Slamet Tohari, also recorded in court as Tuhari and known to everyone as Mbah Slamet, was forty-six when he was tried in 2023 and 2024. He lived in Balun village, Wanayasa, in the hill country of Banjarnegara Regency, Central Java, and practised as a dukun, a traditional healer and spirit worker. His particular offer was penggandaan uang, money-doubling: a client handed over cash as a mahar, a ritual payment, and Mbah Slamet promised to return it multiplied, in some cases to billions of rupiah. It was a fraud. The trial also found that he kept counterfeit notes.
When clients came back to collect, and kept coming back, he killed them. He told the court on November 23, 2023 that the twelve he killed were the ones who pressed him hardest for the money and threatened to report him to the police. The method, established at trial, was potassium cyanide, potas in Indonesian, mixed into a drink. The judges found that he watched his victims die in great pain without trying to help them, and then buried them in a plantation near his house in a manner they described as inhuman.
The case broke in April 2023 and, in the words of the prosecutor, shook Indonesia. Police excavating the plantation recovered twelve bodies. Nine were identified; three had not been by the time of the verdict, and this entry does not name them. Among the identified were Theresia Dewi, forty-seven, and her son Okta Ali Abrianto, thirty-one, from Magelang, who had travelled to Banjarnegara together. Nine of the twelve were buried at the Balun village public cemetery on April 4, 2023.
The trial at the Banjarnegara District Court was heard by a panel of three: Niken Rochayati presiding, with Tomi Sugianto and Arief Wibowo. On December 21, 2023 the prosecutor, Nasruddin, demanded death, saying there was nothing that mitigated, that the defendant had enjoyed the proceeds, and that the case was of national importance. On February 1, 2024 the court convicted him of premeditated murder resulting in more than one victim and committed repeatedly, under Article 340 of the Criminal Code and further counts, and sentenced him to death. The aggravating factors the presiding judge read out were the twelve lives, the suffering before death, the failure to help, the burials, and the absence of pity; some of the dead had left children orphaned.
Judge Arief Wibowo dissented. He held that the death penalty conflicts with the 1945 Constitution and with Pancasila, that a person’s life and death belong absolutely to God, and that executing the defendant could not lessen the families’ suffering. The dissent did not change the result. Theresia Dewi’s brother, Yusuf Edi Gunawan, said the family was satisfied and relieved.
Asked for his response after conferring with his two lawyers, Slamet Tohari said one word: banding, appeal. His lawyer, Ahmad Raharjo, said there were matters the trial had not fully brought out. The appeal to the Central Java High Court in Semarang had not produced a reported outcome in the sources available when this entry was written, and Indonesia carries out very few executions in practice, so his position is that of a man under a death sentence that has not been confirmed.
Twelve convictions, twelve bodies, nine of them named. This archive records the count the court found. The dates of the individual deaths have not been published in the sources consulted and are not invented here.