Devendra Sharma qualified as a Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery and practised as a doctor. He lost money on a fake liquefied petroleum gas agency and moved into organised crime. The Indian press calls him Doctor Death.
Between 1998 and 2004 he ran an illegal kidney transplant racket, facilitating by his own admission more than a hundred and twenty-five transplants with the help of doctors and middlemen across several states.
Alongside that, between 2002 and 2004, he and a group of associates called taxi and truck drivers out on fake trips in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan, led them to isolated places, killed them, and sold the vehicles in the grey market for twenty to twenty-five thousand rupees each. The bodies were taken to the Hazara canal at Kasganj in Uttar Pradesh, a stretch known for its crocodiles, and thrown in. Almost none were recovered, which is the reason the count in this case can never be settled.
Police records link him to the murders of at least twenty-one drivers. He has confessed to more than fifty, and some reporting puts the figure at over a hundred. He has been connected to twenty-six or twenty-seven cases of murder, kidnapping and robbery in total.
He was first arrested in 2004, in Gurgaon, over the kidney racket. He has since been sentenced to life imprisonment in seven separate murder cases across Delhi, Rajasthan and Haryana. On May 14, 2008 a court at Gurgaon sentenced him to death for the murder of a taxi driver named Naresh Verma. A further death sentence has been reported in the case of a driver named Kamal Singh, killed in 2002. His wife and children cut off contact with him in 2004 when the crimes came out.
The part of the case that has kept it in the Indian news is not the killings but the parole. In January 2020, after sixteen years inside, he was released on twenty days' parole and did not come back. He was at large for seven months and was arrested in Delhi in July 2020.
He was then granted parole again. On June 9, 2023 he was released for two months from Tihar jail, was due to surrender on August 3, and vanished a second time. The manhunt ran through Delhi, Aligarh, Jaipur, Agra and Prayagraj and took nearly two years.
On May 20, 2025 the Delhi Police crime branch arrested him at an ashram in Dausa in Rajasthan, where he had been living under a false identity as a priest. Officers watched the ashram for a period, posing as devotees, before going in. He was sixty-seven. He told them he had jumped parole intending never to return to prison.
The detail Indian reporting has always fixed on is that he was a qualified doctor who maintained an ordinary respectable life throughout, and that the state twice released him on parole after he had already absconded once.