Seventy people, by his own count, and not one of their names is recorded anywhere that can be read today. That is the shape of the case of Kampatimar Shankariya, the man Indian reference books call the country's most prolific serial killer, and it is a shape worth stating at the outset, because everything about him that follows rests on a thin layer of secondhand summary.
Jaipur police arrested him in 1978 at the age of twenty-six. He had been born in Rajasthan in about 1952; most published accounts say in Jaipur itself, one recent revision places his birth in Srikaranpur in Sri Ganganagar district, and neither version cites a record. Nothing at all is preserved about his family, his schooling or his work. What the accounts agree on is what he did in 1977 and 1978, across Jaipur and the districts around it: he killed people with a hammer, striking them on the neck below the ear. The blow gave him the name he is known by. Kanpatimar, in the Hindi of the region, means roughly one who strikes the temple, or under the ear, and it attached to him so completely that it is now written as though it were his given name, in two spellings.
The victims were men and women alike, most of them, as far as the reports go, people he came upon by chance. That randomness is offered in the accounts as the reason the police took so long to see one hand behind so many deaths, and it is plausible, but no contemporary investigative record has surfaced to confirm how the killings were finally connected or what led officers to him.
After his arrest he gave what was described as a detailed confession and told police he had killed for the pleasure it gave him. The figure of seventy, sometimes given as more than seventy, comes from that confession as relayed through the court and press reports of the time and then through Michael Newton's Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, which is the source almost every later retelling traces back to. No independent reconstruction of the deaths, no list of names, and no published judgment has been found. Whether he was tried on seventy counts or on a handful with the confession read in is not stated in anything accessible.
He was convicted of murder early in 1979 and sentenced to death. On May 16, 1979 he was hanged at Jaipur, aged twenty-seven. Every account of him closes on what he is said to have told those present on the scaffold: "I have murdered in vain. Nobody should become like me." The sentence everyone can quote is his. The names of the people he killed were never assembled at all.
About 1952: Kampatimar Shankariya is born in Rajasthan.
1977 to 1978: across Jaipur and the districts around it, he kills people with a hammer blow to the neck below the ear.
1978: Jaipur police arrest him at twenty-six, and he confesses to killing seventy people.
Early 1979: he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
May 16, 1979: Shankariya is hanged at Jaipur, aged twenty-seven.