Between 1985 and the middle of 1988, about twelve people were killed in Bombay while sleeping on the sidewalk. Each was struck on the head with a heavy stone. Almost all the deaths happened within a stretch of roughly five kilometres between Sion and King's Circle, at night, and in every case the victim was sleeping alone. Nothing was taken.
The series was not treated as a series until the sixth death. Whatever evidence the first five scenes held was gone by the time anyone was looking for a connection between them. Police later patrolled the area at night and put officers on the pavement dressed as vagrants, which produced nothing.
The victims were pavement dwellers and ragpickers. Most were men. No full list of the twelve has ever been published, and several were never identified, which is a consequence of who they were rather than of any difficulty in the pathology: a man with no address is not reported missing.
The killings stopped in 1988 and no one was ever charged. When a similar run of deaths began in Calcutta a year later the press applied the same nickname to both, and the two series are usually told as one. No evidence has ever linked them. This archive records them separately.