On August 23, 2009, M. Jayamani, thirty-nine, a constable from the all-women police station at Kangeyam, was on temporary duty at Perumanallur during a visit by the deputy chief minister, M. K. Stalin. She was kidnapped, raped repeatedly and killed. Her body was found a month later, on September 19. The man the Tiruppur police went after was M. Jaishankar, a truck driver from Kanniyanpatti village in Salem district, Tamil Nadu, the son of Maarimuttu, married with three daughters. He carried a black bag with a machete in it and killed anyone who resisted. By August 2009, police said, he had raped and murdered twelve women and raped six more, many of them sex workers he picked up near the dhabas along the highways, others women alone on farms. The first reported attack was on July 3, 2009, on P. Shyamala, forty-five, at Perandahalli.
He was arrested on October 19, 2009, and held at Coimbatore Central Prison, charged by then with thirteen counts of rape and murder in Tiruppur, Salem and Dharmapuri. In custody he said he enjoyed torturing the women. On March 18, 2011, being escorted back to Coimbatore from a fast-track court in Dharmapuri, he slipped away from two armed constables at the Salem bus stand. The next day one of them, M. Chinnasamy, shot himself. Jaishankar crossed into Karnataka and in the following month raped and murdered six women in Bellary; he was also blamed for killing a man and a child in Dharmapuri.
On the night of May 4, 2011, he rode a stolen motorcycle into Elagi village in Karnataka and asked a woman working alone in a field, Chandrakala Hotagi, for food and water, then tried to rape her. She raised the alarm, and her husband, Prakash, and a friend ran him down with other villagers and took him to the police. He was held at the Parappana Agrahara Central Jail in Bangalore, treated for psychiatric illness, and reported sentenced to twenty-seven years.
At 2 a.m. on September 1, 2013, at the change of guards, he let himself out of the prison hospital with a duplicate key, scaled a twenty-foot wall, walked along a fifteen-foot wall and climbed the thirty-foot compound wall, where the electric fence was not working that night. He carried a bamboo pole for balance and a bedsheet to lay over the broken glass, and was said to be wearing a police uniform. Eleven jail staff were suspended. The police offered five hundred thousand rupees for information and printed wanted posters in five languages. He had broken his leg jumping from the outer wall. An informant lured him with the promise of a motorbike to a derelict building near the Kudlu gate in Bangalore, where he was arrested on September 6.
He was kept afterward in a high-security cell under constant camera watch. On February 25, 2018, an attempt to escape again failed, and he was put in solitary confinement. In the early hours of February 27 he cut his own throat with a shaving blade he had obtained from a barber the day before; guards found him in a pool of blood at about 2:30 a.m., and he was declared dead at Victoria Hospital at 5:10 a.m. At his death he stood accused of murdering at least nineteen women, and most of the cases against him had never been tried. In one, the 2009 murder of K. Thangammal Ponnaya in Namakkal, he and an accomplice had been acquitted in 2014 because of lapses in the investigation. A 2017 Kannada film, Psycho Shankara, was made about his victims and their families.