Baekuni, who used a single name and was known as Babe, was born in 1962 and lived in Jakarta, working as a street food seller and scrap collector.
Between 1993 and 2010 he killed fourteen boys aged between seven and twelve. Almost all were street children, of whom Jakarta had very large numbers living around the railway stations and markets. He offered them food, money or a place to sleep, took them to his room, sexually assaulted them, strangled them, and in several cases dismembered the bodies and left the parts in different parts of the city.
The disappearances of street children were not investigated. Several of the boys had no registered birth, no address and no adult who would report them, and the police did not connect the deaths across seventeen years.
He was arrested on January 8, 2010 after the dismembered body of a boy was found in Cakung in east Jakarta and traced to him. He confessed to fourteen and was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on October 5, 2010.
The case caused a national argument in Indonesia about the position of street children and about how a series lasting seventeen years had produced no investigation at all.