On the morning of Saturday, July 12, 2008, people living near the Ragunan Zoo in South Jakarta found two bags and a plastic sack holding seven pieces of a human body, among them the head. By evening hundreds had gathered to look. The dead man was Heri Santoso, forty, a sales manager for a private company in Jakarta. He had been killed and cut up in a studio apartment on Jalan Margonda Raya in Depok, and his bank and credit cards had been used afterward for a spending spree. The cards led the police to the man who rented the apartment and to his boyfriend, Noval Andrias. On July 15 they arrested Very Idham Henyansyah, called Ryan, at a rented room in Pesona Khayangan, Depok. He said he had killed Heri because Heri had offered him money and a car to sleep with Noval.
He was thirty, born on February 1, 1978, the younger of two sons, in Jombang, East Java. His father, Ahmad Maskur, was a retired guard at a sugar mill, and as a boy Ryan spent more time at an Islamic boarding school than with his parents. In junior high he took up dancing and make-up and made friends mostly with girls, and teachers remembered him as bright and quick. He drifted through three high schools in Jombang, staying a month at one and a semester at another, and then went to Jakarta, where he found acceptance among middle-class gay men and moved between rooms and apartments he could barely afford. In the autobiography he published in February 2009, The Untold Story of Ryan, he said he had once taught Quran recitation and later worked as a male model.
Once the Ragunan killing was in the news, families began coming forward with relatives who had gone missing after being seen with him. On July 21 the police dug up an old fish pond behind his parents' house in Jombang and found four bodies, most of them already skeletons: Vincent Yudi Priyono, thirty-one; Ariel Somba Sitanggang, thirty-four; Grady Gland Adam Tumbuan, a finalist in the 2007 MTV VJ Hunt; and Guruh Setyo Pramono, called Guntur, twenty-seven. A second excavation on July 28 found six more: Agustinus Fitri Setiawan, twenty-eight; Nanik Hidayati, thirty-one, and her three-year-old daughter, Sylvia Ramadani Putri; Muhamad Aksoni, twenty-nine; Zainal Abidin, twenty-one; and Muhammad Asrori, called Aldo.
By his own account the first was Guntur, killed at the house in July 2007, his head struck with something hard, his body rolled in a mattress and burned and the remains pushed into the fish pond and covered with earth. He killed Nanik Hidayati and her daughter by beating them with a metal bar after they angered him. He said all but three of the dead were gay men like him.
The case filled the Indonesian press for months. In jail he sang to guards, inmates and reporters from an album he said he was making, and the papers called him the singing serial killer. On April 6, 2009, the Depok District Court sentenced him to death. The Bandung High Court rejected his appeal, the Supreme Court rejected his cassation and later his request for judicial review, and on October 1, 2016, his lawyers asked President Joko Widodo for clemency. In 2010 he announced he would marry a woman he had met in police detention, to grant his mother's wish that he marry.
He has spent the years since in a series of prisons, including Kesambi in Cirebon and Gunung Sindur in Bogor, where in 2021 his lawyer said he had been beaten by the cleric Bahar bin Smith in a dispute over money. In 2025 a former cellmate described being made to sleep beside him because no one else would. He has not been executed; Indonesia has carried out no executions since 2016.