Mahanand Naik was born around 1969 and lived at Shiroda in Goa. He drove an auto-rickshaw. He was married with a small child, and reporters at his trials kept remarking on how slight and quiet he was, and how hard people found it to believe the charges.
The pattern, as the Goa police described it, ran for about fifteen years from 1994. He approached young unmarried women from poor families, usually with the promise of marriage, and persuaded them to leave with him. He took them to isolated places, cashew plantations and open plateau land, strangled them with the dupatta they were wearing, took their gold ornaments and sold them on to goldsmiths. In at least one case he hung the body from a tree afterwards. The motive throughout was the gold.
He had been picked up after the first killing, in the mid nineteen nineties. A witness had seen the dead woman with a bearded man. He was let go for want of evidence, with his fellow rickshaw drivers vouching for him, and he was not looked at again for well over a decade.
What ended it had nothing to do with the murder investigations. He was arrested on April 21, 2009 for the rape of his wife's friend. In custody he confessed to a string of killings and took officers to where the bodies were. The woman whose complaint led to the arrest was afterwards left to deal with the social consequences of being attached to the case.
The prosecutions went badly. He was convicted in June 2011 of the murder of Susheela Fatarpekar, a sweeper killed at Bambolim in October 2007, and given life with a fine; the court noted the prosecution had not asked for death. He was convicted weeks later of the murder of Vasanti Gaude, nineteen, killed in 1995, and given a second life term. In February 2012 he was convicted of the murder of Yogita Naik, thirty, strangled in a cashew plantation in January 2009, and given a third. Then in 2013 the appeal court acquitted him in the Fatarpekar case while upholding the Gaude conviction. In seven other murder cases he was acquitted outright because the prosecution could not prove them.
So the arithmetic that matters is this: police attributed sixteen deaths to him, he confessed to a series of them, three courts convicted him, and two of those convictions still stand. He also received seven years for the rape.
In custody he was accused of telephoning and texting the woman he had attacked, which he was able to do because there were mobile phones circulating inside Goa's oldest prison; a women's rights organisation made the complaint that brought it to light. In 2023 he was released for twenty-one days, which local reporting treated as a scandal in itself.
Figures for this case differ by source. Contemporary reports say sixteen women and some say at least eighteen, and later accounts describe him as convicted of two. All three descriptions are accurate at different points in the litigation, which is why both numbers appear in the count here.