Ahmad Suradji was born on January 10, 1949 in North Sumatra and worked as a cattle breeder near Medan, and as a dukun, a traditional mystic healer. Consulting a dukun for medical and spiritual help is ordinary across much of Indonesia, and Suradji had a substantial local practice.
Women came to him wanting to be more attractive, to be richer, to keep a husband, to succeed in business. He told them the ritual required them to be buried up to the waist in the ground behind his house. Then he strangled them with a cable, buried them in the sugar cane plantation with their heads facing his home, and, by his account, drank their saliva as part of the ritual. He said his father had appeared to him in a dream in 1988 and instructed him to kill seventy women in order to become a powerful healer. He was known as Nasib Kelewang, and took the title Datuk Maringgi from the sorcerer he claimed to be.
Between 1986 and 1997 he killed forty-two women and girls aged between eleven and thirty. His three wives, who were sisters, were aware of it, and one of them was later convicted as an accomplice.
The bodies were found in April 1997 after a woman's clothing was discovered in the plantation and relatives of the missing pressed. He was arrested on May 2, 1997, and confessed. He was convicted and executed by firing squad on July 10, 2008.