"Usha has no interest in seeing her blood father"
Usha Sutliff is the daughter of notorious serial killer Charles Sobhraj and her life is completely different to his.
Known as The Serpent, Sobhraj is an Indian-Vietnamese killer, fraudster and thief who preyed on Western tourists on the hippie trail of South Asia in the 1970s.
With the help of his girlfriend Marie-Andree Leclerc, he was suspected to have murdered at least 20 tourists in India, Thailand and Nepal.
Sobhraj was jailed for a total of 29 years before being released in December 2022.
But before his life of cold-blooded crimes, Sobhraj was briefly married to Frenchwoman Chantal Compagnon, whom he shared a daughter with.
Sobhraj and Compagnon met in Paris in their early twenties and despite disapproval from her parents, the pair struck up a romance.
But after a brief period of dating, Sobhraj was reportedly arrested for attempting to evade police while driving a stolen car and later jailed for eight months.
After his release, he proposed to Compagnon and they got married.
Compagnon soon became pregnant and gave birth to Usha.
Sobhraj vowed that he would leave his life of crime behind. They left Paris for Mumbai.
However, Charles Sobhraj continued with his crimes and he was soon arrested for the Hotel Ashok jewellery heist in New Delhi.
He escaped jail by faking appendicitis and reunited with his increasingly resentful wife.
In 1971, the family fled to Afghanistan.
By this stage, Compagnon had lost faith in her marriage and sent Usha back to Paris to be raised by her parents.
In Kabul, Sobhraj and Compagnon were arrested for car theft and failing to pay for their hotel.
Compagnon was soon released and returned to Paris, last telling her husband:
“We are never going to see each other again.”
Sobhraj went on to become a notorious serial killer.
Does Usha still have Contact with her Father?
While Compagnon was held at the women’s jail in Kabul in 1973, she was introduced to stone mason Leon Harris, who had been visiting a friend at the compound.
She grew closer to Harris.
After her release and bidding farewell to Sobhraj, the pair struck up a romance.
When she reunited with her daughter, Harris proposed to Compagnon and they got married in 1975.
The trio later started a new life in the United States, where Compagnon divorced Sobhraj, found work in the music industry and gave birth to her second daughter Sandrine.
Harris adopted Usha and became her legal father.
He revealed that she has had no contact with Sobhraj since she was a baby.
Harris said: “Usha has no interest in seeing her blood father and the last thing she would do is talk about him.
“She is a formidable woman, good-looking and tough-minded like her father, but that is about the only thing they have in common.”
Usha was eight years old when she first learned the truth about her biological father and has never expressed any interest in meeting him.
Harris added: “The rest of us have lived quietly for decades with this awful story and prefer it to stay that way.
“Usha has even cut off her mother because she is so eager to escape this aspect of her past.”
What does Usha Sutliff do Now?
Usha now dedicates her life to fighting crime and has a ‘classified’ job with the US government, specialising in counterterrorism and homeland security.
According to her biography on the government consultancy, Lafayette Group, Usha was an expert in “law enforcement, counter-terrorism, intelligence, homeland security and cybersecurity” until recently.
She previously worked at the Centre for Policing Terrorism at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and was seconded full-time to the LAPD’s Counter-Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau.
Usha has been a member of the LAPD Reserve Program since 2007 and is a former professional print journalist having graduated from Boston University.
Usha is now married to Jason Sutliff in San Marino, California, on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
Her adopted father said she cut ties with her mother sometime after Sobhraj was released from an Indian prison in 1997.
But social media suggests her half-sister Sandrine may still have ties to their mother.
Charles Sobhraj has been the subject of three non-fiction books.
The 2015 Bollywood film Main Aur Charles is inspired by Sobhraj’s life, particularly focusing on his escape from the Indian jail.
An eight-part BBC-commissioned miniseries called The Serpent was broadcast in the UK in January 2021, starring Tahar Rahim as Sobhraj, before being streamed on Netflix in April 2021.
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