General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi

Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi (इंडियन प्रीडेटर: दिल्ली का कसाई) is a 2022 Indian true crime documentary series on Netflix that revisits the case of Chandrakant Jha, a migrant worker convicted of murdering and dismembering men in Delhi and leaving their body parts outside a jail with taunting notes addressed to the police. Directed by Ayesha Sood and produced by VICE India, it premiered on July 20, 2022, and is the first installment of Netflix's Indian Predator series about Indian serial killers.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Format	Three-episode Hindi-language true crime documentary series; episodes titled Tohfe, Tasveer, and Tukre³
Premiere	July 20, 2022, exclusively on Netflix¹
Director / production	Ayesha Sood; VICE India production, with India Today also credited as a production house¹^•⁴
Subject	Chandrakant Jha, convicted in 2013 for three murders committed in Delhi between 2003 and 2007²
Ratings	Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer 60% (10 reviews) and Popcornmeter 20%; IMDb 6.1⁵^•⁶
Age rating / runtime	TV-MA (rated A in India); roughly 42 to 43 minutes per episode³^•⁷
Franchise position	First of the Indian Predator titles, followed by The Diary of a Serial Killer (September 2022), Murder in a Courtroom, and Beast of Bangalore²^•⁸

Spoilers

The case it covers

The series opens with the 2006 discovery of a beheaded body left outside a Delhi jail, accompanied by a note challenging the police to catch the killer. The victim was not the killer's first, and the show traces the Delhi Police investigation, the arrest of Chandrakant Jha, and the effort to understand his motives.³^•¹

Jha was convicted in 2013 for three murders committed in the capital between 2003 and 2007. There was no evidence to convict him in at least four more killings, and the documentary suggests he could have been responsible for additional deaths. He dismembered his victims and scattered their body parts around the city, using them to taunt the police over what he saw as their inefficiency.²^•⁹

Franchise and availability

The Butcher of Delhi was the first of three parts announced under the Indian Predator banner; when the project was first announced in March 2022, four directors were attached, with Sood directing this installment. The follow-up, Indian Predator: The Diary of a Serial Killer, premiered on Netflix in September 2022 and helped establish India Today Originals as a documentary content hub.⁴^•⁸ Later franchise entries include Murder in a Courtroom and Beast of Bangalore.⁷

The series streams on Netflix with a subscription in India and other markets, with no free ad-supported option. Audio tracks include Hindi (original), English, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu, with subtitles in English and Hindi among others.⁶^•³ Netflix and TVmaze list the season as three episodes, while JustWatch's listing shows four episodes for Season 1, a discrepancy between the two databases.³^•⁷^•⁶

Production and approach

Director Ayesha Sood, a documentary filmmaker, said she chose the case through a process of elimination among many candidates and described Jha as an invisible man who preyed on people living on the margins of society. For the show, she interviewed Delhi Police officers who investigated the case, journalists who covered it, the families of victims, and residents of Jha's village, Ghosai.¹⁰^•¹¹ Sood called it a case that "should have rocked the country but was missed."¹

The three episodes move across perspectives: Tohfe covers the 2006 discovery and the killer's challenge to police; Tasveer follows interrogations in which Chandrakant recounts his fraught history with the police while investigators search for conclusive evidence; Tukre presents accounts and photographs from Ghosai residents and expert discussion of the case's mental health and social implications.³

Reception

Critical response was mixed. On Rotten Tomatoes the season holds a 60% Tomatometer from 10 reviews against a 20% Popcornmeter score from fewer than 50 audience ratings.⁵ Rahul Desai of Film Companion called it a rare documentary that conveys information only to expose the viewer's relationship with that information, while Rohan Naahar of The Indian Express gave it 3.5 out of 5 and praised its blending of expert commentary with socio-political context. Bhuvanesh Chandar of The Hindu criticized it for clutching to the brutality of the crime without digging beyond the surface.¹² The Deccan Herald review found the series engaging in parts but reliant on the savagery of the crimes rather than an exploration of the killer's psyche, and noted that Jha's accusations of prison torture were largely sidestepped.⁹ The Quint's review similarly argued that the accused's allegations of custodial torture, given as his reason for wanting to humiliate the police, were left hanging without discussion of police reform.¹³

Audience measurement placed the series among the stronger Indian true crime documentaries: the Ormax Power Rating, a 0-100 measure of audience likeability, scored it 56, compared with 57 for Crime Stories: India Detectives, and an Ormax analysis highlighted its method of mapping the scale of the crime by tracing similar murders across several years.¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026