Yogita Naik, who went by Balika, was thirty and lived at Nagzar in Curti, near Ponda. On January 10, 2009, the man who had been promising to marry her took her to a cashew plantation at Morlem in Sattari, strangled her with her own dupatta, took gold ornaments worth about 80,000 rupees, and hanged her body from a cashew tree to make it look like suicide. He sold the gold to a goldsmith in Bicholim. Unlike the families of most of the women before her, hers kept after the police. Inspector Chetan Patil went through her call records and found a call from her phone made on a stolen SIM card, and the number led him to a young woman who had been under the same man's control for four years. She filed a complaint of rape and blackmail. A police constable recognized the suspect's photograph; he had seen him with a woman in his own family, who was being courted the same way. On April 21, 2009, the Goa police arrested Mahanand Naik.
He was about forty, an auto-rickshaw driver from Shiroda, married with a small child, and so slight and quiet that reporters at his trials kept remarking how hard people found the charges to believe. In custody he confessed to a series of killings going back fifteen years and led officers to the places where he had left the bodies. Police eventually linked him to sixteen deaths; some reports say eighteen, and at least one says twelve. The press called him the dupatta killer.
The method, as the police described it, hardly changed. He worked the bus stands at Ponda, Panaji, Margao and Mapusa, sometimes under another name or posing as a businessman, looking for young women from poor families, housemaids and tailors among them, who wanted to marry. He promised marriage, often a secret elopement, and asked them to wear their best jewelry for the wedding. Then he took them to isolated ground, cashew plantations and open plateau land, sometimes bought them ice cream or made small talk, and strangled them with the dupatta they had on. Some were sexually assaulted. He sold the gold to local jewelers, often with a story about a relative in the hospital.
The first known victim was a woman of thirty at Khandepar in 1994. He had been picked up then: a witness had seen her with a bearded man. He was released for lack of evidence, with fellow rickshaw drivers speaking for him, and no one looked at him again for fifteen years. After a quiet period the killings grew more frequent, and thirteen of them are dated between 2004 and 2009. His choice of victims was a large part of why he went undetected; the disappearances of poor women drew little attention from the press or the police.
The prosecutions went badly. He was acquitted in case after case because the evidence would not hold, among them the killing of Anjani Gaonkar near the Opa water treatment plant in Ponda in August 2005, and a woman he had taken to isolated ground at Bethora. On June 10, 2011, the North Goa sessions court convicted him of abducting and murdering Susheela Fatarpekar of Curca, a sweeper killed at Bambolim in 2007, whose mother had gone to the police in 2009; he got life and a fine, and the court noted that the prosecution had not asked for death. Weeks later he was convicted of killing Vasanti Gaude, nineteen, in 1995, and given a second life term. In February 2012 the sessions court at Panaji convicted him of Yogita Naik's murder, the third life term. In 2013 the High Court of Bombay at Goa acquitted him of the Fatarpekar killing and upheld the Gaude conviction. He was also sentenced to seven years for rape.
The number of acquittals is reported as seven, eight, nine and, in 2024 legal reporting, fourteen, depending on the date of the report and on which cases were counted. The two murder convictions that stand, for Vasanti Gaude and Yogita Naik, are not in dispute.
In custody he was accused of telephoning and sending messages to the woman whose complaint led to his arrest, which he could do because mobile phones were circulating inside the prison; a women's rights organization brought the complaint. She was left to carry the social stigma of her part in the case. In June 2023 the prison authorities gave him a twenty-one-day furlough, on condition that he report to the Old Goa police station. The decision was received in Goa with shock, and with fear for her.
He is held at the Central Jail at Colvale. In 2024 he applied for premature release. The Sentence Review Board refused, because the trial court in the Gaude case had said he could not set off his time as an undertrial against the sentence, which left him short of the fourteen years required. The High Court ruled on July 31, 2024, that he was entitled to the set-off, and in December 2024 it quashed the trial court's observation and ordered the board to consider his application again.
His case became a tiatr, the Konkani musical theater of Goa: Tony Dias staged Mahanand: Monis vo Soitan?, Mahanand: Man or Satan?, in 2010, and Franky Gonsalves produced a sequel in 2023.