From 1985 to 1987, twelve people who slept on the pavements of Bombay, the city now called Mumbai, were found dead from head injuries inflicted with heavy stones. That is the count Open magazine gave in 2013, drawing on Mumbai police sources. The person responsible was never identified. Police had no witnesses and no fingerprints, and the killings stopped as suddenly as they had begun. The press called the unknown attacker the Stoneman, and the name has since been attached to similar series in other Indian cities, beginning with Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1989.
Much about the case remains unknown. The victims have not been publicly named, no investigating officer has been quoted by name about the series, and no one has ever been charged.
According to Open magazine's account of the case, written by Haima Deshpande in June 2013, twelve pavement dwellers were found dead in Mumbai between 1985 and 1987, killed with heavy stones. All of the victims, as far as they were described, were people with no home who slept outside, on the city's footpaths. The director Manish Gupta, who made a feature film about the case, described the attacker in a 2025 interview as someone who stalked Bombay in the 1980s, killing pavement dwellers with a large stone.
The people who died were among the poorest in the city, people with no home who slept on its pavements. Their names, their ages and the lives they had led before they came to the streets of Bombay have not been published.
Mumbai police sources told Open magazine that many profiles of the killer were drawn up during the 1985 to 1987 killings. None of them led anywhere concrete. One profile suggested that the killer was acting on the instructions of a tantric, a practitioner of ritual magic, in pursuit of some spiritual goal. There is no record that this theory was ever tested or supported by evidence.
The police had very little to work with. According to the same account, there were no witnesses and no fingerprints. No arrest in the Bombay series has been reported, and no suspect has been named.
The Bombay killings stopped as abruptly as they had started, Open magazine reported. Why they stopped is not known. In 2025 Manish Gupta's interviewer wrote that the killer was never caught and that his identity remains unknown.
In 1989 a similar series began in Calcutta. Open magazine reported that ten people, all of them beggars, were found dead there, killed in the same way. Vice, writing in 2021, described Kolkata's Stoneman as an unidentified killer who killed 13 people living on the streets with heavy stones. The two figures differ.
Open magazine reported that the Mumbai and Kolkata police shared investigation inputs, but that no evidence was found to show that the same person was behind both series. The only link between them was the method. The Kolkata police profiled their suspect as "a well-built tall person", but with no forensic evidence that profile went no further. The Kolkata killings also stopped suddenly, and no arrest is reported.
Whether one person was responsible for both series has never been established.
The name has followed other series of attacks on people sleeping in the open. Open magazine listed Guwahati in 2009, where nine beggars were found dead in a similar way and the killings stopped within a few months. Its 2013 report concerned Kolhapur, in Maharashtra, where ten pavement dwellers, most of them beggars sleeping near the railway station, had been found dead over about four months. A man from Chhattisgarh was arrested there and reportedly confessed to two of the deaths, though a local activist disputed that police had the right man. None of these later cases has been publicly tied to the Bombay killings of the 1980s.
The Stoneman was not the first person to attack Bombay's pavement sleepers. Open magazine recalled that in 1965 and 1966, people sleeping on pavements and in shanties in the city's eastern suburbs were attacked with a blunt object; about 19 were struck, and nine died. Police arrested a homeless man, Raman Raghav, but released him on the killings for lack of evidence, though he served five years for robbery. After a new run of deaths in 1968, police sought him again, and he confessed to killing 23 people in 1965 and 1966 and about a dozen in 1968. He died in prison in 1987. Open magazine set this history beside the Stoneman case, but nothing reported links Raghav to the killings of 1985 to 1987.
Manish Gupta directed The Stoneman Murders, a film starring Kay Kay Menon and Arbaaz Khan, released in February 2009. The producer, Bobby Bedi, chose a Friday the 13th for the release. In a 2025 interview with the film writer Subhash K. Jha for Bollywood Hungama, Gupta said the idea came from an article about the 1980s killings, and that he and his team searched a newspaper's archives for clippings from the time, some of which appear in the film's opening titles.
Gupta told Open magazine in 2013 that he had been drawn to the case since childhood. When he was a student, he said, his family told him not to hang around after school or the Stoneman would harm him.
The number of victims: twelve is the figure Open magazine gave from Mumbai police sources. No official list of the dead has been published, so the count cannot be checked against named cases.
The dates: Open magazine gives 1985 to 1987. Other dates for the start and end of the series circulate, but none has been confirmed by an official record.
One killer or more: the reporting does not establish whether one person or several were responsible, in Bombay or in Calcutta.
A link to Calcutta: the police of the two cities shared information, but no evidence connected the series beyond the method.
Motive: the tantric theory was one police profile among several; nothing supports it.
1965 to 1966: a series of attacks on pavement sleepers in Bombay's eastern suburbs; nine die. Raman Raghav is arrested and released on the killings for lack of evidence.
1968: new killings; Raghav confesses to the earlier and later deaths.
1985 to 1987: twelve pavement dwellers are found dead in Bombay with head injuries from heavy stones. Police draw up several profiles; there are no witnesses or fingerprints.
1987: the last year of the Bombay series in Open magazine's dates. Raman Raghav dies in prison the same year.
1989: a similar series in Calcutta; ten deaths according to Open magazine, 13 according to Vice. Police in the two cities share information but find no evidence of a single killer.
2009: Guwahati sees a similar series of nine deaths. In February, The Stoneman Murders is released.
2013: killings of pavement dwellers in Kolhapur revive the name.
2025: the Bombay case remains unsolved; no one has been identified.