In 1985 a man sleeping alone on the sidewalk in the Sion and King's Circle neighborhoods of central Bombay was killed by a stone dropped on his head. Nobody connected his death to anything, and nobody connected the next four either. Sion and King's Circle were settled, prosperous districts of family apartment blocks, not places the police patrolled for crime, and the people dying there were the ones who slept outside those buildings: pavement dwellers, ragpickers, men with no address. Only after the sixth killing did the Bombay police see a series, and by then whatever the first five scenes might have told them was gone.
Once it was seen, the pattern was narrow. The victims slept alone on dark, empty stretches of pavement. They were attacked late at night or before dawn, roughly between eleven and four, with a single heavy stone, as much as thirty kilograms in some accounts, and nothing was taken from them. Almost every death fell within a stretch of about five kilometers from Sion to King's Circle. When the director Manish Gupta prepared his 2009 film about the case, the murder sites his team visited included the area around Tilak Hospital in Sion, the Gandhi Market near King's Circle, the pavement outside Matunga police station, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road in Wadala and a small street in Lalbaug.
About twelve people died. No list of them has been published, and most were never identified. They slept alone and had no relatives or companions nearby to claim them, and a man without an address is rarely reported missing. Most were men. One victim lived: a homeless waiter, attacked while he slept in a dimly lit part of Sion, got away and reported it to the police, but he had not seen his attacker well enough to describe him.
The police increased night patrols across the five-kilometer area and put officers on the pavement dressed as vagrants. Neither produced an arrest. In 1987 a ragpicker was hacked to death in neighboring Matunga; police and newspapers suspected the Stoneman, but the method was different and no evidence tied the death to the series. With nothing else to go on, theories filled the gap. Later accounts note that Sion had a reputation for tantric ritual, and some people read the killings as sacrifices; others believed more than one killer was at work.
Accounts disagree on when it ended. Several put all twelve killings between 1985 and 1987; others say they went on until the middle of 1988 and then stopped. Either way they stopped without an arrest, and no one was ever charged. The name the case is known by came later, from Calcutta, where the press adopted it in 1989 for a new run of killings of pavement sleepers that began that June and was applied to the Bombay deaths afterward. The method and the victims were the same. Whether the killer was the same has never been established.