Raman Raghav was born around 1929 and had convictions for burglary from the 1950s. He lived rough around the outskirts of Bombay, in what were then the fringes of the city. He was known as Sindhi Dalwai, among several names he used.
Between 1965 and 1968 he killed at least forty-one people, and probably more, by crushing their skulls with a heavy blunt instrument while they slept. He attacked whole families sleeping outdoors and in huts on the northern edges of the city, men, women and children, and took almost nothing. There was no sexual element and no robbery worth the name. The city was in a state of alarm through 1968 and thousands of officers were deployed on night patrols.
He was arrested in August 1968 by a sub-inspector, Alex Fialho, and confessed after asking for and being given chicken, and afterwards a comb and a mirror. His statements described a world divided between two governments, one visible and one invisible, and a law under which he was permitted to kill; he said he had no quarrel with the people he killed and did not know them.
He was convicted in 1969 and sentenced to death, and the Bombay High Court reduced it to life on the ground that he was incurably schizophrenic. He was held in prison and hospital for the rest of his life and died of kidney failure at Sassoon Hospital in Pune on April 7, 1995. The 2016 film Raman Raghav 2.0 is named after him but is not about him.