Raman Raghav

A city on edge

In the mid-1960s, residents of Bombay's suburbs began to fear a killer who struck at night. The victims were among the city's poorest people: men, women and children sleeping on pavements or in makeshift huts. According to an account in The Quint, a first wave of attacks in 1965 and 1966 in the eastern suburbs left 19 people attacked, nine of whom died. The attacks were carried out with a blunt object while victims slept, and they appeared to be chosen simply because they were exposed and unprotected.

After a pause, a second series of killings began in 1968, this time in the northern suburbs around Malad, Goregaon and Jogeshwari. Police patrols were expanded, residents organised their own watches, and the case became one of the most frightening stories in the city's history.

The manhunt

The investigation was led by Ramakant Kulkarni, then a senior officer heading the crime branch. Reporting by Scroll and The Quint describes how Kulkarni reviewed older files and focused on a man who had been questioned as a suspect during the earlier wave of attacks but had been released for lack of evidence. A large search operation, involving around 2,000 police officers and local volunteers, was concentrated on the northern suburbs.

The breakthrough came in September 1968. Sub-inspector Alex Fialho, then attached to Dongri police station, noticed a man in the Bhendi Bazaar area of south Bombay who matched the description being circulated. According to the National Herald, Fialho followed him and asked him to come along to the police station, where the man gave an alias. Fingerprint experts confirmed that he was Raman Raghav, the suspect investigators had been looking for.

Confession

Raghav, who had moved to Bombay from Tamil Nadu and had used several names, initially said little. Accounts based on Kulkarni's recollections say he began to talk after officers met small requests from him. He then led police to a wooded area in Aarey Colony, where he had hidden tools used in the attacks, and he later confessed before a magistrate, saying he had acted of his own accord.

Raghav confessed to at least 41 killings between 1966 and 1968, according to police accounts cited by the National Herald. The true figure has never been settled. Some sources give higher totals, and Newsgram notes that published counts range widely. Because many victims were homeless, some deaths may never have been recorded, while confessions are an imperfect basis for an exact count. Responsible accounts therefore separate the murders proved in court from the larger number attributed to him.

Trial, sentence and mental illness

At trial, his defence argued that he was of unsound mind and could not be held fully responsible. A police surgeon who observed him for about a month concluded that he was mentally fit, and the sessions court convicted him of murder and sentenced him to death.

Under Indian law, a death sentence must be confirmed by the High Court. During that process, a panel of psychiatrists examined Raghav and found that he suffered from chronic paranoid schizophrenia. Because he was judged to be incurably mentally ill, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was held in Yerwada Central Jail near Pune and died of kidney failure at Sassoon hospital. Sources disagree on the year of his death: Scroll gives 7 April 1988, while other published accounts give 1987 or 1995.

The officers' later years

Kulkarni later described the investigation in his book Footprints in the Sands of Crime, which remains a key source for later retellings. Alex Fialho, who made the arrest, retired as an assistant commissioner of police. He died in Mumbai in November 2020 at the age of 92, and his death prompted fresh newspaper coverage of the 1968 arrest.

Why the case matters

Raman Raghav's case remains one of the best-known serial-killing investigations in Indian history. It also illustrates questions that still shape criminal justice in India: how courts weigh psychiatric evidence in capital cases, and how much weight confessions should carry when physical evidence is limited. The outcome of his case turned on the difference between the trial court's assessment of his mental state and the findings of the psychiatric panel that reviewed him later.

The case also exposed how vulnerable Bombay's pavement and slum dwellers were, both to violence and to being overlooked by official records. It has since inspired films, including Sriram Raghavan's 1991 Raman Raghav: A City, A Killer and Anurag Kashyap's 2016 Raman Raghav 2.0, which kept the story in public memory.