Gauri Shankar, born in 1954, drove an auto-rickshaw in Thiruvanmiyur, in the south of Chennai, which is where the name comes from. He ran a business abducting and procuring young women for men with money and influence in the city.
Between 1988 and 1989 he killed six people, among them Sudalai, Sampath, Mohan, Govindaraj and Ravi. They were associates and members of his own group who knew what he was doing and were in a position to talk about it; several were killed after arrests began. The bodies were buried in and around his premises and were recovered in 1989.
The accounts of this case are inconsistent, and it is worth stating plainly. Six victims are named, four of them men, while summaries of the case say he abducted and murdered nine teenage girls in six months. The conviction was for six murders, and the victims of those murders were largely men connected to the racket. The abduction and sexual exploitation of young women is what the racket was for and is documented, but it is not what the murder convictions cover. The figure of nine appears in encyclopaedia summaries and does not survive contact with the trial record.
He was tried, convicted of six murders, and hanged at Salem Central Prison on April 27, 1995. Before his death he wrote an account naming politicians and officials he said had been his clients, which was suppressed at the time and became the subject of litigation and, much later, a television dramatisation. The political dimension is why the case is still argued about in Tamil Nadu, and it is also why the sensational version of the victim count has been so durable.