Darbara Singh was born in 1952 at Jallupur Khera, 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 1997 the Kapurthala police arrested him over the rape and attempted murder of a migrant labourer's daughter, and he was sentenced to thirty years. He served about ten, and was released on December 3, 2003 on a mercy petition and for good conduct. The abductions in Jalandhar began the following March. Indian reporting called him the baby killer.
He blamed a migrant labouring family for the decade he had lost, and said he wanted to teach them a lesson. The children he took were the children of Bihari and Uttar Pradesh migrant workers living in the labour colonies of Jalandhar, most of them under ten. He lured them away with sweets and food, cut their throats, and raped or sodomised the bodies afterwards. Many were left near a bridge on the Rayya to Khadoor Sahib road in Amritsar district.
Twenty-three children were abducted between March and October 2004. Six were recovered alive. Seventeen were killed, fifteen girls and two boys. The first two taken were sisters, Asha and Diksha, from the Company Bagh in March.
One child lived. On October 18, 2004 a girl named Nishu was lured away from outside her home and her throat was cut. She survived, but the damage to her windpipe left her unable to speak.
He was arrested on October 29, 2004 and confessed to all seventeen killings.
What the courts have actually established is much less, and this is where the entry has to be careful. He was convicted of two murders and sentenced to life. He was convicted of two more, those of five-year-old Khursheed and his six-year-old cousin Ronku, whose bodies were found in a sugarcane field off the Kala Sanghian road, and for those he was sentenced to death on January 7, 2008 by an Additional Sessions Judge at Jalandhar. He was acquitted in four other cases for want of evidence.
The death sentence did not survive. The Punjab and Haryana High Court, hearing the murder reference together with his appeal, declined to confirm it, set aside the conviction, and acquitted him of those charges on benefit of doubt, directing that he be released unless wanted in another case. The court's criticism was of the investigation, and it restated the ordinary requirements for circumstantial evidence, witness credibility and forensic procedure in a capital case.
He died at Patiala Central Jail on June 6, 2018, at sixty-six, still serving the life sentence from the two convictions that stood, with other cases never tried.
An earlier version of this entry said the death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment. It was not; he was acquitted in that case. The version before that gave the count as ten to seventeen. Seventeen is what he confessed to and what was attributed to him in the press, twenty-three is the number of children taken, and two is the number of murders he stood convicted of when he died. The three figures are set out separately above.