The clients came back for money that was never going to be doubled. In Balun, a hill village in the Wanayasa district of Banjarnegara Regency, Central Java, Slamet Tohari, known to everyone as Mbah Slamet and recorded in court as Tuhari, worked as a dukun, a traditional healer and spirit worker. His specialty was penggandaan uang, money-doubling. A client paid a mahar, a ritual fee, and was promised the sum back many times over, in some accounts in the billions of rupiah. Nothing was ever multiplied, and the court later found that he also kept counterfeit notes.
When clients returned to collect, he poisoned them. He told the court on November 23, 2023 that the twelve he killed were the ones who pressed hardest for their 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 severe pain without trying to help, then buried them in a plantation near his house in a manner they called inhuman. After some of the killings, the court found, he went to karaoke bars and paid with what he had taken. When he was arrested he had nine potassium pellets ready, which the court accepted were meant for the next client who came demanding repayment.
The scheme came apart in early April 2023, after the family of one client reported that a relative had gone to the dukun and not come home. Police digging in the plantation behind the house recovered twelve bodies. On April 4 officers walked Tohari, then forty-five, across his land to point out the graves, and nine of the dead were buried that week in the Balun village public cemetery. One regional outlet later wrote that victims had been buried alive. The court's findings describe death by poison followed by burial.
Nine of the twelve were identified. Theresia Dewi, forty-seven, and her son Okta Ali Abrianto, thirty-one, had traveled together from Magelang; police forensic specialists confirmed who they were by matching dental photographs against records from their lives. Theresia's elder brother, Yusuf Edi Gunawan, spoke for the family through the trial. Another of the identified dead, Kuwat Santosa, had been gone from his home for four and a half years when the graves were opened, and when he died has never been made public. Three of the twelve had still not been identified when the verdict was read, and the dates of the individual deaths have not been published.
He did not find his clients alone. An assistant, reported as Budi Santoso and by the nickname Bodrex, recruited them, in part through social media, and brought them to the house. Tried separately in the same court, he was sentenced to three years and six months for fraud and embezzlement under Articles 378 and 372 of the Criminal Code. The court found no proof that he took part in the killings.
At the Banjarnegara District Court the prosecution called relatives of the dead, neighbors, members of the defendant's own family, a forensic doctor and expert witnesses. On December 21, 2023 the prosecutor, Nasruddin, head of general crimes at the district prosecutor's office, asked for death. On February 1, 2024 a panel of three, Niken Rochayati presiding with Tomi Sugianto and Arief Wibowo, convicted Tohari of premeditated murder of more than one person committed repeatedly, together with fraud and possession of counterfeit money. Reading the aggravating factors, the presiding judge listed the twelve lives, the suffering before death, the failure to help, the burials, the absence of pity and the children some of the dead had left orphaned. The mitigating factors, she said, were none. She called it an extraordinary crime that had shaken the social order, committed to pay for a life of pleasure. The sentence was death, as the prosecution had asked.
Judge Arief Wibowo dissented. He held that the death penalty conflicts with the 1945 Constitution and with Pancasila, that a human life belongs absolutely to God, and that an execution could not ease the families' suffering; defense counsel said he had favored life imprisonment. The dissent did not change the result. Yusuf Edi Gunawan said the family was satisfied and relieved.
Asked for his response after conferring with his two lawyers, Tohari said one word: banding, appeal. His lawyer, Ahmad Raharjo, said there were matters the trial had not brought out, and the prosecutor said his office was ready to meet the appeal. No ruling on it from the Central Java High Court in Semarang has been reported. In October 2024 Tohari and his assistant were moved, blindfolded and by boat, from the Banjarnegara detention center to the prison complex on Nusakambangan island off Cilacap, which the detention center's head said was for inmates who need closer supervision. He remains under sentence of death.