Revisiting mysterious stoneman murders of Mumbai, Kolkata

In 2010, a series of 11 murders shook Guwahati, Assam. It was the modus operandi that shocked the people. The serial killer in Guwahati had smashed the heads of the pavement dwellers using a heavy stone. It reminded the people of the ghastly murders that had shaken Bombay and Calcutta 24 years before! 

Was The Stoneman back to strike terror in the hearts again?

The killer first appeared in Bombay between 1985 and 1987, during which time he murdered twelve people. There was a hiatus of two years before the killings resumed in 1989 in Calcutta, 2050 km away from Bombay. Here, he claimed twelve victims. Then, the killings stopped just as abruptly as they had begun.

Bombay, 1985

Around 4 a.m., the shriek of a woman from a pavement near Gandhi Market at King’s Circle pierced through the silence of dawn. She had woken up to find, a few feet away from her, a bloody mess — a man’s head had been smashed in by a boulder. 

This first incident would be written off as a murder by an unknown assailant, probably a thief who had alerted the sleeping victim and then killed him to escape. After all, it was just a homeless pavement-dweller who was killed. There were too many of them, and one death did not matter.

However, another pavement-dweller was found with his head smashed in by a boulder. And another. Till there were five deaths.

The modus operandi was simple. The killer chose his victims from among the pavement-dwellers, especially those who slept alone, far away from a group. The killer would crush the victim’s head with a single boulder weighing as much as 30 kg. In most cases, the victims did not have relatives or associates to identify them.

It was only after the sixth murder that Bombay Police finally began to see a pattern in the crimes. The investigations revealed that the killer was operating within a radius of 5 km, between Sion and King’s Circle. The postmortems and the discoveries of the corpses led to the conclusion that the killer hunted between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. There were no eyewitnesses.

The Press gave the killer its moniker ‘Paththar-Maar’ or Stone-Killer.

Bombay Residents went into a state of panic. In the night, the streets became deserted by ten. Meanwhile, the homeless and the pavement-dwellers, fearing for their lives, formed vigilante groups to keep watch. Despite these measures, the killings still continued.

It wasn’t like finding a needle in a haystack. A radius of 5 km is not a difficult area to cover and patrol. The police knew the killer’s hunting ground. Teams were positioned through the night in the area in the hope of catching the killer, and yet, he outsmarted the police, picking off one homeless person after another as if he were watching them from the dark alleys and waiting for them to fall asleep.

The cops were amazed by the size and weight of the boulders. To make things worse, no fingerprints were found on them.

With panic came the rumours. One theory was that the killer was being guided by a tantric to attain spiritual goals and that each killing was an act of human sacrifice to please the goddess Kali. This theory was also fuelled by the realization that the killings took place on Tuesdays and Saturdays, the two days of the week ruled by the gods Mangal and Shani (or Mars and Saturn)—two astrological signs that are associated with evil, doom and black magic. 

Soon, a breakthrough emerged when a waiter of a small Udupi restaurant was admitted to a hospital at Sion with a head wound. He slept on the pavement, and he had missed being bludgeoned to death by a few centimetres.

The man was in a semi-conscious state and described his encounter with the serial killer to the police. He had heard a noise and had felt someone’s feet on his shoulders while lying on the pavement. He had opened his eyes to see a man standing above him with a stone in his hand. As the man dropped the stone, the waiter had moved to avoid being bludgeoned, but a part of the boulder had struck the side of his head. This lead had come to a dead end. 

The police decided to activate its network of informants or khabris. Luck seemed to be on their side. An informant mentioned Mohammed, a taxi driver who drove only at night and whom the pavement-dwellers described as dangerous, evil and lurking in the shadows. Suddenly, it all made sense. A killer could not possibly walk around the streets with a heavy boulder. It seemed plausible that he would carry it in his taxi. A manhunt ensued. It turned out that the taxi driver in question was actually a police informant who had been told to keep his eyes open at night. Because of his constant patrolling of the streets, the pavement-dwellers had begun to view him suspiciously. Again, all hope was lost.

Two years passed by, and as suddenly as the killings had started in the middle of 1985, they stopped in 1987.

The Stoneman Murders (2009), a critically acclaimed movie directed by Manish Gupta, advocated a very controversial theory. In the movie, the killer was revealed as a Bombay Police constable who believed in black magic and killed the homeless as part of a ritual. This theory has been talked about for years and was one of the reasons cited for Paththar-Maar to have never been caught, as he had all the information required to keep him at an arm’s length from the law—his own colleagues!

The movie concluded by pointing a finger at the Bombay Police for covering up the constable’s involvement and having him executed so the secret would go to the grave with him. If this were true, it would mean that Paththar-Maar was dead.

But just over a year after the killings stopped in Bombay, the first Stoneman murder was reported in Calcutta in June 1989.

This confirmed three things:

1. The theory of the Bombay Paththar-Maar being a constable
was just an urban legend.

2. The killer was never apprehended and had, in fact, escaped
the clutches of law and travelled over 2000 km to a new
hunting ground.

3. There was a possibility that the Calcutta murders were the
works of a copycat killer, meaning that there was a new
Paththar-Maar in town.

To date, there has been no proof that the Bombay killings were
connected to the Calcutta ones. But the uncanny similarity in
the weapon, the choice of victims, the style of execution, and
the time at which the killer struck suggested that the murderer
was the same person.

The killer claimed his first kill in Calcutta on 4 June 1989. She was homeless, sleeping on the pavement beside the road leading up to the iconic Howrah Bridge. There was immediate panic as people connected the murder to the Paththar-Maar of Bombay due to the similar modus operandi. 

The second murder took place on 4 July 1989. The Press in Calcutta decided to change the name of the killer from the boring Paththar-Maar to ‘Stoneman’. Now Calcutta had everyone’s attention.

Like the Bombay killer, the Stoneman of Calcutta worked within a specific territory. His chosen hunting ground was central Calcutta and the areas adjoining the iconic Howrah Bridge. The only difference was that the killer fluctuated between using a boulder and a concrete slab.

On 7 September 1989, Stoneman claimed his seventh victim. Due to the ensuing public outcry and panic, the police were forced to take notice. What was audacious was that the killer had chosen to kill his victim just a block from the police headquarters in blatant defiance.

The City of Joy transformed into the City of Panic. The only conclusion Calcutta Police made was that the killer had to be a tall, muscular man, as it was quite evident that a lot of physical strength was required to lift the heavy stones and slabs.

Policemen swarmed the central part of the city. Believing that Stoneman must be mentally ill, Calcutta Police zeroed in only on suspects who seemed lunatic or mad, leading to three false confessions.

When the dragnet failed to pick up anything, cops began disguising themselves as pavement-dwellers, pretending to be asleep on the roads, wrapped tightly in thin blankets that hid their guns.

One eyewitness materialized in the form of a lunatic named Mohammad Akram, who claimed to have been attacked by Stoneman. He later admitted that he had not been attacked, and the police declared that his head injury was the result of a rat bite.

The Stoneman continued to kill. The confidence that he was invincible and could not be caught made Stoneman braver and more defiant, and he began choosing public places to claim his victims. One of his victims was killed in the busy Sealdah railway station, another on a major street, and one even at the entrance of an underground metro station.

And just like in Bombay, people began to construct images of the killer inside their heads. A rumour spread that the cops could not catch him as they were looking for a man while the killer was a woman. The killings stopped after the murder of the twelfth victim. The city of Calcutta breathed a sigh of relief.

To date, it is unknown whether the murders were the work of a single man, a woman or a large group of people. The years between 1985 and 1989 are officially considered to be the years of Stoneman’s action.

The Stoneman murders of Bombay and Calcutta rank amongst the most elusive unsolved serial-killer cases in the world. Stoneman could still be lurking amongst us, old, senile but waiting to strike again!

Anirban Bhattacharyya is a true crime bestselling author. He is the author of India’s Money Heist: The Chelembra Bank Robbery and The Hills Are Burning. You can read more about The Stoneman Murders in his bestselling book The Deadly Dozen: India’s Most Notorious Serial Killers.

You can follow him on www.linktr.ee/anirbanb