Rajendra Jakkal was a commercial art student in Pune, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, when he and three fellow students carried out a series of ten murders in the city between January 1976 and March 1977. With Dilip Dhyanoba Sutar, Shantaram Kanhoji Jagtap and Munawar Harun Shah he was sentenced to death in 1978 in a sessions trial known in the courts as the Joshi-Abhyankar Massacre case, and in 1983 the four were hanged together at Yerwada Central Jail in Pune.
In the law reports the case carries Shah's name. In later retellings on screen it has carried Jakkal's: when the filmmaker Vivek Wagh made a documentary about the murders, and later a web series, he called both of them Jakkal. When the Free Press Journal looked back at the hangings in 2026, it named Jakkal alone and referred to the others as three other convicts.
Jakkal studied commercial art at the Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya, an art college on Tilak Road in Pune, the Free Press Journal reported in 2020 in a news agency account of the case; his three co-accused were students there as well. The news agency IANS, reporting on Wagh's web series, wrote that the four had no criminal background and came from middle-class families.
Little else about Jakkal's life before the killings has been reported in the court record or the press. His age, his family and his home town do not appear in those accounts, and he is not named in the Supreme Court's 1983 judgment on the petitions of the other three.
The four students, according to the Supreme Court's later summary of the case, acted in pursuance of a criminal conspiracy that ran from January 1976 to March 1977 and produced six separate incidents, ten murders, and acts of robbery and dacoity.
The series began with a classmate. The Free Press Journal's account named him as Prasad Hedge and dated his death to January 16, 1976. His father kept a small restaurant near the college, and the students kidnapped the young man in the hope of a ransom from the family. He was strangled.
The remaining nine killings took place between October 31, 1976 and March 23, 1977, during break-ins at homes in Pune. According to the same report, the people killed were members of the families living in those homes, and they died by suffocation and strangulation. None of the nine is named in the court record or in the news reports on the case published since 2020.
The Supreme Court did not apportion the ten deaths among the four men by name. Of the three who came before it in 1983, it said each had been involved in at least seven of the ten murders. It made no finding of that kind about Jakkal, who was not a party to those petitions.
One of the people accused in the case turned approver, becoming a witness for the prosecution against the four, according to the Free Press Journal. The date of Jakkal's arrest was not reported.
The trial took place at the sessions court in Poona, as Pune is named in the court papers of the time. On September 28, 1978, the court sentenced Jakkal, Sutar, Jagtap and Shah to death. A crowd gathered at the court premises as the sentence was pronounced, the 2020 report said.
The Bombay High Court confirmed the four death sentences on April 6, 1979. The Supreme Court of India rejected the appeals that followed, The Bridge Chronicle, a Pune newspaper, reported in 2026. The Supreme Court's own 1983 judgment records that the special leave petitions in the case were dismissed on November 17, 1980, and review petitions on February 11, 1981, which marked the end of the normal judicial process.
After that the record follows Jakkal's co-accused rather than Jakkal. Shah and Jagtap filed writ petitions that were dismissed in February 1982, and in December 1982 and early 1983 Shah, Jagtap and Sutar each filed a new writ petition seeking commutation to life imprisonment. They argued that the case did not belong among the rarest of rare cases that call for death and that they had lived for about five years under a death sentence. Justices V. D. Tulzapurkar and Ranganath Misra dismissed all three on April 18, 1983. They held that the crimes fell within the rarest of the rare category and that much of the delay had come from the prisoners' own repeated petitions, and they directed that the sentences be carried out without further loss of time. Counsel for the State told the court that the condemned men's mercy petitions had already been dismissed.
Jakkal's name does not appear in that ruling, and the reports on the case do not say whether he filed petitions of his own after 1981.
Jakkal was hanged with Sutar, Jagtap and Shah at Yerwada Central Jail in 1983. The date is reported two ways. The Free Press Journal and The News Minute, writing in January 2020, gave October 25, 1983. IANS, in its report on the web series, and The Bridge Chronicle in 2026 gave November 27, 1983.
The 2020 reports were prompted by the approaching execution of four men in the Delhi case known as Nirbhaya, and The News Minute wrote that the Pune hangings were the last occasion before that case on which more than one person was executed together in India. In July 2026 the Free Press Journal, looking back at the history of executions at the jail, described the 1983 hangings as those of "Rajendra Jakkal and three other convicts" in the Joshi-Abhyankar serial murder case. The same report said Maharashtra prison department records show 35 people hanged at Yerwada since 1950, in a jail the British built in 1851.
Vivek Wagh's Marathi documentary Jakkal won the award for best investigative film among non-feature films at the 67th National Film Awards, for films of 2019, according to the list of winners issued through the Press Information Bureau. The film was produced by Neon Reel Creation.
Wagh went on to spend four years on a dramatized Marathi web series about the murders, also titled Jakkal, IANS reported. It was produced by Jio Studios with A Culture Canvas Entertainment and announced for launch in October 2023. Wagh described Pune as a city that had been known as a pensioners' paradise and as a cultural capital, and said the Jakkal period had frightened its residents. He framed the series around two questions: whether Jakkal was only a surname or an instinct that drove the young men to kill, and whether Jakkal had been an artist who became a murderer or a murderer who became an artist.
The same killings were reportedly the basis of Paanch, the first feature directed by Anurag Kashyap, with Kay Kay Menon among its cast, IANS reported. The Statesman reported that the film was shelved in 2003 after India's Central Board of Film Certification objected to its violence, its depiction of drug use and its strong language, and that its producer later said it would be restored and released.
The Bridge Chronicle in 2026 named Jakkal first among the four men in its list of the death-penalty cases that shaped Pune's criminal justice history.
The day of the execution is given as October 25, 1983 in two 2020 reports and November 27, 1983 in reports from 2023 and 2026. The first victim's name appears as Prasad Hedge in the 2020 news agency report. The names of the other nine people killed, Jakkal's age, the date of his arrest, and his individual part in each killing were not reported in the court record or the news reports on the case.
January 16, 1976: a classmate of the four students, reported as Prasad Hedge, is killed after being kidnapped for ransom.
October 31, 1976 to March 23, 1977: nine more people are killed in house break-ins in Pune.
September 28, 1978: the sessions court at Poona sentences Jakkal, Sutar, Jagtap and Shah to death.
April 6, 1979: the Bombay High Court confirms the death sentences.
November 17, 1980: special leave petitions in the case are dismissed by the Supreme Court of India.
February 11, 1981: review petitions dismissed.
April 18, 1983: the Supreme Court dismisses the last writ petitions of Shah, Jagtap and Sutar.
October 25 or November 27, 1983: Jakkal and his three co-accused are hanged at Yerwada Central Jail, Pune.
2003: Paanch, a film reportedly based on the murders, is shelved.
67th National Film Awards (films of 2019): Vivek Wagh's documentary Jakkal wins best investigative film.
October 2023: launch announced for the Marathi web series Jakkal.