The cases India could not stop talking about, from the first clue to the final verdict: what happened, what the courts said, the theories people believed, and what the evidence really shows.
On the night of 26 November 2008, ten Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen came ashore in south Mumbai in a dinghy. Over the next 60 hours they killed 166 people at a railway station, a café, two hotels, a hospital and a Jewish centre. One of them was caught alive. The men who sent them have never faced a verdict for it.
A young Mumbai woman vanished in April 2012. Three years later a driver arrested over a pistol led police to her mother, one of India’s best-known media executives. Fourteen years on, the trial is nearly over, and the mother still says her daughter is alive.
A 13-year-old girl and the family’s cook killed in one Noida flat in May 2008. Her parents were convicted, jailed for four years, then acquitted. Two CBI teams, two opposite stories, and still no answer to who did it.
Skulls and bones were dug out of a drain behind a Noida bungalow in 2006. A servant confessed, got death sentence after death sentence, and was then acquitted of everything. Nineteen years later, the families still ask: who killed our children?
Someone crushed the heads of people sleeping on the pavements of Bombay, then Calcutta, with a single heavy stone. Police dressed as beggars, hundreds were rounded up, a name was born. Nobody was ever convicted.
Ten members of one family hanging from their ceiling, the grandmother dead in the next room. No break-in, no struggle, no note. Just eleven years of diaries. The night, the verdict, the theories and the house today.
