By SWAYAM GANGULY January 3, 2010: Fatasil Ambari, Guwahati Rajesh had just returned from his drinking binge from the local liquor shop. In his thirties, Rajesh earned his living doing odd jobs and normally slept on the footpath near the Assam State Electricity Board colony. It had been a long hard day and Rajesh fell into deep slumber. Never to wake up again. His body was discovered the next day with his head smashed. A blood smeared stone lying beside the body hinted at the possibility of being the murder weapon.
Bally Police Station area, Howrah,Kolkata Jagdeo Rajak was a 55 year old rickshaw puller who loved his bottle at the end of a hard day’s work. However his wife and sons hated this habit of his and this led to frequent quarrels. One day Rajak decided that the sanctuary of the pavements was a preferred destination to spend the night and left home. An error in judgment, for he never returned again. His head was smashed beyond recognition with a heavy blunt weapon, most probably a stone which was never discovered.
Kolkata: March 27,2008: Ritchie Road The early risers on this busy stretch of Kolkata were greeted by a strange sight. The body of an unidentified youth lay in a pool of blood. Closer inspection revealed a heavy stone near the body stained with the victim’s blood.
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And that is when panic struck. Was the dreaded stoneman of the eighties back? “Stoneman” was the name given by the popular English language print media in Kolkata to an alleged serial killer, who is said to have committed 13 murders over a six-month period in 1989. The “stoneman” would choose his victims from among pavement dwellers and bludgeon them with a stone at the dead of night. When asked about the possible return of “stoneman”, DC (south) Rajesh Subarno rubbished it saying that the murder looked more like the result of an altercation.
“One murder committed with a stone doesn’t mean the Stoneman has returned or that it is the work of a serial killer,” he said. “If there were several murders following the same pattern, then we could begin to speculate. As far as we know, the incident appears to have occurred during the night and could have been the result of a fight,” he said. But the fact of the matter is that the cops have yet to crack these cases and the style of murder resembles that of the “stoneman” who stalked the city and created mass phobia in 1989.
No police officer was willing to go on record on the “stoneman angle” but the source confirmed that they were looking into it. “It could be the handiwork of the stoneman because he usually strikes during January and February. Not only last year, between December 2007 and February 2008, too, five pavement dwellers were attacked in a similar manner,” the source said.
MUMBAI: THE BEGINNING OF THE END! It all began in Mumbai in the year 1985 and lasted for a span of over two years. The first hint of a serial killer came from Mumbai who was targeting homeless ragpickers and beggars.
For two years a series of twelve murders were committed in the Sion and King’s Circle area of the metropolis. The modus operandi of the criminal/criminals was simple enough. Location of an unsuspecting victim sleeping alone in a desolate area and crushing the victim’s head with a stone weighing as much as 30kg. The celluloid obsessed Mumbaikars had christened the killer “Pattharmar” But what was really surprising was that it took the Mumbai police only after the sixth murder to observe a pattern in the crimes. It seemed that the Mumbai police was close to cracking the case when a homeless waiter survived the brutal attack by Pattharmar, narrowly escaping being bludgeoned to death.
But what was perceived as a stroke of luck and a big break came to naught. The dimly lit area in Sion where the victim had been sleeping was responsible for him being unable to get a good look at his assailant.
In the middle of 1987, the killings stopped as mysteriously as they had started. Kolkata: Summer of 89 It has never been ascertained that the Mumbai killings were linked to the “Stoneman” killings in Kolkata. But the uncanny similarity in the choice of murder weapon, selection of victims, execution and the time of the attacks suggests rather strongly that this was the handiwork of the same killer or someone familiar with the episodes in Mumbai. June 1989 saw the first victim succumb to head injuries and twelve more died in the six months that followed. Panic seized the city of joy as all the cops could conclude was that the assailant was a tall,well built male as it needed quite an effort to lift the heavy stone or concrete slab. Unfortunately due to the lack of any survivors or even eyewitnesses there were no clear cut leads in hand. The police retaliated with massive deploymets of men in various parts of the city at night as numerous arrests were made.
But the case was like a dead end. Suddenly the killings stopped and to date,the crimes remain unsolved, making this one of the greatest unsolved mysteries plaguing modern metropolitan Indian police forces. ORISSA: THE COPYCAT STONEMAN To the credit of the Indian police however, the Berhampur police in Orissa did manage to arrest an alleged psycopath called Mahesh Padhi recently who modelled his killings the stoneman style. Padhi, a pan shop owner was nabbed while allegedly attempting his seventh murder.
The four persons who escaped his attack identified Padhi who, however, claimed he was innocent and refused to accept the results of the lie-detection tests. He was then taken to the Indian Institute of Hypnotism in Hyderabad where five attempts to hypnotize him failed. On their way back, Padhi managed to give the slip to the police team. He escaped when the Falaknama Express slowed down near Palasa in Andhra Pradesh. An alert Berhampur police kept track of his family and friends.
Their perseverance was rewarded when they arrested Padhi again, a little over three months after his escape. The Bollywood Stoneman Producer Bobby Bedi produced a film titled “ The Stoneman Murders” based on these incidents. The film released on Feb 13, 2009, starring Kay Kay Menon and Arbaaz Khan. It was written and directed by Manish Gupta, the writer of the Bollywood film, Sarkar.