Between October 2006 and May 2007, Chandrakant Jha dumped three nude, headless and decapitated dead bodies outside New Delhi’s Tihar Jail. The bodies were packed in gunny bags and placed inside fruit baskets, with handwritten notes daring the Delhi Police to nab him.
“Till date, I have endured the punishment for crimes I did not commit, but now I have murdered for real. I challenge you to catch me. More gifts are coming.... Your daddy,” he wrote in one such chilling note, left inside a basket containing a human torso. He had chopped off the victim’s body and dumped each limb in a different area in the city.
In another letter, he wrote about dumping a headless male body in a plastic bag tied with ropes near gate no 1 of Tihar Jail in 2003. The police even then was helpless. For, what does one do in the face of headless bodies turning up in the capital? Each year, the Delhi Police sees 40-50 such cases that remain unsolved because of lack of identity.
The Delhi Police, however, caught up to Jha. Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi, a Netflix docu-series directed by Ayesha Sood, tracks Jha’s gory, disturbingly violent and spine-chilling story, and how the police tied the loose ends to nab him.
Jha’s conviction in 2013 grabbed headlines. Here was a man who taunted the cops as he went on a killing spree. He had a photo album of his victims, clicked just before he killed them in his room—all with the apparent calmness of someone who knew what he was doing. Jha was awarded the death penalty, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. He is currently lodged in the very jail outside which he would dump his victims’ bodies.
For Sood, to revisit the files and replay the crimes on camera was no less a challenge—she had to get witnesses to talk on camera and present the grotesque details without disturbing the sensitivities of the viewer. “We relied on police records and took sufficient time, almost two and a half years, to build rapport with the residents of Ghosai village (in Bihar from where Jha hails) so as to win their trust and get them to talk,” says Sood.
Most of Jha’s victims were friends and acquaintances from his village. He would call them over to Delhi, and after a few days of winning their trust, kill them. Sood got some of the lucky ones who escaped to speak on camera for the first time. Take, for instance, 67-year-old Bhidu Yadav from Ghosai. Jha, he says, took him to Delhi in 2003 to help him move stuff from one room to another. “The moment he opened the door, I saw two others whom I knew sitting there with their mouths gagged and limbs tied,” recalls Yadav. “I was shaken. He took me into a room and clicked a picture of me along with the other victims. I told him to get me some food before killing me. As soon as he stepped out, we ran for our life.” Yadav’s mouth quivers and his hands tremble as he divulges Jha’s misdoings on camera. “I do not know what will happen of me now that I have revealed everything. What if he comes here and guns me down?” he asks, peering into the camera. “Until he dies in prison, I will always be in fear for my life.”
Sood had gone through a number of crime stories for the Indian Predator series, and Jha’s clearly stood out for its shock value. “The fact that it happened in Delhi, that it was quite recent was interesting to me,” she says. There is something inherently compelling about watching true crime documentaries. Sood, who is a big fan of the genre and claims to have watched “almost everything that’s made in local and foreign languages”, says that unpacking crime leads to opening up of a number of narratives that give an insight into the culture and society we live in. Media-tracking companies, which measure the audience demand for content based on search-engine traffic, downloads, and social media, suggest that while the documentary genre as a whole has become the fastest-growing segment of the streaming industry, within it true crime has emerged as the biggest sub-genre. What grabs eyeballs is the edge-of-the-seat treatment given to the narrative, as plots dive deep into the stories of real people committing acts that are sometimes so twisted and monstrous that they seem stranger than fiction.
Indian Predator checks all those boxes. But, at times, the spotlight on the convict seems excessive, as if too much importance has been accorded to him. Also, while the characterisation, be it of Jha, the villagers or the investigating officer, is nuanced, it does not delve deep into Jha’s mind and his troubled past—the experiences that drove him to do what he did. These aspects are spoken about, but not in depth. Overall, a gripping series nonetheless.