India’s Most Dangerous Serial Killer

Shankariya Kanpatimar murdered nearly seventy people across Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana in eighteen months, and that makes him India’s first recorded serial killer. He was hanged in the Jaipur Central Jail on 15 May 1979. He committed crimes in the most ‘brutal and dastardly’ way— all for theft. He would enter his victim’s house naked, kill with whatever object lay at hand, eat, smoke bidis, take a bath and leave only with the cash he found. In one of the murders, he managed to find only two rupees in the house. He came to be known as ‘Kanpatimar’ for the striking similarity of his murders with all his victims being hit on their temples, or kanpati, in Hindi. Drawn from police files, FIRs, contemporary reportage and interviews, India’s Most Dangerous Serial Killer reconstructs both the killings and the world that enabled them. Told in the most truthful and unsparing voice of Rakesh Goswami, Shankariya’s story of how a petty thief turned into a dangerous serial killer, reveals a deeper moral rot.