Maina Ramulu was born in Arutla village in Telangana in 1976 and worked as a stone-cutter. At twenty-one his family arranged a marriage for him; his wife left with another man within days of the wedding. Police said afterwards that this was the origin of what they described as his hatred of women, and quoted him as telling them, “I suffered a lot because of what my wife did to me. I killed these women to see that others don’t suffer like me.” That is his own account of his motive, given to police, and it sits alongside the more prosaic one: every victim was wearing jewellery, and most of it was of very little value.
His method was consistent for nearly twenty years. He approached poor middle-aged women at toddy shops and country liquor vends, offered them drink or money, and took them to isolated ground. He killed them with stones or strangled them. In a number of cases he poured alcohol over the face and set it alight, which delayed identification and is part of why the deaths were slow to be connected. He used at least five names, among them Mainam Ramulu, Bottu Ramulu and Talari Sailu.
Between 2003 and 2009 he killed nine women in the Hyderabad area. He was arrested on October 14, 2009, and on February 21, 2011 the Additional District and Sessions Judge for Ranga Reddy district sentenced him to life imprisonment and fined him five hundred rupees.
The releases are the part of this case that matters. On December 1, 2011, while serving that sentence at Cherlapally Central Prison, he was moved to the Institute of Mental Health at Erragadda for treatment after behaving erratically. On the night of December 30 he escaped with five other patients. Over the next eighteen months he killed five more women, two in the Bowenpally police area, two at Chanda Nagar and one at Dundigal. He was arrested again on May 13, 2013 and received a second life sentence.
In 2018 the Telangana High Court released him on appeal, reported at the time as being for good behaviour. He killed two more women that year. He was released a second time, and in December 2020 two women were killed at Ghatkesar and Siddipet.
He was arrested on January 26, 2021 by the Commissioner’s Task Force North Zone working with Rachakonda police, after a complaint made on New Year’s Day. Hyderabad police commissioner Anjani Kumar said he had by then been arrested in twenty-one cases: sixteen murders for gain, four property offences and one of escaping custody.
Sixteen murder convictions are on the record. The two December 2020 killings were charges when he was arrested and this archive has not been able to establish their outcome. Police put the total number of women involved at eighteen. Some accounts run higher, and one widely syndicated figure of twenty-one conflates the twenty-one investigated cases, only sixteen of which were murders, with a victim count.
He was convicted, escaped, convicted again, and released twice by a court. Women died after each of those releases. That sequence is documented in the police account of the case and is not disputed by any source consulted.