M. Jaishankar was born in 1977 at Kanniyanpatti, in the Edappadi area of Salem district in Tamil Nadu. He left school after Class 12 and worked as a lorry driver. By 2011 he was married with three daughters. The Indian press called him Psycho Shankar, a name that spread further after a 2017 Kannada film took the case as its subject.
Between 2008 and 2011 he attacked women in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, many of them on rural roads and around lorry stops. He abducted them, raped them and killed them, hacking at them with a machete he carried. He was accused in total of something like thirty cases of rape, murder and robbery, and of the murders of at least nineteen women. After his arrest he was assessed as mentally ill.
He was arrested in the autumn of 2009 and convicted in April 2013 in the first case brought against him, one of trespass, rape and murder, receiving ten years. Some accounts describe the sentence as life. More than twenty further cases were pending against him in Chennai, Dharmapuri, Hosur, Salem and Tiruppattur in Tamil Nadu and in Bangalore Rural, Chitradurga, Hiriyur, Kadur, Molakalmuru and Tumkur in Karnataka.
What made him notorious in India was not the killings but the escapes. In 2013 he got out of the high-security Parappana Agrahara central prison in Bangalore using a bamboo pole and a bedsheet, wearing a police uniform, over both the inner and outer perimeter walls and their electric fencing. He cut his feet badly on broken glass going over. Eleven prison officials were suspended for dereliction of duty, an inquiry found the CCTV system was old and did not cover the whole site, and there were recommendations to fit biometric locks. He was recaptured five days later on the Hosur road, tracked down through an informant he had telephoned asking for a vehicle.
A further escape attempt, scaling a thirty-foot compound wall, left him with a spinal injury that disabled him. He was reported afterwards to be suffering from depression connected to it.
On February 25, 2018 he attempted to organise another escape. It failed, and he was moved into solitary confinement. Two days later, on February 27, 2018, he cut his own throat with a shaving blade in the cell. Officers found him in a pool of blood and he was taken to Victoria Hospital, where he was declared dead. He was forty or forty-one.
Most of the cases against him were never tried. Nineteen is the number of murders he stood accused of; one is the number he was convicted of.