Darbara Singh was a native of Jallupur Khera village in Amritsar district, Punjab. He joined the armed forces and was posted to the air force station at Pathankot. In 1975 he was accused of throwing a hand grenade at the house of a senior officer after a quarrel, seriously injuring the officer's wife and teenage son. He was arrested and acquitted.
In the late 1990s the Kapurthala police arrested him for the rape and attempted murder of a migrant laborer's daughter, and in three cases of attempted murder he was sentenced to thirty years. He was moved from Kapurthala to the Jalandhar central jail and then to the Ludhiana central jail, and on December 3, 2003 he was released early on a mercy petition for good conduct. He blamed a migrant family from neighboring Kapurthala for the decade he had lost. He rented a room in the Model House area of Jalandhar and took a factory job in the Leather Complex, and he began to take the children of migrant workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh living in the city's labor colonies. Indian reporting called him the baby killer.
He lured the children with sweets and food. Most were under ten. He cut their throats and sexually assaulted them, and many bodies were left near a bridge on the Rayya to Khadoor Sahib road in Amritsar district. On April 18, 2004 he took an eight-year-old girl named Diksha and killed her; her sister Asha and two cousins later identified him in court. A six-year-old girl named Tajvin, taken that year, was found a week later in bushes at Chaheru village on the Jalandhar-Phagwara road; her body went unclaimed and was cremated at Phagwara.
On October 18, 2004 a girl named Nishu was taken from outside her home. The next morning two men, Bhana Ram and Gurdev Singh, found her near a sugarcane field at Mahadipur village with her windpipe cut. She was taken to the PGI hospital in Chandigarh and survived, but could not speak.
On October 25 two small boys, Khursheed, five, and his cousin Ronku, six, the sons of migrant workers from Darbhanga in Bihar, disappeared. A local man, Jathedar Pritam Singh, later testified that he had seen the accused carrying two children on a bicycle that afternoon at a quarter past two, and had heard the outcry, but said nothing until October 28, when Khursheed's father, Mohammad Vakil, filed a complaint. A special police team arrested Singh at the end of October 2004. Twenty-three children had been abducted between March and October; six were found alive. He confessed to seventeen killings, fifteen of them girls, and led police to bodies.
He was charged in eighteen cases of abduction, rape and murder. By the end of 2007 three had ended in acquittal for want of evidence. On January 7, 2008 Additional Sessions Judge Iqbal Singh Bajwa sentenced him to death for the murders of Khursheed and Ronku, and two days later he was moved to the Patiala central jail. On April 25, 2008 Judge B. K. Mehta sentenced him to life imprisonment for the rape and murder of Diksha; his lawyer had argued that the children who identified him were coached. He was also acquitted of Tajvin's murder, by Additional Sessions Judge B. S. Sidhu.
On July 30, 2009 Justices Mehtab Singh Gill and Jitendra Chauhan of the Punjab and Haryana High Court declined to confirm the death sentence, allowed his appeal and acquitted him in the Khursheed and Ronku case on the benefit of the doubt. The court criticized the investigation, the delayed first report and the witnesses, and restated the ordinary requirements for circumstantial evidence and forensic procedure in a capital case. He was ordered released unless wanted in another case, and he remained in custody on the others.
He died at the Patiala central jail on June 6, 2018, at sixty-six, still serving life on the two murder convictions that stood, with other cases never tried. Seventeen is the number he confessed to, twenty-three the number of children taken, and two the number of murders he stood convicted of at his death.