Stories of Indian serial killers barely took over mainstream narratives about crime like the American ones did. However, some horrifying tales of crime and serial killing originated in India and haunted different parts of the country in their time. The Indian Predator series on Netflix is perhaps the most popular representation of serial killings in India.
With serial killings being so strongly driven by the social and cultural implications of the societies they are based in, Indian serial killers follow a rather different pattern in the way they execute crimes as well as the motive that triggers them. Here are some of the most horrifying serial killers known to us.
Charles Sobhraj
With a minimum kill count of 20, Charles Sobhraj is known to have murdered Western tourists who toured along the hippie trail of South Asia during the 1970s. 14 of the murders occurred in Thailand. Sobhraj was also known as the Bikini killer because most of his victims were found in bikinis. The fact that he escaped conviction for a very long time also gave him the name The Serpent.
Sobhraj was convicted and imprisoned till the 90s in India. Following that, he was tried in Nepal. There, he was imprisoned until 2022 when he was released and deported to France considering his old age. The eight-part Netflix series The Serpent follows the crimes of Charles Sobhraj.
Raman Raghav
Raman Raghav, one of the scariest known Indian serial killers, was also known by the name of Sindhi Talwai and haunted the streets in and around Mumbai during the 1960s. He was famously known as the Jack Ripper of India and killed at least 41 people during his killing spree. His crimes were especially eerie because he targeted random victims which made him very difficult to track down.
He is known to have killed his victims using heavy, blunt objects and created quite a fear among the residents of Mumbai in the 1960s. Raman Raghav received a sentence of life imprisonment and was found to be schizophrenic.
The Nithari Killers
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A horrifying series of children’s murders shook the country in 2006. Also known as the Noida serial murders, the series of crimes resulted in more than 16 victims. Moninder Singh Pandher and his servant Surinder Koli were initially accused of the killings after the parents of the missing children reported negligence from local police. However, the court subsequently acquitted the two accused, leaving the case inconclusive even today.
The fact that the Nithari killers have not been found yet makes the case all the more interesting and one of the most horrifying Indian serial killers’ cases. The Karma Killings is an Indian documentary that explores the details of the Nithari killings. It is streaming on Netflix.
Jolly Joseph
Jolly Joseph is one of the Indian serial killers from Kerala. She is known to have killed six people over the 14 years between 2002 and 2016. While her crimes were initially motivated by a greed for family property, the motive began to become grey when she murdered her two-year-old niece and married her father. Also known as the Cyanide killer, she killed her victims through cyanide poisoning.
Jolly Joseph killed her mother-in-law, father-in-law, husband, husband’s uncle, niece and the niece’s mother. She was finally caught when suspicions were raised by her husband’s brother. Until then, all the deaths were assumed to be natural. Curry and Cyanide: The Jolly Joseph Case is a Netflix documentary that explores the crimes of Joseph, also called the Koodathayi Cyanide case.
