Ten serial killers in India and their spine chilling killings
When it comes to crime, the most feared, hated and widely covered criminals are serial killers.
When it comes to crime, the most feared, hated and widely covered criminals are serial killers. People are intrigued and mystified by the way they go on murdering innocents without any remorse.
Their modus operandi of murdering people sends shivers down people’s spines.
Like the story of the notorious Luis Garavito or ‘the Beast’ of Columbia, who is said to have murdered 140 children over five years in the 1990s after raping and torturing them, India has seen a number of such serial killers.
The latest addition to this breed of psychopath killers is 42-year-old Santosh Pol, who was arrested by the police in Maharashtra’s Satara district on August 11.
Pol admitted to have killed six persons in Wai town in the district in the past 13 years, the latest victim being an anganwadi worker.
Pol, now being known as ‘Dr. Death’, abducted Mangala Jedhe on June 15, murdered her and buried her body in his farm house. After a further search in the farmhouse compound, the police unearthed skeletal remains of five more victims of Pol.
Like most serial killers, who are given bizarre nicknames according to their modus operandi of murdering people, Pol is now called ‘Dr. Death’ because he is a quack and his victims were his patients.
He killed his victims either by hitting their heads with blunt objects or injecting lethal doses of anaesthesia.
Why serial killers kill? According to Twisted Minds, a website devoted to psychological crimes, they kill because they are insecure and irrationally fear rejection. They feel a sense of power when they see the victims suffering for a long time before dying.
Here are 10 serial killers in India who murdered people in cold blood:
1. Thug Behram:
This may not be his real name but given by the British ruling India. The leader of the ‘thuggee’ cult that looted travellers after strangulating them with a handkerchief between late 18th and early 19th century in northern central India.
Thug Behram Pic credit: http://www.asesinos-en-serie.com/
It is said that Thug Behram alias ‘King of Thugs’ murdered over 930 unsuspecting travelers between 1790 and 1840. After being caught, he was hanged to death by the British.
2. Psycho Raman:
Raman Raghav is believed to have killed around 40 persons – mostly slum dwellers – in Mumbai in a span of three years in mid-1960s.
After arrest, no amount of sustained interrogation and torture made him confess to his crime. But after he was treated with delicious chicken, he sang like a bird revealing details of how he went about killing innocents. He was sentenced to death by a Mumbai court.
3. The Hammer man:
Kampatimar Sankariya of Jaipur hammered to death 70 persons. After getting caught, he told police that killing people gave him pleasure. He was hanged in 1979.
4. The Stoneman:
A series of 12 murders were reported in Mumbai over two years starting from 1985. In all cases the killer crushed the victims’ head with a single stone weighing 30 kg while they slept on the pavement.
The killer was never nabbed because he selected his victims sleeping in isolated places, but the killings stopped by1988.
However a year later, 13 more deaths in six months were reported in Kolkata, with the murders having uncanny similarity to Mumbai murders. The killer however still remains a mystery.
5. Auto Shankar:
Born Gowri Shankar, this serial killer was nicknamed ‘Auto Shankar’ because he kidnapped nine young girls from Chennai in his three-wheeler in a span of six months in 1988, murdered them, cremated their bodies and immersed their ashes in the Bay of Bengal. He was sentenced to death in 1991.
6. The Killer Sisters:
Renuka Shinde and her sister Seema Gavit of Kolhapur in Maharashtra killed scores of children after kidnapping them.
After their arrest in 1996, they said could not recollect how many children they had murdered before 1990 but confessed to killing six children in six years after that.
They killed the children by smashing their heads against a wall or electric pole. They said they kidnapped the children to use them as shields against getting caught during a theft.
They were handed over the death sentence in 2001 by a court in Kolhapur.
7. Devender Sharma:
An Ayurvedic doctor, Sharma admitted to killing about 40 persons, all drivers, to steal cars in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana in two years between 2002 and 2004. He has been sentenced to death.
8. Surinder Koli:
Known as ‘Nithari killer’, Koli worked as a domestic servant in the bungalow of a rich businessman, Mohinder Singh Pandher, at Nithari village in Noida.
In 2006, after several skulls of children of the village were found in the bungalow, police arrested both the master and servant and booked them for kidnapping, murder, rape, pedophilia and organ trafficking.
Koli was found guilty of abducting and killing the children and handed over death sentence while Pandher is awaiting justice in some related cases.
9. The Beer Man:
This serial killer murdered six persons in Mumbai within four months from October 2006 and a beer bottle was found near each victim’s body.
In 2008, a man called Ravindra Kantrole was arrested following the seventh murder and convicted of two earlier murders as well, but a year later he was acquitted of all charges due to lack of evidence. So the mystery of the murders continues.
10. Cyanide Man:
Mohan Kumar alias Anand Kulal a school teacher in Mangalore in Karnataka killed 20 women after befriending them between 2005 and 2009.
He was nicknamed ‘cyanide man’ because he killed the women by offering them cyanide on the pretext of giving medicine after proposing and eloping with them. He was sentenced to death in 2013.
Big Wire
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