Renuka Kiran Shinde, born in 1973, and her half-sister Seema Mohan Gavit, born in 1975, worked with their mother, Anjanabai Gavit, in Pune, Kolhapur, Nashik and other towns of Maharashtra. The family lived by picking pockets and snatching chains in crowded places, temples, markets, bus stands, and they took small children with them, because a woman carrying a child is not suspected and a crying child covers a theft.
Between 1990 and 1996 they abducted thirteen children, most of them under five. When a child grew too old to be useful, or cried too much, or drew attention when they were caught in the act, they killed it. The methods recorded in the judgments are starvation and swinging the child against a wall or an electricity pole, and in one case a child was killed in front of a crowd to create a distraction while they escaped. The bodies were left in bins, by roadsides and on rubbish tips. The Bombay High Court wrote in 2022 that the injuries some of the children suffered were so severe that only an extremely depraved mind could have inflicted them.
The three women were arrested in November 1996, after Anjanabai's estranged husband went to the police about the disappearance of his daughter by another marriage, whom they had also killed. Renuka's husband, Kiran Shinde, was arrested with them, turned approver and was pardoned. Anjanabai died of illness in custody before the trial began; most reports give the year as 1998.
In 2001 the sessions court at Kolhapur convicted both sisters of kidnapping thirteen children and murdering six, and sentenced them to death. The Bombay High Court upheld the convictions in 2004 but acquitted them of one murder, leaving five, and the Supreme Court confirmed the death sentences in 2006. The prosecution had alleged nine killings in all. The sisters' mercy petitions to the Governor of Maharashtra, filed in 2008, were declined in August 2013, and President Pranab Mukherjee rejected their petitions in July 2014, despite appeals for clemency from the United States, Japan, Canada and India on the ground that executions of women were almost unknown. They would have been the first women hanged in independent India.
They went back to the Bombay High Court. On January 18, 2022 a bench of Justices Nitin Jamdar and Sarang Kotwal commuted both death sentences to imprisonment for the rest of their natural lives. The court found that through the casual approach of state officials the mercy petitions had gone undecided for seven years, ten months and fifteen days. "Though the procedure for deciding the mercy petitions mandates speed and expediency, the State machinery showed indifference and laxity at each stage of processing the files," it held; seven years merely to move files on so grave a matter, when electronic communication was available, was unacceptable. By then the sisters had spent about twenty-five years at the Yerawada central jail in Pune under sentence of death.
The children they killed are not named in the published reports of the judgments. The figures are the totals for the case, shared by both sisters: thirteen abductions, five murders proved on appeal, six found at trial, nine alleged.