The case did not interest anyone at first. The bodies were street children, and as the Indonesian press later put it without much softening, the victims were "only" street children. Police intensified the investigation after the fourth, when the forensic examinations came back showing the same pattern of injuries each time: a ligature mark at the neck, a cut across the abdomen, and evidence of anal injury.
Siswanto was born in 1963 in the village of Beji, in Tulis district, Batang regency, Central Java. He could not read or write. He had no home and moved between Jakarta and Central Java, living by begging and casual work.
The boys were nine to fifteen and were living on the street. He approached them at the Pasar Senen market complex with food, money or somewhere to sleep, and killed them on the marshy ground of the abandoned Kemayoran airport in Central Jakarta.
Twelve died between December 1994 and July 1996. Only eight were ever found: four at Kemayoran and four at Pondok Kopi in East Jakarta. The other four have never been recovered.
Only one has been named publicly. Kasikin was the eighth found, and it was his body that gave the police the case.
The nickname came from the way he moved. A Gatra magazine profile described a vagrant with a lame leg, short, slight, hunched and walking with a limp, whose head shook from side to side without apparent cause. Gedek is the shaking. The press called him Robot Gedek and it stuck.
He was arrested in the summer of 1996 and on August 6 admitted eight killings in Jakarta and two more at Pekalongan in Central Java. He told police he had drunk his victims' blood and kept pieces of their skin. He also said the killings had happened outside his own awareness, and that in his mind what he was killing were chickens.
The prosecution was split between two jurisdictions: six counts in the Central Jakarta District Court and two in East Jakarta. The Central Jakarta trial was held behind closed doors because of the sexual charges. His lawyer, Febri Irmansyah, asked repeatedly for a psychiatric examination, first of the police and then of the court, because Siswanto laughed and would not take the questions seriously when he was asked whether he had killed, and every request was refused. The court sentenced him to death for twelve murders; the verdict is dated May 21, 1997 in most accounts and May 20 in others. The presiding judge, Sartono, said the crimes had shaken the public because he had sadistically killed children, and that what he had done could never be forgiven. His appeals to the Jakarta High Court and then to the Supreme Court were refused. In 1999 he was moved from Cipinang to the Batu prison on Nusakambangan, the island where Indonesia holds the men it intends to shoot.
He waited almost ten years with no date set. On March 25, 2007, when a cellmate told him his execution was coming soon, he suffered a heart attack. He was treated at the Batu prison clinic and then taken to the regional hospital in Cilacap, and he died on March 26, aged forty-three.
The case reopened three years later. In January 2010 Jakarta police arrested Baekuni, known as Babe, over the killing of a ten-year-old boy, Ardiansyah, whose dismembered remains had been found at the East Flood Canal in Cakung on January 8, and he came under suspicion in the deaths of fourteen boys he had sodomized, several of them dismembered. Febri Irmansyah said at once that he recognized Babe as the man who had testified against Siswanto in 1997 under the name Sunarto, the only witness the prosecution had called to say Siswanto was the killer. The two had known each other from Pasar Senen. The rights group KontraS said Siswanto's trial had been legally flawed because it rested on a single witness, and Usman Hamid, then at KontraS, said Siswanto had not been capable of the killings.
The police would not accept the link. A Jakarta police spokesman, Boy Rafli Amar, said investigators had found nothing connecting the two cases and asked people to stop tying them together. Edward Syah Pernong, who had led the detectives of the Central Jakarta police in 1996 and 1997, said there had been no wrongful arrest: some of the victims' belongings had been found on Siswanto, and at the reconstruction he had shown where he killed, under a large tree. No court has reopened the case. The argument that a homeless, illiterate man with a limp was arrested to close a case that was embarrassing the police has not gone away, and it is repeated in mainstream Indonesian outlets rather than fringe ones.
What is not in dispute is why it took two years. The criminologist Erlangga Masdiana of the University of Indonesia put it plainly: the children were chosen because they had no power to resist. Nobody reported them missing, and that is the whole of the reason the killings went on as long as they did.