Ali Kaya was born in Gaziantep in 1978; Murderpedia gives 1979. He was in prison by seventeen for theft, assault and snatch theft, and was released in 1997 at nineteen. The killings began that year.
The first was his uncle. He stabbed Celal Kaya to death at his estate agency in Alanya in 1997, was sentenced to five years of aggravated imprisonment at Silifke, and was paroled in 1999.
What follows is a sequence of releases and further killings. After the parole he killed Zeynel Abidin Gümüş, a man he believed had sexually assaulted his mother. In prison at Elazığ he was diagnosed with a mental disorder and moved to a psychiatric hospital, from which he was discharged on a report of claustrophobia. Free again, he stabbed three men in Alanya, a music hall owner, a procurer and a third man; two of them died. Because he held a psychiatric report he was not detained during that trial. He then stabbed two officers of Alanya prison, Kemal Aksakal and Hasan Askeroğlu, in the street.
He was placed in 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 to death. The roommate was Ayhan Kartal, the child murderer the Turkish press called the beast of İzmir. It is that killing that fixed his own nickname in the papers, bebek yüzlü katil, the babyface killer. He was arrested in 2001 and held at Şanlıurfa.
The last killing attributed to him is Mehmet Poyraz, shot in 2012 at a house in Gaziantep.
He escaped twice. In 2003 he got out of the semi-open prison at Şanlıurfa and was not retaken until 2004, when a suspicious vehicle was stopped at Mahmutlar near Alanya. He was carrying a false identity card in the name Erdal Yılmaz and a death list naming businessmen and men he said had abused him as a child. He told his interrogators that he would confront his enemies and the sinners, that he had not succeeded so far, and that he would cleanse society of bad people.
The second escape was on January 5, 2014. During Sunday visiting hours at Gaziantep prison he walked out with the crowd of visitors, and his absence was noticed only at the evening count. Police and gendarmerie ran a large manhunt; he had gone to Adana and Mersin and intended to cross into Syria. He was caught in central Gaziantep on March 3, 2014, running from a friend's house, with a handgun and a list of ten names on him, and returned to the prison he had left.
Turkish sources also report that he attempted to kill Suphi Altındöken, the murderer of Özgecan Aslan, while both were in prison.
The figure of ten is what Turkish reporting and the reference works attribute to him. A conviction-by-conviction breakdown is not published in the sources consulted here, and the case has never resolved into a single trial: he has moved between prisons and psychiatric hospitals for most of thirty years.