On Sunday, January 5, 2014, during open visiting at the high-security H-type prison in Gaziantep, a thirty-five-year-old inmate named Ali Kaya slipped into the yard of his ward while most of the guards had been moved to the entry points. He climbed a five-meter wall topped with razor wire, dropped into the prison parking lot and hid for about two hours under an ambulance and the prison service vehicles. When visiting ended he walked out through the gate among the departing families. His younger brother Kenan, who shared his seven-man ward, told the guards he had gone. Turkish papers had long called Kaya bebek yüzlü katil, the babyface killer, for his good looks and innocent face, and credited him with ten killings.
He was born in Gaziantep in 1978 and was in prison by seventeen for theft, assault and snatch theft. Most accounts say he came out in 1997 at nineteen and began killing the same year; one puts his first killing at seventeen. The first victim was his uncle, Celal Kaya, stabbed to death at his estate agency in Alanya. No one learned why. Kaya was sentenced to five years of aggravated imprisonment at Silifke and was paroled in 1999.
What followed was a run of releases and killings. After the parole he went to Adana and killed Zeynel Abidin Gümüş, a man he believed had sexually abused his mother, and by one account left a note at the scene saying God was calling him and he would soon settle accounts with the sinners. Moved from prison to prison for indiscipline, he was sent from Elazığ prison to the city's psychiatric hospital, diagnosed with a mental disorder and given a report that he could not be held in an enclosed space; the hospital discharged him. Back in Alanya he stabbed three men: a music hall owner known as Dedo, a dealer known as Ağrılı Mehmet, and a third man named in the press as Fırat S. Accounts differ on whether two of them died or all three. Because he held a psychiatric report, he was not detained during the trial. He then stabbed the director of Alanya prison, Kemal Aksakal, and another officer, Hasan Askeroğlu, in the street; Turkish sources differ on whether they survived.
He was committed to the psychiatric hospital at Manisa with a diagnosis of personality disorder. On the night of March 13, 2000, he and another patient, Tayfun Şahin, stabbed his roommate in the throat and abdomen. The roommate was Ayhan Kartal, the rapist and child killer the press called the beast of İzmir, and it was after that killing that the babyface name stuck. Kaya was arrested in 2001 and sent to Şanlıurfa.
In 2003 he walked away from the semi-open prison at Şanlıurfa. In 2004 gendarmes stopped a suspicious car at Mahmutlar near Alanya and found him carrying an identity card in the name of Erdal Yılmaz and a long death list naming businessmen and other men he said had abused him as a child. Under questioning he said he would face his enemies and the sinners, that he had not managed it so far, and that he would cleanse society of bad people.
Released again, he shot Mehmet Poyraz on April 6, 2012, at a house in Gaziantep where Poyraz was living with his family; one account says it was his brother's house, and that Poyraz had convictions for wounding, robbery and drug dealing. One Turkish paper says he killed three people after his 2012 release who had informed on him. He was recaptured in November 2013 after a heavy exchange of fire with gendarmes and held at Gaziantep, which he left seven weeks later.
The manhunt after the January escape involved police and a special gendarmerie team, and criminal and administrative inquiries were opened into the officers on duty. He had gone to Adana and Mersin and meant to cross into Syria, then came back to Gaziantep and hid at the house of a childhood friend, a barber, in the Çıksorut neighborhood. On March 3, 2014, realizing the house was surrounded, he tried to get away across the roof and was caught after a short chase with a pistol in his hand and a list of ten names in his pocket, people he was said to have planned to kill. At the courthouse he saw the reporters and shouted: "Allahu akbar. If not today, then tomorrow, God willing." He was returned to the prison he had escaped from, under measures meant to stop a third escape.
Turkish sources also report that he tried to kill Suphi Altındöken, the murderer of Özgecan Aslan, while both were in prison. Most published counts credit him with ten killings; one paper gave eleven. The cases were tried separately over some fifteen years in courts from Silifke to Gaziantep, and no single published record sets out the sentence for each.