On the evening of March 23, 1977, Anil Gokhale went to the Alka Talkies cinema in Pune to meet his older brother Jayant, and could not find him. Rajendra Jakkal, a friend of Jayant's from art college, happened to be there with his motorcycle and offered Anil a ride home. He took him instead to the tin shed he kept on Karve Road. There Anil was strangled with nylon rope, lashed to an iron ladder, weighted with boulders and dropped into the Mula-Mutha River near Bund Garden. The next evening the body surfaced near Yerwada.
It was the tenth killing, and the one that ended it. Inspector Manikrao Damame's team recognized the way the rope had been knotted: it matched the two households strangled in the city over the previous winter, which the police had until then treated as robberies that went wrong. Assistant Commissioner of Police Madhusudan Hulyalkar took over and started with the people Anil had last been seen with. That list began with Jakkal.
He was twenty-five, the oldest of four commercial art students at the Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya on Tilak Road who ran together and had a campus reputation for drinking and theft. The others were Dilip Dhyanoba Sutar and Munawar Harun Shah, both twenty-one, and Shantaram Kanhoji Jagtap, twenty-three. Reporting on the case treated Jakkal as the leader. The shed was his, and it was where the first and last victims were taken. The court convicted all four of all ten murders and did not divide the killings among them.
The first had been a classmate. Prakash Hegde's father, Sundar Hegde, ran the Vishwa, a small restaurant behind the college, and the four planned to hold the son for ransom. On January 15, 1976, with another student, Suhas Chandak, they lured Prakash to the shed and made him write his father a note saying he was leaving home. The next night they gagged him, took him to Peshwe Park, a few yards from his father's restaurant, and strangled him with nylon rope. His body went into an iron barrel with stones and was sunk in the park lake. The day after, his father received a ransom demand. The police filed Prakash as a missing person.
Over the summer the group went to Kolhapur to rob a businessman, Arvind Kashid. They called at his house two nights running on the pretext of business, and on the second night, once inside, decided he was too big and the street too crowded, and left.
Back in Pune, on the night of October 31, 1976, they forced their way at knifepoint into Achyut Joshi's house in the Vijaynagar colony, tied up Joshi and his wife Usha, strangled him and smothered her. When their teenage son Anand came home he was stripped and strangled. The four left with a watch, Usha Joshi's mangalsutra and several thousand rupees. Three weeks later a raid on Yashomati Bafana's bungalow on Shankarseth Road failed when she and two servants fought back, and the attackers went over a barbed-wire fence.
At about eight in the evening of December 1 they rang the bell at Smriti, the Abhyankar house on Bhandarkar Road. Dhananjay Abhyankar answered. They gagged him, tied his hands and made him walk them through the house, where his grandfather Kashinath Shastri Abhyankar, eighty-eight, a noted Sanskrit scholar, his grandmother Indirabai, seventy-six, the family's maid Sakubai Wagh, sixty, and his sister Jui were at home. All five were gagged, tied hand and foot and strangled with nylon rope. Jui was stripped and made to show them the valuables before she was killed. Her age is given as twenty or twenty-one, and her brother's as nineteen or twenty-two, depending on the account.
After the Gokhale killing the four were questioned separately and could not agree on where they had been that week. A fellow student, Satish Gore, gave way under questioning and told the police about Prakash Hegde and where his body was. Chandak, who had been present when Prakash was taken, became an approver. The four were arrested on March 30, 1977, and goods from the Joshi and Abhyankar houses were recovered.
Shamrao G. Samant, a senior criminal lawyer, prosecuted for the state. The trial opened in the Pune sessions court on May 15, 1978, and lasted more than four months, and on September 28 Judge Waman Narayan Bapat sentenced all four to death. The Bombay High Court confirmed the sentences on April 6, 1979, and the Supreme Court of India dismissed their petitions on November 17, 1980. The President declined to pardon them. Jakkal, Sutar, Jagtap and Shah were hanged at the Yerwada Central Jail on November 27, 1983.
Three years later the director Rajdutt made the case into a Marathi film, Maaficha Sakshidar, whose title means witness for the prosecution. It renamed everyone, and gave the part modeled on Jakkal to Nana Patekar in one of his first film roles.