On January 4, 2021, the body of a woman was found beside the railway track near Ankushapur village, in the Ghatkesar police limits on the eastern edge of Hyderabad. Her face had been burned with alcohol, and she could not be identified from it. Near her lay bangles, earrings, a water bottle, the long shirt that women on construction sites wear over their clothes, and a slip of paper with a mobile number written on it, one digit short.
She was Kavala Venkatamma, fifty. Her husband, Kavala Anathaiah, had gone to Jubilee Hills police station on New Year’s Day to report that she had been missing since eight o’clock on the morning of December 30. The police later said she had been picked up at the toddy compound in Yousufguda, taken to open ground at Ankushapur, given liquor and killed with a boulder, and that her valuables were taken. The incomplete number led investigators to a laborer in Yousufguda, and the inquiry that followed led to a man the Hyderabad police already knew well.
Maina Ramulu, forty-five, a laborer living in Borabanda, was arrested on January 26, 2021 by the Commissioner’s Task Force North Zone working with Rachakonda police. Police tied him to a second killing that month. On December 10, 2020, they said, he met a woman aged between thirty-five and forty-five at the toddy compound in Bala Nagar, took her to Japta Singayapalli village in the Mulugu police limits of Siddipet district, strangled her with her own saree and took her silver ornaments. She has never been identified.
Hyderabad police commissioner Anjani Kumar then set out a record that went back almost two decades. Ramulu had been arrested in twenty-one cases before: sixteen murders for gain, four property offenses and one escape from custody. The police put the number of women he had killed at eighteen.
He was born in Arutla village in 1976 and worked as a stone-cutter. At twenty-one his family arranged a marriage for him, and his wife left with another man within days of the wedding. Police said afterwards that this was the origin of what they called 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 in custody. It sits beside a plainer one: every victim was wearing jewelry, and most of it was worth very little.
The method barely changed. He approached poor women, many of them married and most of them middle-aged, at toddy shops and country liquor vends, offered drink or money, and took them to isolated ground. He killed them with stones or strangled them. In many 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 and around Hyderabad. He was arrested at Narsingi 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 Deccan Chronicle reported in 2025 that his first arrest had come earlier, in 2006, for the killing of his brother in the Raidurg police limits. The 2021 police account does not mention that case, and its outcome has not been reported.
On December 1, 2011, while serving the life sentence at Cherlapally Central Prison, he was moved to the Institute of Mental Health at Erragadda 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. Bowenpally police caught him on May 13, 2013, and he received a second life sentence.
In 2018 the Telangana High Court released him on appeal, a release reported at the time as being for good behavior. He killed two women that year, at Shamirpet and Patancheru, and was returned to prison. A further appeal to the High Court freed him on July 31, 2020. The unidentified woman at Japta Singayapalli died four months and ten days later, and Kavala Venkatamma twenty days after her.
The count needs care. Sixteen murder convictions are on the record. The two December 2020 killings were charges when he was arrested, and no verdict in either has been reported. The figure of eighteen is the police total, and the widely syndicated figure of twenty-one confuses the number of cases he had been arrested in, only sixteen of which were murders, with a count of victims. An online legal commentary published in October 2025 asserted that a Hyderabad sessions court sentenced him to death in 2023. The Deccan Chronicle, writing about the case in June 2025, described murder cases still pending against him and did not mention a death sentence. The claim is unconfirmed.
Each time he left custody, by escape, on appeal or on the strength of good conduct, women were killed within months. The record Anjani Kumar read out in January 2021 was of a man the system had held three times and let go three times.