In Bombay, between 1985 and 1988, about twelve people were killed while they slept on the pavement. Their skulls were crushed with a stone. Almost all of the deaths happened inside a stretch of roughly five kilometres between Sion and King's Circle, at night, to people sleeping alone. Nothing was taken. There were no witnesses, because the sort of person who was killed is the sort of person nobody was watching.
The police took the series seriously after the sixth death.
That is the fact to hold on to, because everything else about this case is uncertain and that part is not. Five people were killed in the same way, in the same few square miles, before the killings were treated as connected. By then whatever there had been to find at the first five scenes was gone.
In June 1989, a year after the Bombay killings stopped, a man was found dead at B.B.D. Bagh in central Calcutta with his head crushed. B.B.D. Bagh is the administrative heart of the city, and the body lay a short walk from Lalbazar, the headquarters of the Calcutta Police. Over the following six months another dozen people died the same way, all of them homeless, all of them sleeping alone in unlit places, most of them in the center of the city near the approaches to the Howrah Bridge. The last of them died in the early months of 1990. Nobody has ever been charged in any of the thirteen cases.
The Calcutta press called him the Stoneman, and the name traveled backwards to Bombay, and the two series became one story.
They have never been shown to be one series. The method is the same and the victims are the same kind of people, and that is the whole of the evidence. The Calcutta police could not establish whether their own thirteen were the work of one person or several, let alone whether they connected to a city sixteen hundred kilometres away. The honest position is the one they reached: two runs of killings, similar in method, unlinked in evidence, and no one identified in either.
A reader will object that this is over-cautious. Two cities, one method, one type of victim, four years apart: of course it is the same man. It might be. A migrant worker moving between the two cities has always been the plausible version, and the fact that most of the Calcutta bodies were found near the railway approaches has kept it alive. But a copycat is equally consistent with everything known, and so is the possibility that in a city where thousands of people sleep on the pavement, more than one person worked out that a sleeping man alone in the dark can be killed with a rock and nobody will come.
Naming a killer is a way of saying the killings have been understood. The Stoneman had a signature and a nickname and eventually a couple of films, and none of that required anyone to know a single thing about him. He was a suspect-shaped space with a name on it.
The effect on the investigations was real. Once Calcutta had a Stoneman, the Calcutta deaths were episodes in a story that had begun somewhere else, and the question stopped being who killed this man in this street and became when will he strike again. Officers in both cities dressed as vagrants and slept on pavements waiting for him. It is a reasonable tactic against a hunter with a fixed method, and it produced nothing, in either city, across five years.
What it displaced is harder to see because it never happened. Thirteen deaths in six months in central Calcutta are thirteen investigations, each with its own street, its own hour, its own scene, its own handful of people who might have been awake. Treated as one case with one unknown offender, they became one investigation with thirteen scenes, and the differences between them, which is where the evidence would have been, stopped being interesting.
Very little is recorded about who died. They were pavement dwellers and ragpickers. Most of them were men. Some of them were never named, and the ones who were named are recorded as a name and an age and nothing else. There is no list of the Bombay twelve that anyone can now produce in full.
This is not an accident of record-keeping. A person with an address is missed within a day and has relatives who telephone the police. A man asleep on a pavement in Sion is not reported missing, because there is nobody whose job it is to notice, and when he is found in the morning with his head broken the investigation begins and ends with the body. Whoever did this did not have to be clever. He had to pick people whose deaths would not generate any pressure, and both cities had a large supply.
Twenty-five or so people were killed in two Indian cities over five years and the case is remembered for the stone.
Editor's note: this piece was written for the archive rather than imported. A file in the magazine's back catalog covers the same ground, but its own document properties give its title as "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" and several passages carry recognizable Wikipedia phrasing, which is licensed for reuse only with attribution and share-alike and cannot carry a signed byline. It also runs the Bombay and Calcutta cases together as one, which is the thing this piece argues against. Nothing from that file is reproduced here. The archive now carries separate roster entries for the two series. Figures vary between sources: Bombay is usually given as twelve deaths between 1985 and 1988, Calcutta as twelve or thirteen between June 1989 and early 1990, and the combined total is often stated as at least twenty-four. No one has been charged in any of them.