Chandrakant Jha was a vegetable hawker from rural Bihar who lived and worked in north Delhi. Between October 2006 and May 2007 the remains of three young men were found in public places in the city, most of them in west Delhi. With them came handwritten letters in Hindi that mocked the Delhi Police and promised more deaths. Jha was arrested in May 2007, and in January 2013 a Delhi sessions court convicted him of all three murders. He was sentenced to death twice and to life imprisonment for the rest of his life in the third case. In January 2016 the Delhi High Court upheld every conviction but replaced both death sentences with imprisonment for the rest of his natural life, without remission.
Delhi Police attribute seven killings to him in all, beginning with a man killed in 1998, and say most of the dead were young migrant workers he had befriended. Only three of those killings were ever proved in court, and one of the three victims has never been identified. In 2023 the High Court released him on 90 days' parole to arrange a daughter's marriage. He did not return. The Crime Branch caught him at Old Delhi Railway Station on January 17, 2025, after a search that lasted months.
The trial court records give Jha's home as the village of Ghasi, under the Chausa police station in Madhepura district, in northeastern Bihar. He studied up to the eighth grade, according to a Press Trust of India account of the police case, and moved to Delhi in 1990. There he settled near Azadpur Mandi, the large wholesale fruit and vegetable market in north Delhi, and took a series of low-paid jobs. The Tribune reported that he committed burglaries in his early years in the city. WION described him as a hawker in Delhi's weekly street markets.
He married twice. Both The Tribune and WION reported that he left his first wife within a year and that he had five daughters with his second wife, though WION added that he mostly lived apart from his family. Court records from his tenancy years show something more settled for at least part of that time. A landlord in Haiderpur, a neighborhood in northwest Delhi, testified that Jha rented a ground-floor room from him in 2006, said he did vegetable work at Azadpur Mandi, and lived there with his wife and five children, one of whom was born in that room. His mother also stayed with the family for a time. He owned a cycle rickshaw fitted with a scooter engine, which he used for his trade.
In its 2016 judgment the High Court summed up what the record said about him: he earned his living as a vegetable vendor, he was a family man with children, and he had earlier been tried and acquitted in a murder case. He also faced other criminal cases registered between 2003 and 2005.
According to the police account given to the Press Trust of India in 2025, Jha's first killing took place in 1998 in Adarsh Nagar, in northwest Delhi. The dead man was named Mangal, also called Aurangzeb. Jha was arrested that year and held for about four years, then released in 2002. WION reported that he was freed for lack of evidence.
The 2016 High Court judgment records only that he had been tried and acquitted in a murder case, without saying which case it was. The outcome of the 1998 case in legal terms was not reported. The killing of Mangal remains a killing attributed to Jha by the police, not a proved crime.
The police picture of the killings, as set out by the Crime Branch in January 2025, is consistent from case to case. Jha befriended young men who had come to Delhi from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh looking for work. He fed them, sometimes housed them, and helped them find jobs in the markets. Then, police said, some small grievance would turn him against one of them, and he would kill him. Additional Commissioner of Police Sanjay Kumar Sain told reporters that Jha turned violent over minor provocations. The grievances the police listed were things like drinking, lying, smoking ganja, chasing women, or eating meat, which Jha objected to.
Police said he strangled his victims.
The police list of victims after 1998, as reported by the Press Trust of India, runs as follows.
Shekhar, an associate of Jha's, was killed in June 2003 in Haiderpur, police said, over his drinking and his lies. His body was found in Alipur.
Umesh, a migrant from Bihar, was killed in November 2003 over what police called a betrayal. His body was found in west Delhi.
Guddu was killed in November 2005, police said, because of habits that included smoking marijuana. His body was found in Mangolpuri.
Amit, whom the courts identified as Anil Mandal, was killed in October 2006. Police said Jha accused him of womanizing.
Upender was killed in April 2007 over a love affair Jha disapproved of.
Dilip was killed in May 2007, police said, because he ate non-vegetarian food. The courts did not accept that the man found in May 2007 had been proved to be Dilip.
The trial record shows that police took Jha to several places after his arrest to point out spots linked to Shekhar, Umesh, Guddu and others, and prepared memos of what he showed them. Those killings were not part of the three cases he was convicted in. In a 2022 parole petition Jha told the High Court that he had been acquitted in every other case filed against him, while the state said he still faced ten other cases. What became of the cases over Shekhar, Umesh and Guddu was not reported.
On October 20, 2006, a man's body was found in west Delhi, and Hari Nagar police registered FIR 609 of 2006. For months no one could say who he was.
He was Anil Mandal, also known as Amit, the son of a man from the village of Ugri in Bhagalpur district, Bihar. Doctors put his age at 25 to 30. He had been missing since October 19, 2006, a day on which he was due to appear at a court hearing. His identity was established in steps. A first DNA test, run against a couple named in early leads, excluded them as his parents, and Jha's lawyers later used that result to argue that the case against him should be dropped. Police then turned to their own fingerprint records, and the prints on file for Anil Mandal matched those taken from the body. His widow identified him from a police photograph, and a later DNA test matched his remains to a blood sample from his daughter, with all 15 markers in agreement.
A handwritten letter in Hindi was found with the body. It taunted the police and read as a confession. Telephone calls made that day from a public phone booth were traced as part of the case, and the booth operator later identified Jha in court as the man who had made them.
Early on April 25, 2007, more remains were found in west Delhi, and Hari Nagar police registered FIR 243 of 2007. The post-mortem placed the death in the night between April 24 and 25.
The victim was Upender, also called Pintoo, from Maharajganj in Uttar Pradesh. The doctors who examined the remains estimated his age at 28 to 30; the Press Trust of India, reporting on the case in 2023, gave it as 19. No one knew who he was until Jha, after his arrest, gave police leads that took them to a relative of Upender's who worked in Bhiwadi, Rajasthan. DNA tests then matched the remains to Upender's father. His mother had died before she could testify.
That relative told the court that he had been in touch with Jha by phone after Upender disappeared, and that Jha had told him Upender had cost him Rs 20,000 and run off with his vegetable cart. Another witness said Jha and Upender had worked together in the market as partners. Phone records showed the movements of the phone Jha used on April 24 and 25, 2007, and the High Court found that they fit the places where the remains were found.
A second letter, which the courts linked to the April 2007 case, was even more hostile to the Delhi Police than the first. It named two police officers, warned that more killings would follow, and was signed "CC."
At about 6:20 a.m. on May 18, 2007, a man called the Delhi Police control room to report a body. Remains were found in west Delhi that morning, and Hari Nagar police registered FIR 279 of 2007. The doctor who examined them estimated the man's age at 22 or 23.
The police charge sheet named him as Dalip, or Dilip. Jha himself was said to have named the dead man that way. But no relative was ever found to confirm it, and both the trial court and the High Court held that his identity had not been established. He remains unidentified.
A letter written in green ink was found with the remains. In it the writer confessed to this killing and two earlier ones, mocked the police for failing to catch him, and claimed to kill "7-8" people a year. The High Court treated the letter as the thread that tied the three cases together, but it did not accept the boast about the yearly number as proved.
The phone call was the other thread. The operator of the public phone booth from which the call was made picked Jha out as the man who had used his phone that morning.
Police arrested Jha at about 3 p.m. on May 20, 2007, in a lane in Alipur, in north Delhi, acting on a tip from an informer, according to the trial record. His lawyers later argued that he had been picked up a day earlier, on May 19. The High Court held that even if that were so, it would be an irregularity, not a defect that undid the case. In a 2023 order the High Court recorded his judicial custody as dating from May 30, 2007.
On him police found a Samsung mobile phone and a sheet of paper listing names and telephone numbers. On his information they searched the rented room in Haiderpur, where they seized evidence and a second phone, and they seized the motorized rickshaw. Tests found blood on three knives and on pieces of the floor. One knife carried blood of group AB, the same group as the remains found in May 2007.
On May 23, 2007, a further recovery was made on Jha's information. DNA tests matched it to Anil Mandal. The High Court called that recovery and the DNA evidence "weighty and substantive evidence" of considerable value.
Handwriting was the last link. A magistrate supervised the taking of 64 pages of specimen writing from Jha. A handwriting expert compared them with the letters left with the remains and concluded that Jha had written them. The High Court did not rely on the expert alone. It also weighed what the letters said, which matched what the police knew of the crimes.
The three cases went to the sessions court in late 2007; the case over Anil Mandal was committed for trial on September 11, 2007, and the case over Upender on October 5, 2007. They were tried together as Sessions Cases 89, 90 and 91 of 2011 before Dr. Kamini Lau, Additional Sessions Judge in the North-West district at the Rohini Courts in Delhi.
The prosecution called 47 witnesses in the Anil Mandal case and 61 in the Upender case. They included the doctors who carried out the post-mortems, the phone booth operators, the officials who kept the phone company's call records, DNA and handwriting experts, the landlords who had rented rooms to Jha, and the officers who led the investigation. In its account of the evidence the trial court described the three crimes as following a "definite pattern."
The defense contested almost everything. Its lawyers suggested to witness after witness that they were testifying at the investigating officer's direction. They argued that the police had planted the knives and the rickshaw and had written up the recovery papers afterward at the police station. They questioned how Jha had been identified, since no formal identification parade was held, and suggested that call records could be altered. They challenged the handwriting expert's methods and the chain of custody of the samples, and pointed out that the Haiderpur landlord had no written rent agreement or receipts. Jha's wife testified as a defense witness.
The trial court reserved its judgment on January 19, 2013, and announced it on January 24, 2013, convicting Jha in all three cases of murder and of causing evidence of the crimes to disappear.
The court passed sentence on three days in early February 2013.
On February 4, in the case of the man never identified, it sentenced Jha to imprisonment for life, to last for the rest of his life. The High Court later noted that life imprisonment had been chosen in that case because the victim remained unidentified.
On February 5, in the Upender case, it sentenced him to death, calling the killing a "rarest of rare" case.
On February 6, in the Anil Mandal case, it again sentenced him to death.
In each case it added seven years of rigorous imprisonment for causing the disappearance of evidence, with fines of Rs 10,000 under each section and a month in jail if they were not paid. The two death sentences went to the Delhi High Court as Death Sentence References 2 and 3 of 2013, heard alongside Jha's own appeals.
The appeals were heard by a two-judge bench of the Delhi High Court. In April 2015 Jha asked the court to admit 47 replies he had obtained under the Right to Information Act after his trial, covering subjects such as police deployment records, evidence-room entries and handwriting samples. Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Ashutosh Kumar found most of them repetitive or irrelevant, picked out five that might matter to his defense, and asked the state to answer on those.
The final hearing was before Justices Sanjiv Khanna and R.K. Gauba, who reserved judgment on September 21, 2015, and delivered three judgments on January 27, 2016, one for each case. Jha was represented by M.L. Yadav, and the state by Additional Public Prosecutor Varun Goswami.
The court upheld all three convictions. It held that the leads Jha gave police after his arrest, once confirmed by independent witnesses, were admissible as evidence of his conduct, and that what was recovered on his information was admissible as well. It found the phone records, the recoveries and the handwriting evidence consistent with one another. It also allowed each case to draw on the fact of the convictions in the other two, though not on their evidence, and found the letters linked the three crimes. Of Jha's denials in his own statement to the court, the bench said they were "a false denial in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary." In the Upender case it concluded that "Chandrakant Jha was the perpetrator and no other person had committed the said offence."
On sentence the court began from the rule laid down by the Supreme Court: "Life imprisonment is the rule and death sentence is an exception." It found brutality in the crimes and noted that the motive had nothing to do with anything the victims had done to provoke him. The letters, it said, were aimed at the police; in them Jha presented himself as an innocent man who had been harassed and falsely accused. Against that it weighed what the letters and the record showed of him as a family man with children who earned his living selling vegetables.
The court then took the course the Supreme Court had approved in its decisions on long life terms, including the Constitution Bench decision in V. Sriharan. It replaced both death sentences with imprisonment for the rest of Jha's natural life, without remission, and upheld the same term in the third case. It added that the order did not touch the constitutional powers of pardon and remission under Articles 72 and 161 of the Constitution.
Jha served his sentence in Tihar. Court orders from the years that followed show him in frequent dispute with the prison administration and returning again and again to the High Court.
In 2020 he told the High Court that he had been granted parole seven times despite the natural-life term. By 2023 the High Court counted five releases on parole and seven on furlough, and noted that there was no allegation that he had misused any of them. He was released on parole by court order in January 2020.
That same month his record turned. In January 2020 he was punished after prison staff searching his ward in Central Jail No. 2 found a Samsung phone, a battery and a SIM card in his cell; his telephone and canteen privileges were stopped for a month. In October 2020 he was punished again, for misusing the prison telephone facility. The state later told the High Court that he had been caught posing as a Tihar official to get information from another inmate's mother, and that he had admitted it in writing. That punishment cost him 30 days of visits and canteen access.
The punishments mattered because they blocked parole. In June 2020 he asked the High Court for emergency parole after the state turned him down, citing his conduct, the absence of a recommendation from the jail superintendent, and the natural-life direction in his sentence. His mother died on January 21, 2020, and in a later petition he said he had been unable to perform her last rites or mark the first anniversary of her death.
On February 7, 2022, Justice Chandra Dhari Singh dismissed a petition for three months' parole. Jha said he had spent more than 14 years in custody, that his eldest daughter was of marriageable age and he needed to find her a husband, and that his wife was working as a peon to support the family. The state answered that he faced ten other cases, that his record was "not clean," and that the two years of good conduct the Delhi Prison Rules require after a major punishment had not yet passed. The judge also pointed to the rule that bars parole for prisoners convicted of more than one murder except in special circumstances, and found that the marriage and the anniversary did not meet that bar. Another parole request was refused by the prison authorities on December 23, 2022.
Jha challenged the punishments themselves, and won. On March 28, 2023, Justice Anish Dayal held that the January 2020 punishment had been entered in his record before he was heard, and that no written notice had been given or inquiry held as the prison rules require. The judge ordered the prison to give him a fresh hearing and decide the matter again. On February 1, 2024, Justice Jyoti Singh set aside the October 2020 punishment on the same ground, leaving the state free to start over with a proper notice.
In 2023 Jha tried again. In a petition decided on August 16, 2023, his lawyer told Justice Rajnish Bhatnagar that he had served more than 15 years and six months in custody, had not been out in three years, and had received no punishment for more than two years. He needed to find a husband for his eldest daughter, the petition said, and there was no other adult man in the family to do it. A police status report filed in the case recorded that one of his five daughters had died in 2019 and that his wife and four daughters were living as tenants in Alipur. The state opposed release, citing his criminal record, his three murder convictions and the risk that he would jump parole.
Justice Bhatnagar found his conduct satisfactory, noted his five earlier paroles and seven furloughs without misuse, and granted 90 days' parole. The conditions were a personal bond of Rs 25,000 with two sureties, a working mobile phone number given to the police, no travel outside Delhi without permission, a report to the Hari Nagar police station every third day, and surrender to the jail superintendent at the end of the 90 days. On September 19, 2023, at Jha's request, the judge cut the sureties to one and changed the reporting to once a week, every Monday.
He was released in October 2023, according to the Press Trust of India and The Tribune. He never went back. Police later said he hid in Bihar and Delhi.
On February 9, 2024, while he was still missing, a Supreme Court bench of Justices Hrishikesh Roy and Prashant Kumar Mishra agreed to hear a petition filed in Jha's name through his advocate, Rishi Malhotra. It asked whether a life sentence must mean imprisonment for a prisoner's whole natural life, or whether it can still be commuted or remitted by the government. The petition argued that the murder section of the Penal Code allows only death or life imprisonment, not a term expressly running until death; that a natural-life term without remission violates a prisoner's fundamental rights and shuts off any chance of reform; and that it conflicts with state remission rules. The court issued notice to the Delhi government, ETV Bharat reported. No later ruling on the petition was reported.
By January 2025 a Rs 50,000 reward had been offered for Jha's capture. A Crime Branch team spent about six months on the search. Officers traced his relatives, friends and old associates, revisited the places linked to his crimes, and questioned traders and workers in the fruit and vegetable markets of the Delhi region, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where he had worked. Analysis of call records turned up a suspicious mobile number, which they followed.
On Friday, January 17, 2025, they arrested him at Old Delhi Railway Station as he tried to leave for Bihar. The Tribune reported that he had just visited his family in Alipur and was trying to leave Delhi for good. He was 57. "Jha was on the run after jumping parole in October 2023," Additional Commissioner of Police Sanjay Kumar Sain said. Sain described him as a man who turned violent at the slightest provocation.
In 2022 Netflix released Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi, a three-part documentary series about the case directed by the Delhi filmmaker Ayesha Sood and produced by VICE Media. It drew on interviews with the police officers who investigated the killings, journalists who covered them, a victim's family, and people from Jha's home village in Bihar. Sood told Outlook that she had not heard of the case before the makers approached her during the Covid lockdown, when migrant workers were leaving Delhi in large numbers. "It was in our backyard and yet we never heard of it," she said. She described the victims as people on the margins whose deaths had gone largely unnoticed.
The critic at Film Companion found the first two episodes one-sided, relying heavily on police accounts and staged reconstructions, but credited the third, set in Bihar, with tracing the case back to the neglect of the village and of the migrants who leave it.
The number of victims. Delhi Police count seven killings, from 1998 to May 2007, and the Outlook account of the documentary uses the same figure. WION's January 2025 report said he had killed 18 people, but it gave no source for the figure and its own list of names ran only to six. The letter left with the remains in May 2007 boasted of "7-8" killings a year, and the High Court did not accept that claim as proved. The courts found him guilty of three murders.
The four earlier deaths. The killings of Mangal in 1998, Shekhar and Umesh in 2003 and Guddu in 2005 rest on the police account. Jha was arrested over the 1998 death and released in 2002; WION reported that it was for lack of evidence, and the High Court recorded that he had been tried and acquitted in an earlier murder case without naming it. Jha told the High Court in 2022 that he had been acquitted in all other cases against him.
The third victim's name. Police named the man found in May 2007 as Dilip, or Dalip. Both courts held that his identity was not proved, and he is described in the judgments as unidentified.
Upender's age. The doctors who examined his remains estimated his age at 28 to 30. The Press Trust of India gave it as 19 in 2023.
The date of arrest. Police gave May 20, 2007; the defense said May 19; a 2023 High Court order dates his custody from May 30. The High Court said the one-day dispute made no difference to the case.
His motive. Police described killings over small grievances against the men he had taken in. In his letters, as summarized by the High Court, Jha directed his anger at the Delhi Police and cast himself as a man who had been harassed and falsely accused.
1990: Jha moves from Bihar to Delhi and settles near Azadpur Mandi (PTI).
1998: Mangal, also called Aurangzeb, is killed in Adarsh Nagar, police say. Jha is arrested and held until 2002.
June 2003: Shekhar is killed, police say.
November 2003: Umesh is killed, police say.
November 2005: Guddu is killed, police say.
October 20, 2006: Anil Mandal's body is found in west Delhi, with a letter taunting the police.
April 25, 2007: Upender's remains are found in west Delhi.
May 18, 2007: A caller reports a body in west Delhi; the victim is never identified.
May 20, 2007: Jha is arrested in Alipur.
September and October 2007: The cases are committed for trial.
January 24, 2013: Convicted in all three cases at the Rohini Courts.
February 4 to 6, 2013: Sentenced to life for the rest of his life in one case and to death in two.
April 16, 2015: The High Court calls for the state's reply on documents he obtained under the Right to Information Act.
January 27, 2016: The High Court upholds the convictions and commutes both death sentences to imprisonment for the rest of his natural life without remission.
January 2020: Released on parole; punished the same month after a phone is found in his cell.
February 7, 2022: The High Court refuses parole.
March 28, 2023: The High Court orders a fresh hearing on the January 2020 punishment.
August 16, 2023: The High Court grants 90 days' parole.
October 2023: Released on parole; fails to surrender.
February 1, 2024: The High Court sets aside the October 2020 punishment.
February 9, 2024: The Supreme Court agrees to hear his plea on natural-life sentences.
January 17, 2025: Rearrested at Old Delhi Railway Station.