The body that surfaced in the Mula-Mutha River near Yerwada on the evening of March 24, 1977, was tied to an iron ladder and weighted with boulders. It was Anil Gokhale, the younger brother of a college friend of four art students at the Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya on Tilak Road in Pune. The police team under Inspector Manikrao Damame looked at the nylon rope lashing him to the ladder and saw the knot they had seen before. Pune had been living with a string of strangulations for more than a year, and until that moment the police had treated them as robberies gone wrong. Now they knew they were looking for a group.
Shantaram Kanhoji Jagtap, twenty-three, was one of the four. The others were Rajendra Jakkal, twenty-five, Dilip Dhyanoba Sutar, twenty-one, and Munawar Harun Shah, twenty-one. They were commercial art students with a reputation on campus for drinking and for theft. The record of the case treats the four as a single unit. It does not separate what Jagtap did from what the others did, and all four were convicted of all ten murders.
The first was a classmate. Prakash Hegde's father, Sundar Hegde, ran the Vishwa, a small restaurant behind the college, and the group planned to kidnap the son for ransom. On January 15, 1976, the four, with another classmate, Suhas Chandak, picked Prakash up on a pretext and took him to Jakkal's tin shed on Karve Road, where they 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 the restaurant, and strangled him with nylon rope. They put his body in an iron barrel with stones and sank it in the park's lake. The day after that, they sent his father a ransom note. For more than a year the police carried Prakash as a missing person.
In August the gang tried a businessman in Kolhapur, Arvind Kashid, calling at his house two nights running on the pretext of business. Once inside, they judged him too strong and the neighborhood too crowded, and went back to Pune.
On the night of October 31, 1976, they forced their way at knifepoint into the house of Achyut Joshi in the Vijaynagar colony. He and his wife Usha were alone. The four tied the couple's hands and feet, strangled Joshi with nylon rope and suffocated his wife. When their teenage son Anand came home, they stripped him and strangled him too. They left with a watch, Usha Joshi's mangalsutra and several thousand rupees. On November 22 they attacked the bungalow of Yashomati Bafana on Shankarseth Road, but she and her two servants fought back, and the attackers escaped over a barbed-wire fence.
Nine days later, at about eight in the evening of December 1, they rang the bell at Smriti, the Abhyankar bungalow on Bhandarkar Road. Dhananjay Abhyankar opened the door. They stuffed a ball of cloth into his mouth, tied his hands and made him lead them through the house. There were four others inside: his grandfather, Kashinath Shastri Abhyankar, eighty-eight, a noted Sanskrit scholar; his grandmother Indirabai, seventy-six; the maid, Sakubai Wagh, sixty; and his sister Jui. Each of them was gagged, bound hand and foot and strangled with nylon rope. Jui was stripped and forced to show them where the valuables were before she was killed. Accounts disagree on the grandchildren's ages: Jui is given as twenty or twenty-one, and Dhananjay as nineteen or twenty-two. The killing of two families in a month put the city in a panic.
Anil Gokhale was the last. On the evening of March 23, 1977, he was supposed to meet his brother Jayant at the Alka Talkies cinema; when he did not find him, Jakkal offered him a ride home on his motorcycle and took him to the shed instead. After the body surfaced, Assistant Commissioner of Police Madhusudan Hulyalkar took charge of the investigation and began with everyone Anil had last been seen with, which brought in the four. Questioned separately, they contradicted one another about where they had been all week. A fellow student, Satish Gore, broke under questioning and told the police about Prakash Hegde and where his body was. Chandak, who had been there when Hegde was taken, told them the rest and became an approver. The four were arrested on March 30, 1977, and property from the Joshi and Abhyankar houses was recovered.
The state appointed Shamrao G. Samant, a senior criminal lawyer with a long record of prosecutions for the government, as special public prosecutor. The trial opened in the Pune sessions court on May 15, 1978, and ran more than four months. On September 28 Judge Waman Narayan Bapat sentenced all four to death. The Bombay High Court confirmed the sentences on April 6, 1979, the Supreme Court of India dismissed their petitions on November 17, 1980, and the President refused them mercy. Jagtap, Jakkal, Sutar and Shah were hanged together at the Yerwada Central Jail on November 27, 1983.
Shah wrote a book in prison, Yes, I Am Guilty, published in Marathi the year they were hanged. Three years later the Marathi film Maaficha Sakshidar, based on the case, gave Nana Patekar one of his first screen roles, as Jakkal.