Between 2003 and 2007 the police in west Delhi kept finding parts of young men near the gates of Tihar Jail and around the city, some of them with handwritten notes daring the police to catch the killer. He signed them as "your father" and "your brother-in-law." The man leaving them was Chandrakant Jha, a hawker in Delhi's weekly bazaars, and the dead were young migrant laborers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh whom he had befriended, fed, housed and found small jobs for. He killed them over petty disputes: a theft, a lie, eating meat when he disapproved. He strangled them, cut up the bodies with a care he later boasted about, and dumped the pieces.
Jha was born in 1967 in Madhepura district, Bihar, and came to Delhi, where he settled near the Azadpur market. He married twice, left his first wife within a year, and had five daughters with his second, though he mostly lived apart from his family. His first killing, in 1998, was of a man known as Pandit, or Mangal. He was arrested and held until 2002, when he was released for lack of evidence. The killings began again the next year: Shekhar and Umesh in 2003, Guddu in 2005, Anil Mandal in 2006, and Upender and Dilip in 2007.
He was arrested on May 20, 2007. He was convicted of three of the murders; in the others the dead could not be identified. In February 2013 he received two death sentences and a term of life imprisonment until death. In January 2016 the Delhi High Court commuted the death sentences to life without remission.
In January 2022 a court refused him parole, citing his disorderly conduct in prison. In August 2023 the Delhi High Court granted him ninety days to arrange a marriage for his eldest daughter. He was released that autumn and did not come back. For seventeen months he was on the run, until a Crime Branch team that had spent six months questioning his old contacts and visiting his old haunts arrested him at Old Delhi railway station in January 2025. A 2022 Netflix series, Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi, told the story of the case, and of how young men could come to the city from Bihar, vanish, and never be reported missing.