Jha was born in 1967 in Ghoswari, in Bihar, and came to Delhi in the 1980s, where he worked as a labourer and then ran a small vegetable business in the Azadpur market. He recruited young migrant men from Bihar as helpers, put them up, and killed them when they crossed him: over drinking, over women, over dishonesty, by his own account.
Between 1998 and 2007 he killed at least seven men. He strangled them with a nunchaku, dismembered the bodies at his room, and left the trunks and limbs in bags outside Tihar Jail in west Delhi, sometimes with handwritten notes challenging the police to identify the victim or catch him. He said afterwards that he had chosen the jail gates because he had been mistreated by police in an earlier case and wanted to humiliate them.
He was arrested in 1998 and released, and arrested again on May 20, 2007 after a note led investigators to him. He was convicted in three of the cases, the others failing for want of identification of the bodies, and sentenced to death on February 5, 2013. The Delhi High Court commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment in January 2016, and he remains in Tihar.
The count of seven is his own, given in confession; three are proved. Several of the dead were never identified at all, which is the part of the case Indian reporting has returned to: young men came to Delhi from Bihar to work, disappeared, and no one reported them missing.