying himself as Carl Gascogne and his wife Ida Bons. Police call off the search and escort the couple to headquarters for questioning.
The man claims to be a scholar, his wife a Dutch television star. He insists he has never seen the murder victim before. “I ask what this is all about,” he says.
When the witness comes in to identify the man she met with Vanessa Wilson, she draws a blank. She can’t positively identify him as the same man she saw with her friend.
Kathmandu detective Bishwa Lal Shrestha noted the difficulty: “Any foreigner or guest is treated very politely. We look at him suspiciously. False identification can be very difficult for the investigator.
Documents can be reproduced, and they can be made to look authentic.”
The police let the couple go. The man they know as Carl Gascogne and his wife returned to their hotel. Investigators all the time are coming this close to capturing someone that needs to be brought to justice, only to see them slip away because their identification changed or because they were just a minute too late.
That’s a huge frustration.
Days later, a Kathmandu policeman takes a statement from a witness who saw a white car near where the bodies were found. Amazingly, she remembers the license plate number. It matches the plate on Carl Gascogne’s car.
And then, hard evidence. Police find two arrival cards for the victim Pierre Bontemps. The signatures don’t match.
A handwriting expert determines that the second card shares characteristics with Carl Gascogne’s signature, and it was dated December 24th, the same day Pierre Bontemps’ corpse rolled into the coroner’s office.
The police conclude that the man they know as Gascogne had left the country and re-entered Nepal using the dead man’s passport. The cool, calm professor was a cold, calculating liar. Police now have a case against the man they think is Gascogne.
They hurry to make the arrest, but it’s too late. Gascogne and Ida are gone.
“There were clothes all over the place, documents were all over the place, including passports and gasoline. We also saw things to alter the passports. After we found that evidence, we were certain that the killer had slipped away.”
Police have no idea where to find him, and it will be months before the information they’ve gathered reaches Interpol. Reporter Alan Dawson explained the communication delays: “You could wait two days to get a call through to Nepal, and communications were not like they are today at all. By the time authorities could really make their case, it was quite some time down the road, and he was long gone.”
In Thailand, authorities still have no suspects and no identities for the four dead Western tourists. Interpol Chief Somporn Suthisamphop searches for leads. “It’s very unusual that a large number of foreigners were murdered.
Nothing like this had happened before. Usually foreigners come to Thailand to relax and have fun. They don’t come here to do wrong or break our laws.
So we were investigating the possibility that the killer was from Thailand.”
While Thai police attempt to identify the victims, the Dutch Embassy in Bangkok receives a vital clue. Herman Knippenberg is the most junior diplomat at the Dutch Embassy. He receives a letter in the diplomatic pouch about a missing Dutch couple traveling in Thailand.
“The family was very worried about the fact that for a period of over six weeks they had not had a sign of life from a couple who were ardent correspondents.”
The 28-year-old Knippenberg can’t imagine how important the couple’s names are: Carl Gascogne and Ida Bons. The relative has only one lead. In the missing couple’s last letter, they wrote that they had made a sophisticated new friend in Bangkok.
The man was a French gem dealer who was helping Ida and Carl buy precious stones. “The Frenchman had been very hospitable, had taken them to dinner and had invited them to his apartment. They were not completely sure if this Frenchman was genuine in his intentions.
They thought that there might be an ulterior motive from the Frenchman. But since that letter, nothing.”
The family asked the Dutch Embassy to help find them. “They felt worried, and I felt that they might have reason to be worried.”
Herman Knippenberg contacts Thai authorities and gives them the names Ida Bons and Carl Gascogne. But the Thai police have no information about the missing couple. Knippenberg has to find someone who knows this mysterious gem dealer.
He gets a lead from a friend at another embassy. “I learned from the Australian Consul that an Australian couple, youngsters traveling, had been drugged and robbed by a French gem dealer.”
Knippenberg locates them and discovers the name of the gem dealer: Alain Gautier. But little else. In a city of 4.
2 million people, locating Gautier would prove next to impossible. But Knippenberg catches a break when he learns of a woman who knows the suspect. Working after hours, he arranges an interview with the woman.
She lives in the same apartment complex as Alain Gautier. Her name is Nadia.
She tells an extraordinary story about a devious and ruthless killer. Several months earlier, Nadia met a French-Canadian woman named Marie Leclerc, who moved into the building with her husband, Alain Gautier. Marie told Nadia that Gautier was extremely possessive and would probably 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her if she ever tried to leave.
When Nadia expressed concern, Marie told her that she was joking. Nadia soon learned otherwise.
“My informant told me that Gautier was an extremely dangerous person. He was also charming and lured young foreigners into his apartment.” Knippenberg learns about one guest who got sick, left with Gautier, and never returned.
People had a way of disappearing from the Alain Gautier apartment. They suddenly went on trips from which they never returned, leaving their jewelry and bags and passports behind.
Nadia soon learned he had two willing accomplices. Ajay Chowdhury had earned a chilling reputation. Chow was considered a killer who took great pride in showing people his knife.
Leclerc cultivated more subtle skills. “She had a great knowledge of pharmaceutical things. She could inject people.
She was considered the poisoner of the three.”
And then Knippenberg got the best news yet. Nadia had actually met the missing Dutch couple, Carl Gascogne and Ida Bons. “I promise you good gems.”
And significantly, while they were buying gems from Alain, the couple fell suddenly ill. Not long after that, Gautier and Ajay Chowdhury whisked the sick Dutch couple away.
Then one of Gautier’s guests showed Nadia a picture from the Bangkok Post. “They could see on the photograph in the newspaper that these people who had been murdered in such a cruel manner were wearing the clothes of the Dutch couple.”
Knippenberg now believed the horrifying photo of the burned couple found outside Pattaya showed Carl Gascogne and Ida Bons. She had to find out more about her dangerous neighbors. With Gautier and his two accomplices on a trip to Nepal, Nadia entered their apartment.
In a safe, journals, passports, jewelry. In a suitcase nearby, syringes, drugs, everything that the charming host Alain Gautier would need to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 his guests and assume their identity.
Now afraid for her life, Nadia contacts a friend at the embassy who contacted Knippenberg. She took something from Gautier’s apartment for proof: Ida Bons’ diary. She gives it to Knippenberg along with press clippings about other murders and missing persons cases.
Knippenberg reads the articles, and as he looks over the headline about the murder outside of Bangkok, he has a recollection. “The thing which stuck in my mind was that the female had worn a t-shirt with a label in it, made in Holland.”
Although not a police officer, Knippenberg finds himself in a position familiar to many investigators. Circumstantial evidence points him toward a solution, but he needs concrete proof. He gets that from the dental records of Carl Gascogne and Ida Bons.
“I just entered the morgue, and suddenly from one of the corners of the room came this voice which said, ‘Mr. Knippenberg, I found it. It’s them.’
And at that moment I knew that our worst fears were becoming reality, and that it was the young Dutch couple which had been murdered.”
While Thai police search for the killer, Charles Sobhraj assumes the identity of Carl Gascogne and the alias Alain Gautier to escape murder charges in Nepal. But police in two countries have not made the connection. Interpol will have to put the pieces together and pick up the killer’s trail.
In Bangkok, Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg suspects gem dealer Alain Gautier of murdering a young Dutch couple, but he hasn’t realized that the gem dealer is serial killer Charles Sobhraj. “I had already very, very strong suspicions that more young people of roughly the same age and of a similar background had come to an end in a similar manner.”
Knippenberg compiles all the evidence he has secured into an exhaustive study of the killer’s crimes in Thailand, connecting the deaths of the two unidentified women with the Dutch couple. His research uncovers the unsolved murders in Kathmandu. “I also saw press reports coming out of Nepal which described exactly the same operational method: vicious killings followed by burnings with gasoline in Nepal.”
Knippenberg submits his report to the police, who take it very seriously. The Thai police and an undercover squad raid Alain Gautier’s apartment. Inside, two men and a woman.
The woman’s name is Marie Leclerc. She has a valid passport. Ajay Chowdhury’s papers are in order.
But Sobhraj produces an American passport. Now he is calling himself Steve Watson.
The police bring them to the station for questioning. They also confiscate the apartment safe. But amazingly, Sobhraj convinces police that he really is an American named Steve Watson, and authorities cannot refute his phony passport on the spot.
John Mofhof, former director of Interpol’s US office, explains why: “Every document can be replicated. And if he is sufficiently skilled, or he knows the right people who are sufficiently skilled to help him prepare an authentic-looking US passport, there’s no reason why the Thai officials would question that.”
The safe Nadia found full of stolen passports is now empty except for some receipts. No evidence, no case. And for the police, no choice.
They hold the trio’s passports but have to let the suspects go free.
“When the police stated to me that there had been no proof of their criminal activities, I was of course quite flabbergasted. I could not stand idly by and have a group of completely innocent young people be slaughtered without anybody lifting a finger.”
But Knippenberg had also delivered his file to Interpol’s National Central Bureau in Bangkok. Chief of Interpol Somporn Suthisamphop now knows more about this elusive killer’s true nature. “I understood from the beginning he had to commit more crimes.
He has a true criminal nature. He doesn’t care anything about other people. He only looks after himself.”
No one in Thailand knows the killer’s real name, but Interpol follows close on his trail. His luck is about to run out. In Canada, agents track down the parents of Marie Leclerc.
They learn that she had given her family a phone number in Paris of a woman by the name of Madame Sobhraj. At Interpol headquarters in France, agents run the name Sobhraj through their international database of known felons. Finally, they trace the alias Alain Gautier to the wanted killer Charles Sobhraj.
They put him on their most wanted list and post a red notice to member countries around the world. “You have the ability to very effectively disseminate to 181 countries instantaneously information about a particular crime pattern. And when people are moving across borders, it’s important that you be able to disseminate that kind of information readily.”
Sobhraj is already wanted in India, where he has earned his nickname “The Serpent” for his uncanny ability to slip out of the grasp of the law. And now the serpent slithers away again.
Following the murders of six young Westerners in Thailand and Nepal, Charles Sobhraj, the killer known as the Serpent, is on the run throughout Asia. Interpol has issued a red notice on the fugitive, placing him on the organization’s most wanted list. And although already wanted in India, Sobhraj enters the country and in no time is apparently struck again.
In New Delhi, a young Westerner is found murdered in a tourist hotel. His passport and money gone. The coroner determines death by poisoning.
Three days later, police respond to a mass poisoning of over 50 tourists at a New Delhi hotel. A group of French students claimed their tour guide poisoned them. Police recognize Sobhraj as the phony guide and immediately take him into custody.
Reporter Alan Dawson is not surprised by Sobhraj’s bold act. “I think Charles really thought that he could do anything he wanted to do, and he wanted to show his power over these people by poisoning them. And Charles went down that day.”
Authorities arrest Sobhraj and Leclerc, charging them with poisoning the students. Their usual accomplice, Ajay Chowdhury, was not with them and has never been seen again. An Indian court finds the couple guilty.
Leclerc gets 8 years, Sobhraj 12.
But it takes more than iron bars to hold the Serpent, and authorities underestimate his devious nature. Sobhraj and Leclerc are incarcerated in Tihar Prison, but the charismatic Sobhraj manages to gain special privileges. He exploits the media to toy with authorities back in Thailand.
Reporter Alan Dawson visits him several times. “I asked him about the murders. He says he is familiar with the victims.
He knows what happened to that person, and he makes it very obvious that he was indirectly involved in what happened to that person.”
And on one visit, a disturbing revelation. “He proceeded to draw me a map of a place in Pattaya with X marking the spot where a body was buried. And when I came back to Thailand and I gave that map to the police, and they went to that spot and dug where it said X, and they dug up a body.”
Thai authorities really did want Charles to come back, face a court, be found guilty, and be shot. Extradition proceedings have already begun as Thai authorities tried to bring Sobhraj back. They have until 1995 to try the Serpent for multiple counts of murder before the statute of limitations runs out.
Chief of Interpol in Thailand, Somporn Suthisamphop, went to India. “I went to India to strengthen our extradition request. The Indian police took me to see Charles Sobhraj in prison.
He knew why I was there. He knew that if I was successful and he was sent back to Thailand, he would die. He would be executed.
We had plenty of evidence. Charles told me that he feared one thing legally, and that was to be sent to Thailand.”
The Indian government refuses to extradite Sobhraj until his sentence is complete. Years pass, and the Serpent plots his next move. On his 10th anniversary in prison, a former inmate returns to visit his good friend.
He brings candy. Charles generously offers it to everyone. Within the hour, prisoners and guards pass out.
Sobhraj slips out of jail, a deadly fugitive on the loose.
And no one knows where the Serpent will strike next. A man of the world, escaped killer Charles Sobhraj, The Serpent, could be anywhere, hiding nearby or slipping out of the country without a moment to lose. Interpol reopens its file and notifies its members that the Serpent is loose.
New Delhi police assign a surveillance team to stake out the Serpent’s old hangouts. Three weeks later, New Delhi detective Madhukar Zende spots a man who looks familiar. “Then I focused on him.
I realized that he looked like Sobhraj. My heart started pounding. It seems too easy.
How can a man famous for eluding the law be so careless?”
Now it is time to arrest the Serpent yet again. The agents make their move. The Serpent receives an additional 10 years for the escape.
But it’s exactly what he wants. “Charles said later the reason he staged his escape was specifically because the time was running out on his real sentence in India. He faced possibly being freed from Indian jail.
Thailand had filed for his extradition, but that if he escaped from jail in India, that he would not be extradited to Thailand. And that’s exactly what happens.”
India will not extradite a criminal still serving a sentence. While Sobhraj does the additional jail time in India, the statute of limitations runs out on his crimes in Thailand. When his sentence is up, he’ll be a free man, even free to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 again.
In 1997, Charles Sobhraj is released. Chief of Interpol in Thailand, Somporn Suthisamphop, was furious. “I was very angry.
I wanted him to be tried and punished for his crimes in Thailand. He killed a lot of people here.”
His old accomplice is gone. Leclerc died of cancer in 1984. But Charles Sobhraj is never tried for the murders of the two people who were found burned to death outside of Kathmandu.
Nepal has no statute of limitations on murder. A warrant for Sobhraj’s arrest remains in effect 28 years after the crime.
In that time, Ganesh KC, the young boy who discovered the burned bodies, has joined the Kathmandu police department. He has never forgotten the sight. “It was the first time I saw a dead body.
It was a foreigner, naked, burned. I was really very afraid, terrified.”
Then, in an odd twist of fate, six years later in October 2003, the Serpent returns to Nepal. A journalist snaps a few photos and sells them to the local newspaper. “We couldn’t believe that Sobhraj would come here.
So we called the paper. They said we’re certain it’s him.”
Two days later, as Sobhraj enters a casino in Kathmandu, Ganesh and his men arrest him. “I was delighted because I thought that this might give another opportunity to find justice for the two beach victims.”
Nepalese investigator Bishwa Lal Shrestha hopes his patience will be rewarded. “We people of law, we believe that justice may be delayed but should never be denied. Justice shouldn’t die.”
Sobhraj denies he had anything to do with the murders, and justice might still prove elusive. Ganesh KC and the police in Nepal have a difficult task reconstructing a case almost 30 years old. They turn to Interpol.
“It was important for me to get as much evidence as possible. The international community and Interpol offices in different countries helped us to solve this case.”
The organization provides an extensive dossier on the Serpent, the fruits of their investigation. John Mofhof explained: “When you have a pending investigation, you’re not going to destroy any records associated with that. As long as these cases are outstanding, whatever information comes to Interpol will be collected and stored.”
The dossier gives Ganesh the evidence he needs to secure a murder conviction against Charles Sobhraj. “Sobhraj has to pay for his crimes. He has to be punished.
The souls of his victims will now rest in peace.”
After a 28-year chase, on August 12, 2014, a Nepalese court sentences Charles Sobhraj to life in prison.
A father and daughter disappear on a ski holiday. A drowned man surfaces in the sea. Two mysterious events, 3,500 miles apart, seemingly unconnected, but secretly linked to the master plan of one devious criminal.
It will take crime fighters from four countries to piece it together and make him pay for his crimes.
Jurisdiction: the world. When crimes are committed, an international organization unites police officers to deliver justice. Interpol investigates.
December 1990. A crime of international proportions begins with one suburban family in Brantford, Canada, 65 miles southwest of Toronto. Barbara Walker allows her 15-year-old daughter to spend the holiday skiing with her ex-husband in Switzerland.
Both father and daughter vanish without a trace.
“Our last conversation was about a health problem that I was having, and I was worried that it was going to be diagnosed as cancer. That was our last conversation before she disappeared.”
The holidays pass, and her ex-husband and daughter do not return. This is a picture of them. This is the last picture I took.
After countless attempts to reach them, Barbara goes to the Brantford Police to report them missing. “It felt very hopeless because in another country, far away, how would I ever even begin to find them?”
And the distressing news keeps coming. Over $700,000 has vanished from the accounts of Walker Financial Services, the company owned by Barbara’s ex-husband, Albert. For more than 10 years, Walker Financial has invested millions of dollars in savings and retirement accounts for its clients.
“The offices were besieged with phone calls and then people who came down,” reported Bill Schiller from the Toronto Star newspaper. “There was a sense of panic because people had invested their life savings, and some of them, quite frankly, were rather elderly, and this represented everything that they had been able to save in life.”
Canadian investigators determined that Albert Walker made credit card purchases in Switzerland and never used his return tickets from Zurich. They notify Interpol. John Mofhof, former director of Interpol’s US office, explained the process: “All an officer has to do is call and establish for the Interpol bureau in Ottawa that he is a law enforcement officer and that he needs assistance in the matter, and Interpol can act on it.”
Interpol issues an international missing persons report, a yellow notice, for Albert and Amanda Walker. They’ll stay on the case until father and daughter are found. “Many notices are decades old.
That’s not uncommon. But Interpol will be there to render its assistance, that is, keep that notice pending as long as the investigator needs Interpol to pursue her matter.”
Only Interpol can connect what happens 3,500 miles away off the southern coast of Devon, England. A trawler fisherman hauls up his catch from the bottom of the ocean. He is shocked to find entangled in his nets a human body.
Her Majesty’s Coast Guard receives the distress call. They escort the boat back to Brixham Harbor.
Detective Constable Ian Clenahan heads to the scene. He expects the victim to be a young man who had disappeared off the coast a week earlier in a boating accident. “His body at that stage hadn’t been recovered, and it was certainly a consideration that the body that had been trawled up by the fishing boat could have been, at that stage, the body of this young lad.”
But the facts don’t quite add up. “I went onto the boat and found a male body. It was fully clothed.”
The victim seems older, and his body looks to have been in the ocean for some time. “I found that there was no identification on him. Pockets were pulled out of the trousers.”
Detective Clenahan wonders if this could be a robbery victim, but the dead man still wears what appears to be a Rolex watch. “We didn’t know whether it was a genuine Rolex or whether it was, of course, a 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒. Either way, the watch could provide a clue.
I examined the wristwatch on the boat and noted that the time had stopped at 11:35, and the date window on the watch was showing the number 22.”
Clenahan also notices a blurred star-shaped tattoo on the victim’s hand. When the medical examiner arrives, Detective Clenahan points out a deep gash on the back of the victim’s head.
Police bring the body to the pathology lab. The first order of business is raising fingerprints, not so easy on a body that spent a long time in the water. “The skin of the hands become wrinkled, and it’s extremely difficult to get fingerprints off a hand like that.”
But forensic pathologist Dr. Guy Fernando manages to lift a usable print. The frigid waters of the English Channel helped preserve the fragile body.
He discovers three injuries: a bruise on the hip and a second bruise on the middle of the thigh that he concludes occurred after death. The timing of the third injury, a deep gash to the back of the head, presents more of a mystery. It could have been inflicted before or after death.
But the lungs clearly indicate that this man died from drowning.
“At that stage, I had only the few injuries to go on, and they didn’t make any sense. It’s common to find injuries in people who have drowned, and at that time I couldn’t really say that this was a homicide.”
The forensic text placed the victim’s few personal effects in a bag. The doctor grapples with another mystery: the victim’s time of death. After several days at sea, it’s impossible to estimate.
“All I could say that he’d been in the water for a week or two. Not much to go on.”
Three injuries of unknown cause, no identification, and no way of knowing how the man drowned. The pathologist freezes the body in case it requires further examination. Devon authorities run the fingerprints through their database of known criminals.
They find no match.
Days go by. Another body surfaces in the waters near Brixham Harbor. The Coast Guard determines that this was the young man from the boating accident.
It has no connection with the previous John Doe. The first body lying in the morgue remains a mystery that demands a solution. “What we have to do is try our utmost to identify who the dead person was and to find out how exactly that person came to die.”
Clenahan learns that the victim’s Rolex watch might hold the answer. Rolex keeps records for each of its timepieces. If the owner ever had it serviced, the company would have his name on file.
Investigators send the watch to Rolex headquarters in Kent, England.
But going through the victim’s clothing, Detective Clenahan discovers another important clue. “In amongst those clothing, we found that a lot of the labels originated from Canadian manufacturers.”
By now, more than five years have passed since Barbara Walker’s ex-husband and her daughter left Canada bound for their Switzerland ski holiday and disappeared. “It was hard to handle. If you thought about it too much, you could lose your mind.”
Barbara’s hope never wavers. She tries not to imagine the worst, believing that her daughter and ex-husband will somehow be found. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in her shoes in this situation.
Tragic. A mother, you know. I imagine that it would be very difficult.”
Two cases on two continents. A desperate family tragedy and a body pulled from the sea, seemingly unrelated. But investigators will soon find them linked to a large and cunning criminal plot.
Two random tragedies, or so it seems. In Canada, a father takes his daughter on holiday to Europe and they never return. In England, a fisherman pulls a dead man from the sea.
Eventually, authorities will connect them and reveal the mastermind behind it all. But for now, investigators work them as separate cases, counting on timing, luck, and thorough detective work.
In Devon, England, Detective Ian Clenahan tries to solve the case of the dead man pulled from the sea. The victim’s watch has a serial number that could identify its owner. “So we sent the Rolex off to the Rolex company head office in England, where it was examined, and we were eventually informed that that particular Rolex watch had been serviced three times, all in the Harrogate area of England in Yorkshire.
And the name of the person that put the watch in for service on all three occasions was Mr. Neil Barrett.”
Investigators’ first lead on the identity of the man in the morgue. His last known address was in Chelmsford, northwest of London, and a five-hour drive from Devon. Detective Clenahan asks a colleague there to help out.
“So my role was to go to Chelmsford and establish if anyone there knew the chap,” said Detective Sergeant Peter Redmond.
Redmond finds Barrett’s rental house empty and calls upon Barrett’s landlord. The landlord tells him that Neil had given up the house and moved to France to set himself up in business. The landlord gives the detective a copy of Neil Barrett’s lease.
On it, Barrett listed a man named Steve Russell as a reference.
Detective Redmond calls Steve Russell, authorities’ only link to the deceased. “The purpose of my meeting with Steve Russell was to see if there was anything else about Neil that he could tell us that would assist the identification, because as I understood it, the body wasn’t in a fit state to be viewed by a friend.”
“About my height. We sat and talked for a while. Nice chap, well spoken, well dressed casually but very well-dressed, expensive clothes.
He had an air of confidence about him. There was an accent, but I couldn’t detect it. It was North American, whether it was American or Canadian, I couldn’t tell.”
Redmond wanted to know when he’d last seen Barrett and if he knew at that time what his plans were, because they couldn’t explain how he would be traveling to France and winding up in the sea of Devon. Steve Russell can’t explain his friend’s deadly twist of fate. “He was originally going to Paris, but I don’t believe…”
But he offers some useful information. He recalls that Neil had served in the Army.
The Army would provide Neil’s medical and dental records, which were forwarded to Devon and Cornwall, and they were able to match the dental records. Barrett has been positively identified. Police find no further evidence of foul play.
Detective Redmond believes the case is wrapping up. “They identified the body. There’s no sign of any third-party involvement.
His death was being treated as an accident of drowning.”
But what investigators don’t realize is that this case is just getting started.
Detective Clenahan notifies Barrett’s brother of Neil’s death. Barrett’s brother tells Clenahan that the tattoo is a Canadian maple leaf. He asks Clenahan to put him in touch with Steve Russell, hoping that Russell can help him find his brother’s belongings.
Clenahan calls on Detective Peter Redmond again to ask him to visit Russell in the small farming village where he lives.
In rural England, houses often have no street addresses. Instead, they’re given names. At first, Detective Redmond can’t locate it.
“I found the two houses, neither of which had got names on them. So I took potluck and I called at one. As it turned out, the neighbors said, ‘I said I was who I was, and then I was looking for Steve Russell.’
And he said, ‘Oh no, Neil Barrett lives there.’ And I’m thinking straight away, something’s not right here. That’s the name of the man who’s dead in Devon.”
“How long have they lived next door to you?” Redmond learns what the neighbors know about this other Neil Barrett. He discovers an uncanny similarity between Neil Barrett and Steve Russell.
“And when they described the person they knew as Neil, his manner, the accent, it became apparent to me that we were talking about the same person but with two different names.”
Redmond realizes that Steve Russell is pretending to be Neil Barrett. “What they said transformed what had been a simple investigation to identify a found body to potentially a murder investigation. The man I was seeking was living as this man’s identity.
There had to be something sinister in my mind. Had Neil met his end as a consequence?”
On his way back to the station, Redmond calls Detective Ian Clenahan in Devon with the news. “Detective Clenahan informed me of his findings at Woodham Walter, which really threw a totally different light on the matter.”
But investigators haven’t begun to fathom the depths of deceit involved in this case, or to suspect the international criminal at the bottom of it.
In Canada, people have begun to realize the Albert Walker case is much more complicated than it originally seemed. Right after Walker disappeared with his daughter, money disappeared from his company. And now it appears that Walker had plundered his own corporation.
“I found bank information indicating that large amounts of money were being transferred through his personal bank account. I knew it wasn’t his own money because we didn’t have that kind of money. So it had to be either money that he was taking from the company or taking it from clients.”
“He had left his wife to deal with the clients who are obviously extremely upset. It was a shock to people that someone like this who seemed to be righteous and good and charming and generous could actually disappear and leave people high and dry without their life savings.”
Canadian police charge Walker with 19 counts of theft, fraud, and money laundering. They request that Interpol issue a red notice for Albert Walker. He will rise to number four on Interpol’s most wanted list.
“The red notice is like an electronic version of the wanted notice that we used to see in the post office. Interpol will send that out to 181 countries so that if this person, if this subject comes to their attention, they can take steps to see that he’s apprehended and returned to face justice in Canada.”
But Walker will be very hard to locate. When he left Canada, he shed his identity. “I think he was difficult to track because you’re dealing with a very cunning criminal mind.
Mr. Walker was not a deeply intelligent man, he was not an intellectual, but when it came to crime, he was dangerously clever. Maybe too clever for his own good.”
Because now Albert Walker has the full force of Interpol gunning for him. That leaves him with no place to hide.
Off the coast of Devon, England, an anonymous dead body is pulled from the sea. Eventually, dental records identify him as Neil Barrett. But this case is not so simple.
Someone has taken Barrett’s life and stolen his identity. Detective Peter Redmond has even met the impostor. He introduced himself as Steve Russell.
Concerned that he may be a friend of police, they soon learn that Steve Russell lives with his young wife and two small children in Canada. The name Steve Russell means nothing yet to Barbara Walker, who is more concerned about the capture of her ex-husband, Albert Walker, number four on Interpol’s most wanted list.
But during the Canadian police investigation into Albert Walker, they find the real Steve Russell, one of Walker’s former clients. He told the police that he had gone to Mr. Walker for a loan.
Mr. Walker said that he would be able to facilitate that, and in doing so, said he would need his birth certificate.
With that one slip of paper, an experienced criminal can steal an identity. “No, I don’t… I mean, our dealings were…
he needed another identity, appreciate, and Mr. Walker did just that.”
“There were two key things that he did extremely well. He kept moving, and he kept moving under different personalities, and he got the necessary documentation, the official papers that he needed in order to be convincing.”
Using Steve Russell’s identity, Albert Walker starts a new life in England. Three years later, fearful that Canadian investigators will catch up with him, he takes on yet another identity: Neil Barrett.
“We started over the next few weeks to investigate the house, and we checked on all the utilities, the gas, the electric, the water, and we found that all of these items were registered in the name of Neil Barrett.” Police find the children’s birth certificates are also registered under the name Barrett.
But the real Neil Barrett is lying in the morgue in Devon. He has no wife and lived alone. But he did have an ex-girlfriend named Melinda, who became an unwitting pawn in a murderous master plan.
Detective Clenahan tracks her down. “When did you first meet Steve Russell?” Melinda worked for the man police know as Steve Russell.
She bought antiques and property, traveling around the continent for him. But that isn’t all she did. “She was also asked by Mr.
Russell to take vast quantities of money over into Europe and deposit them in various banks in Switzerland and other similar countries.”
She never questioned where the money came from. Russell wins her trust completely. Melinda introduces her boyfriend, Neil Barrett, to her boss from Canada.
She informed Mr. Russell at the time that her boyfriend, Mr. Neil Barrett, had one great ambition in life, which was to emigrate to Canada.
Russell makes Melinda and Neil business partners, setting the trap. To complete the paperwork, he asks for their identification papers, including birth certificates. “It was wonderful to work with him.”
Together, they have no reason to be suspicious of Russell. After all, he’s exceedingly generous.
One Christmas, they were around at Mr. Russell’s home address when Mr. Russell gave Mr.
Barrett and Melinda two one-way tickets to Canada. What they don’t know is that Russell needs Barrett out of the country for a reason. He wants the man’s identity.
The trap is sprung. Steve Russell becomes Neil Barrett. But things don’t quite work out as planned.
Neil and Melinda break up. Melinda moves back home. And soon enough, a letter arrives in Steve Russell’s mailbox.
Neil Barrett has decided to come home as well.
Steve Russell finds himself in an impossible situation. “The problems came when Neil Barrett decided to return to England, and then there were two Neil Barretts living in close proximity.”
Clenahan suspects that gave the impostor a motive to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Barrett. “We decided at that time that we would arrest both Mr. Russell and his wife Diane Russell on suspicion of the murder of Neil Barrett.”
According to the neighbors, Russell and his family are out of town. But Detective Peter Redmond decides to drive by to see for himself. He is surprised to see a car in the driveway.
But the detective is alone, without backup. “I found the car’s back. I’m not going to leave in case they take flight.”
It was then suggested that they didn’t really know who this person is. He’s wanted for murder. Someone suggested there might be firearms involved.
In Great Britain, police almost never carry a pistol, and armed raids require special arrangements. Redmond is told to sit tight until headquarters can mount an operation.
While the detective waits for the firearms team to arrive, a taxi approaches the house, and the man he knows as Steve Russell gets in. With or without backup, Redmond cannot let the suspect slip from his grasp. “So I decided to follow it and to get it stopped.”
Redmond is alone and unarmed. He can only pursue his mark and hope that backup will arrive before it’s too late. “I got on the telephone and explained to them what was happening, that I was following this taxi and I believed it got our suspect.
So they frantically tried to get the armed response vehicle, which in fact was some distance behind me, to catch us up. And eventually, I would imagine two to three miles from the house, I finally caught up and stopped him.”
Police approached the arrest cautiously. They know Steve Russell is a desperate man about to be cornered.
In England, a fishing boat snares a dead body. Police discover that a man named Steve Russell has stolen the dead man’s identity. They arrest him on suspicion of murder.
Detective Peter Redmond takes him in. Russell plays it cool. “So I walked up to him, and he recognized me straight away.
‘Sergeant Peter Redmond, Devon and Cornwall Police. I’m placing you under arrest for the murder of Neil Barrett.’ He was completely composed.
He put his hands behind his back in readiness for me to handcuff him, and then they took him away in their patrol car.”
“Mr. Russell is a very cool, calm, and calculated killer. He’s a very, very ruthless man and would do anything to meet his ends.”
At Russell’s house, Redmond and his associates find the rest of the family. They take the young mother in for questioning. “She seemed a little taken aback, but there was no hysterics.
It was all about the children.”
Then, while Diane was getting herself ready and the children, the female officer who was with her noticed the small rucksack that she was preparing for the toddler and said, “Wait a minute, what have you got in there? It’s heavy, isn’t it?” And when she opened the bag, she discovered several bars of gold and several thousand in cash.
Just what a three-year-old needs for a night away.
The man at the center of the mystery won’t cooperate. “It’s very difficult to give someone an opinion of a person who answers ‘no comment’ to every question.” But he appeared to be a very calm, very calculated person, very sure of himself.
Police question Diane Russell separately. “She answered all our questions, and she informed us that Steven Russell was a very successful businessman and that he had fled America in order that his wife, who he had now split up from, couldn’t get half of his earnings from the business. And that was why they were over here.
We just love it here.”
The police search Russell’s house, hoping to find evidence to turn their suspicions into proof. “At this point, we still didn’t have any hard facts at all, and in fact, really we were struggling to say that Mr. Barrett had actually been murdered.”
Investigators find more cash and gold bars. They also uncover various documents, including a rental agreement for a self-storage facility. “So we checked the lockup, and we found…”
A search of the storage unit yields a global positioning satellite device, or GPS, used to navigate boats.
GPS. The suspect has a boat registered under Barrett’s name. Police locate it at the pier in Devon.
They impound and search it. On board, they find a bag with credit card receipts, including one from a nautical supply store. The credit card is also in the name of Neil Barrett.
Police question the owner of the nautical supply store. He tells them that the receipt is for an anchor. He recalls the customer insisted on buying the anchor even when told it was too small for his boat.
The store owner describes the purchaser. He fits the description of the suspect known as Steve Russell.
Detective Clenahan knows he must find the missing anchor. He re-interviews the trawler fisherman who discovered the body. “He informed us that in fact an anchor had been trawled up in the same nets as Mr.
Barrett. The fisherman had forgotten all about it. He was, after all, focused on the discovery of the body.”
Clenahan knows the anchor could provide crucial evidence of murder. Pathologist Guy Fernando has frozen the victim’s remains. When the police bring the anchor to the morgue, he can re-examine the body in light of this new evidence.
Dr. Fernando determines that the bruises on the thigh and the hip seem consistent with the anchor’s shape. He concludes that the killer used the anchor to weigh the body down.
“And immediately the police and myself thought this must have been hooked onto the belt.” Dr. Fernando believes the anchor pulled away from the body when it got caught up in the trawler’s net.
“Might I see the belt, please? So we took the belt out and had a look, and where we thought the anchor must have been hooked, the belt showed definite evidence of twisting.”
They bring the belt and the anchor to the lab. The anchor is coated with zinc. Forensic investigators discover traces of zinc on the belt, providing the evidence they need to classify this death as a murder.
They theorize that the killer knocked Neil Barrett unconscious on the boat, weighed him down with the anchor, and threw him overboard.
The police know a murder occurred. Now they must link it to the suspected murderer. Using Neil Barrett’s card, Steve Russell purchased the anchor.
But investigators need to place him at the scene of the crime. The GPS device recovered from his storage locker could be the smoking gun they’re looking for. They send it to the manufacturer to determine where the GPS system has traveled recently.
“Very interestingly, this put that GPS system out at sea at 9:00 p. m. on the 21st of July, six miles off Teignmouth, which was roughly where the body was trawled up from.
This is consistent with the date on the watch found on the body, the 22nd. A Rolex will self-wind for up to 44 hours before it stops.”
Time has run out for Steve Russell, on the hook for murder. But he is not the man authorities think he is, and his crimes go far deeper than they ever imagined.
British police arrest North American Steve Russell, believing he murdered Neil Barrett to steal his identity. But through Interpol’s fingerprint database, they are about to discover they’ve solved an international case that has stymied investigators for years.
Whenever a foreign suspect is arrested, authorities send the fingerprints to the Interpol database to see if the suspect has committed crimes abroad. In fact, Interpol does have a match. But the fingerprints do not belong to a man named Steven Russell.
He is not the man authorities think he is, and his crimes go far deeper than they ever imagined.
“Within a few hours, a reply came back that in fact Mr. Steven Russell wasn’t Steven Russell but was in fact Albert Johnson Walker, a man that featured very prominently on Interpol’s most wanted list.”
Albert Walker. The same man who left Canada six years earlier to escape fraud charges. The same man who appeared with his teenage daughter.
“We had caught the fourth most wanted man in the world. We were all obviously very thrilled.”
In Brantford, Canada, Barbara Walker has not seen her daughter in six years, ever since her husband Albert disappeared with the young girl. Finally, she receives the call she has longed for. “This is Detective Myers from the Ontario Provincial Police.
I’m calling to inform you…” “My knees went weak. I thought, this is unbelievable.
They were saying that my daughter was found, that she was okay. And it was just after all those years of hoping, and it came out of the blue.”
British authorities uncover that the woman posing as Russell’s wife is really Barbara Walker’s kidnapped daughter.
An older man with a younger wife is not unusual. But an older man with a younger woman who, when you look closely, has physical resemblances to him, then you start to think, I wonder what’s going on here. “This is a particularly difficult situation because you’re talking about a child-parent relationship, and the concept of free will, as we know it, breaks down somewhat in that equation.
Certainly, you’re a victim in that instance.”
“His daughter came over at 15 years of age. Mr. Walker was a very manipulative man.
He manipulated many lives that he came across daily and ruined people’s lives. It didn’t matter whether it was a friend or family. He didn’t care.”
Though many have speculated about the identity of the children’s father, the paternity has never been revealed.
British Social Services counselors arrange and monitor the first meeting between Barbara and her daughter. “I was shaking when I went into the room, but it went well. It was awkward, of course.
When you haven’t spoken with someone in six years, you sort of have to reintroduce yourselves.”
“It was when that spell was broken, the contact with her father was broken, she was then able to come forward and tell what had really happened. And it became apparent that she was not a suspect, she was a victim.”
In time, Amanda Walker agrees to testify against her father. Albert Walker will finally have to answer for the death of Neil Barrett.
It seems like the perfect murder. And for all intents and purposes, he should have got away with it. The Rolex watch found on Barrett’s body, the clue that gave police the dead man’s identity, is where the case came together for police and unraveled for the con man.
“Had he even taken the watch off and thrown it, perhaps 60 or 70 leagues, simply disengaged it from the body, he’d be a free man today.”
And were it not for Interpol, the identity of the murderer would have forever remained a mystery. “The fingerprints were the key issue. I think had the fingerprints not identified him as our Walker, I don’t think we would ever have found out who he was in the end.
Thank God Interpol were the people who put together the information, sent it to the United Kingdom, and the investigators finally knew who they were dealing with.”
Albert Walker is convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Although finally brought to justice, Walker’s ego will not allow him to be humbled. “He was led away in the prison van when one of the prison officers mentioned my name to him.
He replied, ‘Yeah, I know the man. Tall, not too bright. But I was brighter than Mr.
Walker on this occasion.'”
Albert Walker is serving a life sentence in England. He still faces 37 charges of fraud in Canada.
