Serial killer Chandrakant Jha was awarded the death penalty on Tuesday for the second of the three murders that he committed before being arrested by the Delhi Police.
He earned the notoriety by dumping headless bodies and torsos of his victims near Tihar Central Jail during 2006 and 2007.
He would also write letters or make phone calls to mock at cops and dare them to catch him.
Additional Sessions Judge Kamini Lau sentenced 46-year-old Jha, who was a vegetable retailer, to death penalty for the murder of 19-year-old Upender whose dismembered body was found outside Tihar on April 25, 2007 following which other body parts were recovered from other places in Delhi.
The three murders had a similar pattern with decapitated bodies being thrown outside Tihar Jail on October 20, 2006, April 25, 2007, and May 18, 2007. Though the police have suspected his involvement in other murders from 1998 onwards, charges in those cases failed to stick in court. Jha, a father of five minor girls, had been sentenced on Monday to life in prison for the murder of an unidentified person whose body was found on May 18. Regarding her rationale for terming the murder in the “rarest of rare” category, ASJ Ms. Lau said: “The brutality so inflicted on the body of the deceased demonstrates that the convict does not possess basic humanness and lacks the psyche or mind set which may be amenable for any reform which psyche was displayed during the commission of offence. It is writ large that the convict Chandrakant Jha had stooped so low as to unleash his monstrous self on the innocent, helpless and defenceless young man who had reposed his faith and confidence in him. The convict is a menace to the society and the manner in which he has engaged himself into senseless serial killings shows that he is beyond reform. Certain category of perpetrators of crime who if not removed from the circulation of the society would destroy it.”
The quantum of sentence in the other murder case will be pronounced on February 6.
