(CNN)--The smell inside the morgue was overpowering, as disinfectant masked the odor of decaying corpses.

"It's them," said a dentist, who had just inspected the mouth of a stiff body.

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. The woman's brain had been bashed in with something heavy and the man strangled, a pathologist said. Both were still alive when they were set alight.

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. 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.

"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.