In January 2010 a cardboard box was found by a roadside in East Jakarta holding the dismembered body of a boy. He was Ardiansyah, nine, one of the city's street children, and his mutilated body was found on January 8 and his head the next day. A complaint from his family and the trail of the box led police on January 9 to a modest rented home in Pulo Gadung, near the Haji Dalim mosque, where they arrested a street vendor known as Babe.
Baekuni was born in 1961, the son of a poor farmer in Magelang, Central Java. Mocked as a fool because he so often missed class, he left school for good and ran away to Jakarta, where he lived at Lapangan Banteng and was sodomized by a thug, an experience he later said shaped what he became. He became a kind of minder to the street children who drifted around Lapangan Banteng, and he knew Siswanto, the man called Robot Gedek, who had also sodomized and killed street boys and was sentenced to death in the 1990s. He had once served two years for abducting a girl.
He confessed to killing fourteen boys since 1993, street children whom he took in with food and somewhere to sleep, sodomized, and strangled with a raffia cord, and four of whom he dismembered. The prosecutors named them: Teguh Raifudin, Teguh called Ardi, Iwan Imron, Kiki, Doli, Feri, Ardit, Arief Kecil, Rio, Adi, Yusuf, Riki, Aris and Ardiansyah. Their ages are given as six to twelve in most reports. One boy, Ardi, he killed in a field when the boy refused him and buried in the rice paddies on the bank of the Gluthak river at Mranggen, in Kajoran, back in Magelang, where he often took children. He killed a twelve-year-old in Purwokerto, in Central Java, and carried the head to Jakarta to cover his tracks. Police took him back to Magelang to find his victims.
The prosecutor, Trimo, charged him with premeditated murder under Article 340 of the criminal code and asked for death, saying his acts went beyond the bounds of humanity. On October 6, 2010, the East Jakarta District Court sentenced him to life. The prosecution appealed. "If killing two or three people gets the death penalty, how can killing fourteen get life?" Trimo said. The Jakarta High Court, in a panel led by Judge Sumantri, found the killings cruel and barbaric, committed only because the boys would not submit, with no real remorse and nothing in mitigation, and raised the sentence to death. The ruling is dated December 13, 2010, in most accounts; other reports give December 3 or December 20.
His lawyer, Rangga Reikuser, appealed, arguing that the High Court had ignored two victims' mothers, Nurhamidah, the mother of Ardiansyah, and Hudaifah, the mother of Arif Kecil, who had told the judges they opposed the death penalty and would accept life. On April 21, 2011, the Supreme Court upheld the sentence, holding him guilty of killing fourteen boys and mutilating four, and it later rejected his request for judicial review. By May 2016, as Indonesia prepared a third wave of executions, he had still not been put before a firing squad and was not on the list, and no execution has been reported since.