On August 27, 1968, a police sub-inspector from the Dongri station, Alex Fialho, recognized a man in the Bhendi Bazaar area of south Bombay from the descriptions circulating of the killer who had been terrorizing the northern suburbs. With two witnesses from the area he detained him. The man got into his jeep without protest, and when his fingerprints were checked they matched the record of Raman Raghav, alias Sindhi Dalwai, a homeless man with a past conviction for robbery. He was arrested under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code for the murders of Lalchand Jagannath Yadav and Dular Jaggi Yadav at Chinchavli village in Malad.
He was born around 1929 and had used many names, among them Sindhi Talwai, Anna, Thambi and Veluswami. He lived rough on the city's fringes and had served five years in prison for robbery. The killings came in two waves. In 1965 and 1966 nineteen people were attacked along the Great Indian Peninsula Railway line, and he later admitted killing twenty-three people there in 1966; he was picked up and questioned at the time, but none of the survivors had seen the attacker, there was no evidence against him, and he was released. In 1968 the killings began again in the northern suburbs. His victims were the poorest people in the city, men, women and children sleeping on pavements and in huts, whose skulls he crushed with a bent iron rod as they slept. He took almost nothing. The city panicked, people were afraid to sleep in the open or with their windows open, and the deputy commissioner of police for crime, Ramakant Kulkarni, led a combing operation involving thousands of officers.
In custody he at first refused to talk. He confessed after asking for and being given chicken, and afterwards a comb and a mirror, and then admitted forty-one murders and took the police on a tour of the places where he had killed and to where he had hidden the rod. He described a world divided between two governments, one visible and one invisible, and a law under which he was permitted to kill, and he told Fialho he felt no remorse because God had told him to kill. Fialho received the President's Police Medal for the arrest.
His lawyer argued that he was of unsound mind. The Police Surgeon of Bombay observed him from June 28 to July 23, 1969, and reported that he was not psychotic, that his memory was sound and his intelligence average, and that he understood the nature of his acts and the proceedings; he was not certifiably insane. With that opinion the trial went ahead, and he pleaded guilty. On August 13, 1969, he was sentenced to death. Later examinations diagnosed chronic paranoid schizophrenia, and the Bombay High Court reduced the sentence to life imprisonment on the ground that he was incurably mentally ill; one account dates that ruling to August 4, 1987.
He was held at Yerwada Central Jail in Pune and treated at the Central Institute of Mental Health and Research, and he died of kidney failure at Sassoon Hospital in Pune. Accounts disagree on the year: several give 1987, others April 7, 1995. The 2016 film Raman Raghav 2.0 takes its title from him but is not about him.