The first body was found on the morning of June 4, 1989, on the southwest corner of B.B.D. Bagh, the administrative and commercial heart of Calcutta, a short walk from Lalbazar, the headquarters of the Calcutta Police. The call went to the Hare Street police station. The dead woman was Aleya Bibi, thirty years old, homeless and three months pregnant. She had a single wound, on the right side of her head, and a stone of about nine kilograms lay beside her. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. Nine months and at least eleven more deaths later, the police were no closer to knowing who had dropped it.
Six weeks passed. On the night of July 19 two more bodies were found on the pavement, both killed with large stones: a man in his forties near the north gate of the Geological Survey of India in the Taltala police station area, close to the entrance of Park Street Metro station, and a teenager near the Sealdah railway station subway, in the Muchipara area. After those two the police accepted that they were dealing with a series. More deaths followed through the summer, around Park Street, Camac Street and the Maidan. Every victim was homeless and asleep, alone, in a poorly lit place, and every one was killed the same way, by a stone or concrete slab brought down on the head from close range.
Accounts of that autumn disagree in the details. One account of the police investigation counts seven killings between June 4 and September 11. A summary of a Los Angeles Times report from October 1989 places the seventh on September 8, a block from police headquarters, and credits a deputy commissioner named Singh with first calling the killer the Stoneman at the press conference that followed. Other accounts say the name came from the city's English-language newspapers, which used it in place of the Hindi Paththar-Maar.
The investigation found nothing to hold on to. No fingerprints or other forensic traces were recovered from any scene, and no witness had seen an attack. Officers lay on the pavements at night disguised as vagrants. Suspects were detained, questioned and let go. Pavement dwellers began sleeping in groups and taking turns to stay awake. According to one later account, a witness pointed the police to a homeless man named Mohammed Akram, who proved too emaciated to have lifted the stones, and the witness afterward admitted to lying. Because so many of the killings were near the approaches to the Howrah Bridge, some investigators wondered whether the killer came into the city by train. Because the stones were so heavy, they assumed a tall and powerful man.
A pause of about two months followed. The tenth killing came on January 29, 1990, and the eleventh on February 20, and at the eleventh scene the killer left footprints, three of the left foot and nine of the right. The analysis of those prints overturned the picture the police had been working from. The man who made them was of medium build, not especially tall or broad, with an unusually long big toe on his right foot.
Five days later, on February 26, a boy of fifteen or sixteen who begged around Sealdah station was killed a little after midnight near the station subway, where two of the earlier victims had died. His is the last death attributed to the Stoneman in Calcutta. A round of arrests of suspicious persons had preceded the end; the suspects were released for lack of evidence, and the killings did not resume.
The number of dead depends on who is counting. The police account counts twelve. Other widely cited accounts give thirteen over roughly six months, and none publishes a list. Apart from Aleya Bibi, none of the dead has been publicly named; they are recorded as a man in his forties, a teenager, a beggar boy. The police never settled whether the deaths were the work of one person, of several, or of copycats. A series of about twelve killings of pavement sleepers in Bombay between 1985 and 1988 used the same method on the same kind of victim, and the name was later applied to it as well, but no evidence has ever connected the two. Nobody has been charged with any of the Calcutta killings.