Kampatimar Shankariya was born in Jaipur, Rajasthan in about 1952, and was twenty-six when Jaipur police arrested him in 1978. Almost nothing is recorded of his early life.
Between 1977 and 1978 he killed around seventy people, men and women, striking them with a hammer below the ear and on the neck.
It is the method that gave him the name he is known by. Kanpatimar means, roughly, one who hits under the ear.
The killings were spread across Jaipur and the surrounding districts and the victims were largely people encountered by chance, which is part of why the police struggled to connect them.
He confessed at length after his arrest and said he had killed for the pleasure of it.
No comprehensive victim list was ever assembled. The figure of seventy rests on his confession and on the court and press reports of the period rather than on any independent reconstruction.
He was convicted in early 1979 and hanged at Jaipur on May 16, 1979, aged twenty-seven.
He is remembered in India almost entirely for what he said on the scaffold: "I have murdered in vain. Nobody should become like me."
Seventy deaths and no list of the dead. The sentence everyone can quote is his, and the names of the people he killed were never assembled at all.