The Stoneman Murders: India’s Most Famous Unsolved Serial Killings

In the India of the 1980s, tens of thousands of people slept on the pavements of its biggest cities every night. Ragpickers, beggars, rickshaw pullers, migrant workers from villages where there was no land left to farm. Calcutta, a city of about six million, had more than 50,000 homeless people, the Los Angeles Times reported in 1989.

They slept alone or in small groups, under shop awnings and on traffic islands, in streets the street lights did not reach. Many had no papers. When one of them died, there was often nobody to tell, and nobody who came to ask.

That is the world the Stoneman chose. And it is the reason, more than any clever trick, that he was never caught.

It started in the central suburbs of Bombay, around Sion and King’s Circle, in 1985 (some later accounts say as early as 1983). The pattern was always the same. A person asleep on the pavement, alone, in a dim stretch of road. A single blow to the head from a heavy stone or slab, picked up from somewhere close by. No struggle, no witness, no robbery worth the name.

By most counts about 12 people died in Bombay. Most were never even identified, because no relative ever came forward to claim them. Police only began to see a pattern after several deaths. There were no fingerprints, sniffer dogs found nothing, and the profiles drawn up came to nothing concrete.

Then, in 1987 or 1988 depending on whom you believe, the Bombay killings stopped, as suddenly as they had started.

On 4 June 1989, more than a thousand miles away, a woman who sold country liquor on the street was found dead on a Calcutta pavement, her head crushed. A month later, a beggar. Then more, mostly in the busy heart of the city near Howrah Bridge, B.B.D. Bagh, Park Street and the Sealdah subway.

Killing number seven was the one that stung. It happened a block from Lalbazar, the headquarters of the Calcutta Police. Whoever was doing this was either very lucky or very sure of himself.

Calcutta’s police threw everything at it. Night patrols were stepped up across the centre of the city, and reporters rode along on midnight rounds. Undercover officers lay down on the pavements dressed as street people, pretending to sleep, with revolvers hidden under their blankets.

Hundreds of people the police called ‘lunatics’ and ‘maniacs’ were rounded up. Human-rights groups protested that street people were being beaten and unlikely suspects mistreated.

The name came out of this chaos too. Deputy Commissioner Rachhpal Singh, who had been building a profile of the killer, told the Los Angeles Times that he himself had coined the word ‘Stoneman’ at a press conference. Within weeks it was a household name. “I’m paying for it now,” he said.

We are nowhere on this case yet.

By October 1989, the man leading the hunt admitted the police did not have a clue. Singh also admitted something more uncomfortable: the first three or four murders were not even seen as connected, partly because of what he called some lack of concern, since the victims were after all just pavement dwellers. Detectives had not even thought to keep the murder weapons until the seventh killing.

The case’s big ‘break’ fell apart almost as soon as it was announced. Police detained a man named Mohammad Akram, whom they described as a lunatic, near a pavement sleeper who said the Stoneman had attacked him.

The details did not hold up. The ‘victim’ later admitted he never actually saw anyone raise a stone. His only injury was a tiny cut on the ear that the police themselves put down to a rat bite. And Akram was so thin and weak that he could not have lifted the kind of slab the Stoneman used. By the Los Angeles Times account, the detective chief was perhaps the only officer who still suspected him.

Other ‘suspicious persons’ were held, the killings stopped, and everyone was eventually let go for lack of evidence. Nobody was ever charged with the Stoneman murders.

• Victims with no names. Police did not know the names of six of the first seven Calcutta victims, and nobody claimed the bodies. Without knowing who someone was, you cannot ask who wanted them dead.
• A weapon from the street. The stones and slabs were always found near the victims, so there was nothing to trace back to a buyer.
• No forensics, no witnesses. No fingerprints, no eyewitness description, no clear footprints except in one late account.
• A slow start. By the police’s own admission, the early deaths were not linked or taken seriously, and the first weapons were not kept.
• Turf and rivalry. The officer who knew the case best was moved off it mid-hunt, and Calcutta had not even asked Bombay’s detectives for help by October 1989.

With no killer, no motive and no trial, the Stoneman became a story people could shape however they liked. These are the theories that refuse to die, with our verdict on each.

At first, almost nobody cared. One crime reporter at The Telegraph put it bluntly to the Los Angeles Times: pavement dwellers did not even have voting rights there. It took several bodies before the deaths were seen as one story.

Then the fear arrived, and it was everywhere. By October 1989, the paper wrote, ‘Stoneman’ was as much a household name in Calcutta as ‘Gandhi’. On the pavements, people stopped sleeping alone. “We are all staying in groups now,” a pavement sleeper named Shankar Malik said, and they slept in shifts so someone was always awake.

In Bombay, people who lived through it remember not leaving home after 7 pm. The film director Manish Gupta, who grew up there, recalled being told as a schoolboy that the Stoneman would get him.

There was never a trial, never a conviction, never even a named suspect who stood up to scrutiny. More than three decades later, the identity of the killer, or killers, is still unknown.

The official answer in one line: unsolved. Police never proved whether the Stoneman was one man, several men, or a name the newspapers gave to a run of murders nobody could explain.

The killings ended, but the name kept coming back. Every few years, someone sleeping on an Indian street is found with their head crushed by a stone, and the headlines write themselves:

Police treated each one as its own case. None was ever tied to the killings of the 1980s.

Manish Gupta’s Hindi film The Stoneman Murders (2009), with Kay Kay Menon as a suspended cop on the killer’s trail, is the best known version; Gupta called it roughly 40% fact and 60% fiction, and opened it with real newspaper clippings. Srijit Mukherji’s Bengali thriller Baishe Srabon (2011) gives its detective a past on the 1985 and 1989 investigations, and hoichoi’s web series The Stoneman Murders (2019) has a journalist find the killer’s diary on a train.

The Stoneman is usually told as a monster story: the faceless giant with the slab, the cop who might be the killer, the tantrik in the shadows. But read the police’s own words from 1989 and a different story appears.

The killer, or killers, chose the people the city had already decided not to count. People without names, without votes, without anyone to come looking. The early murders were not linked because nobody was paying attention, and by the time everyone was, the trail had gone cold.

That is why it stays unsolved, and why the name keeps coming back. Not because the Stoneman was a genius, but because the people he chose are still sleeping on the same streets.