One night in 1986, a thirty-six-year-old witch doctor named Ahmad Suradji went to bed and had a dream in which his deceased father appeared and gave him instructions on what he must do to increase and enhance his paranormal powers. In that moment, a lot of women in Indonesia were slated to die. His father had told him that to increase his supernatural powers, he had to kill seventy women.
As a sorcerer or witch doctor, Suradji had access to a lot of potential victims: In Indonesia, women and girls frequently visited sorcerers for advice and counsel and magical aid on romantic issues, particularly to cast spells to ensure that their spouses and husbands didn’t cheat on them. Because the women were too embarrassed to tell their families of the visits, when they vanished no one connected their disappearances to Suradji.
His method of murder, both brutal and disgusting, was invariably the same. When visitors came to him, he would The Killer Book of Serial Killers evaluate their spiritual needs and charge them the equivalent of $200 to $400. After he was paid, a woman would follow Suradji to a sugarcane field, where he claimed he had to bury them up to their waists in an already-dug hole as part of the ritual. This incapacitated them, of course, and then Suradji would break out an electrical cable and strangle them to death.
Following this he would drink their saliva, hoping to incorporate their power into himself. Then he would strip them and rebury them with their heads facing his home so that their spirits would have a direct path to him.
Sometimes, if paying customers were in short supply, Suradji would hire prostitutes to take part in the rituals that would end their lives. This was a very safe supply of victims, because, as Ted Bundy had noted, prostitutes are low-risk targets because they often do not have much family to look for them if they go missing. Prostitutes would help Suradji meet his needed seventy victims that much faster.
There is no way to know whether Suradji would have reached his goal, because on April 28, 1997, eleven years after his father had spoke to him in his dream, investigators looking for the many missing females discovered three women buried in the sugarcane field during a random search. Suspicion was cast Suradji’s way.
Police questioned him—they brutalized him, his wife said— and he admitted to murdering sixteen females over a five-year period. However, when the police searched his home, they found evidence indicating many more than sixteen victims. They found clothing and personal items from twenty-five different females, the classic behavior not of a sorcerer but of a serial murderer gathering trophies of his victims. Armed with this evidence, police were able to break down the sorcerer, and he admitted to killing forty-two women and girls since his 1986 dream. The police also arrested his three wives, but after questioning, two of them were released. Only the oldest wife Tumini, age thirty-eight at the time, was charged.
The trial of both Suradji and Tumini began on April 28, 1997. They were charged with forty-two murders. The prosecution has its work cut out—the duo had taken back their confessions to police, claiming that police had beaten the admissions out of them. However, the jury didn’t buy it. Both were found guilty; Tumini received a life sentence and Suradji a death sentence, an uncommonly harsh penalty in Indonesia. He was executed by firing squad in May 1998.
After the trial, Suradji lamented to reporters that he would not reach his goal of seventy deaths. Chillingly, when the case hit the limelight, police asked all families in Indonesia to report to them whether anyone in their family was missing. About eighty families responded.
