Between 1994 and 1996, boys who lived on the streets of central Jakarta began to die. The deaths were in two parts of the city, Central Jakarta and East Jakarta. In July 1996 police arrested a homeless scavenger named Siswanto, whom the press knew as Robot Gedek. He confessed to killing 12 boys in Jakarta and Central Java. The cases of eight boys went to court, and in May 1997 the Central Jakarta District Court sentenced him to death.
He was never executed. After nearly ten years on death row, most of them on the prison island of Nusakambangan, he died of a heart attack in March 2007. Three years later the case came back into the news when his former lawyer said that the main prosecution witness at his trial had been Baekuni, known as Babe, a man arrested in January 2010 over the deaths of 14 boys. Police rejected any link between the two cases, and the officer who led the 1996 investigation said there had been no wrongful arrest.
Little is known of Siswanto's early life, and the accounts do not agree on every point. His family lived in the village of Beji, in the Tulis district of Batang regency, Central Java, and it was there that he was buried in 2007, the Antara news agency and detikX reported. A Liputan6 commentary in 2010 described him as a native of Pekalongan, Central Java. When he was arrested in 1996, detikX wrote in 2022, he had gone home to a village in Batang that it named as Ketendan. Antara gave his age at his death in March 2007 as 39. His date of birth was not reported.
According to Antara, he was the fourth of five children. His family told the agency's reporter in 2007 that he had moved around from a young age, Jakarta included. They said he had caused no trouble in the village and that neighbors had been surprised when he was arrested.
In Jakarta he lived on the streets around the Senen market area in Central Jakarta. detikX, drawing on a 2010 profile in the news magazine Gatra, described him as a scavenger who lived in a makeshift hut in Senen. The Associated Press, reporting in 2010, described him as a homeless man who collected plastic bottles for recycling.
His nickname came from the way he looked and moved. detikX, again following Gatra, described him as short, thin and slightly hunched, walking with a limp, with a head that often shook for no apparent reason. The shaking head gave him his nickname, detikX wrote, and the name Robot Gedek stayed with him through the trials and in later reports.
The boys who died were children who lived and worked on the streets of central Jakarta. Little is known of them as individuals: not their names, not their families, and in most cases not their exact ages. What is known is where and when they were found. detikX counted at least eight boys killed between 1994 and 1996, four found near the former Kemayoran airport in Central Jakarta and four near Pondok Kopi in East Jakarta. Republika, in a 2023 survey of Indonesian serial murder cases, placed the series in 1995 and 1996 and described it as the first such case to draw wide public attention in Indonesia.
For a long time the deaths drew little official interest. The forensic pathologist Abdul Mun'im Idries, who worked on the case, wrote in his 2013 book Indonesia X-Files that the killings were at first given little attention because the victims were street children. detikX, which quoted the book in 2022, reported his account that the investigation was stepped up only after the fourth boy was found, when forensic examinations showed the same pattern in each case. Republika gave the same account in 2023.
Once the inquiry was taken up by the Jakarta regional police, Polda Metro Jaya, detectives worked through several theories. According to detikX, police at first suspected that the killer was a man of means. They later concluded that the boys had known their killer and that he probably came from their own world, a scavenger or a homeless adult who could approach them without arousing suspicion.
The break came with the eighth boy found. After his body was discovered, police detained several men for questioning. One of them, detikX reported, was the scavenger Baekuni, known as Babe, who told police he had met the boy shortly before his death. The boy, police were told, had been with Robot Gedek, who lived in a hut in Senen. When officers went to the hut, he had gone.
The commander of the criminal investigation unit at the Central Jakarta police in 1996 and 1997 was Edward Syah Pernong. Speaking to detikNews in February 2010, by then a senior commander in Semarang, he recalled that he had just arrived from the same post in Bekasi when he took on the case, and that the series had alarmed the public because it had gone unsolved for two years.
Siswanto had gone home to Batang. Officers from the Central Jakarta police followed him to Central Java, and after several days of searching they arrested him on July 27, 1996, while he was begging at the railway station in Tegal, detikX reported. Antara, in its 2007 report on his death, put his arrest in 1996 without a date.
Edward Syah Pernong said in 2010 that the suspect had been identified by scientific methods and by careful, procedural collection of evidence. According to detikX, police pointed to forensic findings and to fingerprints on an object recovered at one of the scenes. During a reconstruction, Siswanto led officers to a large tree where, he said, one of the killings had taken place, and police found the tree where he said it would be. "Robot Gedek was A1, and 100 percent the offender he was suspected of being," detikX quoted Edward as saying.
In police custody Siswanto admitted to killing 12 boys. Republika reported that two of the 12 were outside Jakarta, and detikX listed the places he named as Jakarta, Pekalongan and Kroya, in Central Java. Eight bodies were recovered. The other boys he described were not traced.
His manner under questioning would become central to the later dispute. His lawyer said that whenever Siswanto was asked whether he had killed, he grinned or laughed, and the lawyer took that as a sign that his client did not understand what was happening to him. VICE Indonesia wrote in 2020 that he showed psychopathic traits, citing his statement that the killings had brought him a sense of relief. No psychiatric examination was carried out, either during questioning at the Central Jakarta police or later at trial.
The prosecution was divided between two courts because the boys had been found in two districts. According to Republika, eight boys were recorded as victims: six killed within the jurisdiction of the Central Jakarta District Court and two within that of the East Jakarta District Court. He was charged with murder, with other charges.
His lawyer was Febri Irmansyah, whose name is spelled in several ways in the Indonesian press (Febri Firmansyah, Febry Irmansyah, Febri Firnansyah). Speaking to detikNews in February 2010, he recalled that the Central Jakarta trial was held behind closed doors. He asked the panel of judges to order a psychiatric examination of his client, as he had asked the police before them, and the court refused.
The prosecution called about 20 witnesses, Febri said, but none of them had seen a killing. The only witness who connected Siswanto directly to a death, by the lawyer's account, was a man who testified under the name Sunarto, also known as Babe, and who was presented as a friend of the defendant. According to the verdict, as detikNews summarized it in 2010, Babe did not see Siswanto kill anyone; his evidence concerned what he said he had seen one night in 1995 near the former Kemayoran airport. Febri said the witness had watched from about 20 meters away and had seen only movement behind bushes. He also said that no weapon or other tool was produced in court, and that the case against his client rested on that one witness and on Siswanto's own confession, which he repeated in court.
The Central Jakarta District Court found him guilty and sentenced him to death. detikX dated the sentence May 21, 1997. Two detikNews reports in February 2010 cited a verdict dated May 20, 1997, and in one interview Febri placed Babe's testimony at a hearing in July 1997. On hearing the sentence, detikX reported, Siswanto said: "I am afraid of dying."
Febri appealed to the Jakarta High Court and then to the Supreme Court, detikX reported. Both appeals failed; the Supreme Court rejected his cassation petition, and the death sentence became final. The dates of the appeal rulings were not reported.
He was held first at Cipinang prison in East Jakarta, detikX reported; his uncle told Antara that the family visited him in prison in Jakarta in 1996. In 1999 he was moved to Batu prison on Nusakambangan, the prison island off Cilacap in Central Java. The family said they had not been able to visit him there.
In August 2006 Antara reported that ten death-row prisoners at Batu, among them Robot Gedek and three men condemned for the first Bali bombing, had been kept out of the prison's Independence Day flag ceremony. The head of the prison, Sudijanto, said the decision was made for security reasons. No execution date was set for Siswanto. detikX wrote that he waited nearly ten years.
In March 2007, detikX reported, a cellmate told Siswanto that his execution was coming soon, and on March 25 he suffered a heart attack. He was treated at the Batu prison clinic and then taken to the regional hospital in Cilacap.
The official account came the next day from Ngusman, head of the Central Java office of the Ministry of Law and Human Rights and a former head of Cipinang prison. He told detikNews that Siswanto had complained of chest pain and had first been treated for two days at Batu by the prison doctor. When he did not improve, he was referred on Sunday, March 25, to the Cilacap regional hospital, where he spent one night. He died there on Monday, March 26, 2007, at 1:45 p.m. The first indication was heart disease, Ngusman said, adding: "There were no signs of anything unnatural in Robot Gedek's death."
The family's account differed in small details. His uncle told Antara that the family understood he had been admitted to the hospital on Saturday, March 24, and that prison officers informed them on the night of March 26 that he had died. The body reached the family home in Beji at about 9 p.m. that night, escorted by an ambulance and two prison officers. After prayers at a small mosque in the village, he was buried the next day, March 27, in the village cemetery. Ngusman had told detikNews that the family took the body the same day and buried it in Pekalongan.
In January 2010 Jakarta police arrested Baekuni, a 48- or 49-year-old street vendor known to street children as Babe, a word for father. The arrest followed the death of a ten-year-old boy in East Jakarta in January 2010. According to the Associated Press, Baekuni confessed to killing 14 boys between 1995 and January 2010. By early February police had confirmed the identities of six of them, from Purworejo, Magelang, Kuningan, Pulo Gadung and Cakung, Antara reported.
The arrest revived the Robot Gedek case. On February 4, 2010, Febri Irmansyah told reporters that he was "100 percent" sure that Baekuni was the man who had testified at Siswanto's trial under the name Sunarto alias Babe. He said that the two men had known each other since their days in Senen. Febri said he had never believed his client was psychologically capable of the killings and described him as emotionally unstable.
A Liputan6 commentary on January 22, 2010, written by its executive editor Erdi Taufik, had already set the two cases side by side, calling Robot Gedek's killings of about 12 children in Jakarta and Central Java between 1994 and 1996 a reminder of the dangers street children faced.
On February 8 the human rights group KontraS, the Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence, said Siswanto's trial had been legally flawed. Its coordinator, Usman Hamid, told detikNews that a conviction resting on a single witness was a problem: "If there really is only one witness, a single witness, as material truth, that is legally flawed." He said that if the trial was shown to be flawed, responsibility would be shared by the police and the prosecutors, and he criticized decisions taken on the basis of police interview files and paperwork alone.
The Associated Press, in a March 2010 report printed by the Northwest Asian Weekly, called the possible connection an unexplained twist. It reported Febri's belief that Baekuni had testified under another name in 1997 and had given evidence against him about something he said he saw in central Jakarta in 1995. Baekuni's own lawyer, Haposan Nainggolan, told the agency that his client knew Siswanto only as two men who worked the same streets would. Police and Baekuni's lawyers denied that he had been a witness at the trial.
Polda Metro Jaya's position changed within a few days. On February 5, 2010, its head of public relations, Senior Commissioner Boy Rafli Amar, told Antara that any involvement by Babe in the Robot Gedek case "could become a new fact, but needs more time." In the same remarks he said it was not possible that Babe had carried out the killings attributed to Robot Gedek, because the court process was complete: Robot Gedek "has been proven to be the perpetrator through a court decision," he said, and the ruling had permanent legal force. detikNews reported him saying police would question Baekuni about his earlier testimony, and that this would take time.
By February 8 the police were firm. Boy Rafli told reporters that investigators had found nothing pointing to a link. "There is no connection. The case stands on its own," he said, as detikNews reported. He asked the media not to tie the two cases together, noting that identifying Babe's 14 victims was difficult enough and that the Robot Gedek trial was over. The Robot Gedek case dated from 1996, he told Antara, while Babe's had come to light in 2010. Police had not yet called Febri to give his account, he said.
The same day Edward Syah Pernong rejected any suggestion that he had arrested the wrong man. "We did not treat the solving of that case lightly," he told detikNews by telephone. A wrongful arrest, he said, would have violated human rights, the law and professional standards, and he asked the public not to speculate about the investigation.
Baekuni went to trial in his own case. In December 2010 the Jakarta High Court sentenced him to death, The Jakarta Post reported. No court reopened the Robot Gedek case.
The number of victims. Siswanto confessed to killing 12 boys, and the Associated Press and Liputan6 used that figure in 2010. Republika recorded eight boys as the victims in the cases brought to court, and VICE Indonesia in 2020 described him as the killer of eight street children. In February 2010 the police spokesman Boy Rafli Amar referred to the 1996 case as one of six victims. The four killings he described outside the eight were confessed, not tried.
The trial evidence. His former lawyer and KontraS argued in 2010 that the conviction rested on one witness who saw no killing, together with a confession from a man whose mental state was never examined. The police and the officer who led the 1996 investigation said the evidence included forensic findings, fingerprints and a reconstruction in which Siswanto pointed out a scene.
The identity of the witness. Febri Irmansyah said the witness Sunarto alias Babe was Baekuni. Police denied that Baekuni had been a witness, and so did Baekuni's lawyers. detikX reported in 2022 that Baekuni had been among the men police questioned in 1996 after the eighth boy was found. The question was not tested in court.
Dates. The sentence is dated May 21, 1997, by detikX and May 20, 1997, by detikNews in 2010. Edward Syah Pernong was quoted in 2010 as making the arrest in 1997, while detikX dated it July 27, 1996. Accounts of when he was taken to hospital in March 2007 differ by a day.
The case left a mark on Jakarta. detikX wrote that his name became widely known and that parents used it to frighten children who stayed out playing at night. In March 2015 a Jakarta toy designer, Cipta Croft-Cusworth, showed a set of figures called "Indo Psychos," among them a Robot Gedek figure, at the Jakarta Toys Fair; he told Antara he remembered the case as one that had startled people abroad as well.
When the Babe case broke in 2010, the Associated Press set both men's cases against the wider problem of abuse of street children in Indonesia, quoting the National Commission on Child Protection's warning that the Baekuni case was "the tip of an iceberg." In 2020 VICE Indonesia returned to Robot Gedek in a piece on how the Indonesian public responds to violent crime, noting that he had been sentenced to death in 1997, that he died of a heart attack on Nusakambangan ten years later, and that suspicions had since been raised that he was the victim of a wrongful arrest.
1994 to 1996: Deaths of street boys in Central Jakarta and East Jakarta; eight are found. The investigation is stepped up after the fourth boy is found; after the eighth, police question several men.
July 27, 1996: Siswanto is arrested at the railway station in Tegal, Central Java, by Central Jakarta police (detikX).
1996: He confesses to killing 12 boys in Jakarta, Pekalongan and Kroya; he is held at Cipinang prison, where his family visits him.
May 20 or 21, 1997: The Central Jakarta District Court sentences him to death.
After 1997: Appeals to the Jakarta High Court and the Supreme Court are rejected (dates not reported).
1999: Moved to Batu prison on Nusakambangan, Cilacap.
August 17, 2006: Among ten death-row prisoners at Batu kept out of the Independence Day ceremony.
March 24 or 25, 2007: Taken to the Cilacap regional hospital after a heart attack.
March 26, 2007: Dies at the hospital at 1:45 p.m.
March 27, 2007: Buried at Beji, Tulis district, Batang.
January 2010: Baekuni (Babe) is arrested in East Jakarta after the death of a ten-year-old boy.
February 4, 2010: Siswanto's former lawyer says Baekuni was the key witness at the 1997 trial.
February 5, 2010: Police say a link could be a new fact but needs more time.
February 8, 2010: KontraS calls the trial legally flawed; police say the cases are unrelated; the former lead investigator denies a wrongful arrest.
December 2010: The Jakarta High Court sentences Baekuni to death.
March 2015: A Robot Gedek figure is shown at the Jakarta Toys Fair.
September 22, 2022: detikX revisits the case.