The Story Of The Groom Who Killed 16 Brides With Dupatta

Dupatta Killer: Mahanand Naik, a 25-year-old bearded guy who drove an autorickshaw in Shiroda, a town 40 kilometres south of Panaji, the capital of Goa, in 1994. 21-year-old Darshana Naik resided in the home next door to him. Her mother Laxmi Naik, 75, recalls that “she stayed alone at home when we worked in the paddy fields.” On September 30 of same year, not far from Goa Medical College and Hospital in Panaji, Darshana was discovered hanging from a cashew tree near Bambolim. Because Darshana’s family was not wealthy, the investigation was cut short before it even got going. She had been hanged with her own dupatta. Mahanand had once more been fortunate.

The serial killing starts

Just two months earlier, at Khande-par, 28 km southeast of Panaji, Mahanand had murdered Gulabi Gaonkar, 30, the first of his 16 victims. In the Ponda market, close to the autorickshaw stand where Mahanand worked, there was a tailor named Gulabi. One day after the murder, her decaying body was discovered, and a witness told police that she had been meeting a bearded man frequently. Mahanand was taken into custody for precautionary measures. However, he was let go when the other drivers admitted that he had been at the stand the day of her disappearance. He had slipped away unnoticed and returned in the afternoon’s drowsy hours.

Gulabi’s murder provided Mahanand with the blueprint he would use to kidnap and kill women near Panaji over the course of the following 15 years. He craved money, sex, and maybe most of all, the sick thrill of murder. As an auto driver, he was aware that he had to stalk his prey in the less affluent areas—women like Gulabi, who barely made ends meet and had little hope of finding a compatible partner. Mahanand was surrounded by such women—at bus stops, markets, and industrial parks—and he began deliberately selecting the most helpless ones in the 20–35 age range. For instance, his third victim, 19-year-old Ponda housemaid Vassanti Gaude, was from a low-income family. Mahanand promised her 50,000 rupees.

Vassanti went with him to a lonely area in the adjacent Shantinagar on September 11, 1995, and she was never heard from again. Vassanti’s sister Jenny Gaude said, “We haven’t even seen her body.”

Naik, who was convicted of two murders and given a life sentence, was given a 21-day leave of absence earlier this year. A crowd set fire to his home in Shiroda, 40 miles from Panaji, after he was arrested. Mother of one of Naik’s claimed victims, Vassanti Gaude, holding a picture of her daughter

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Dupatta Killer continues the series…

The dupatta killer Mahanand disclosed his operating method to the authorities following his arrest on April 21, 2009. He would adopt a dapper demeanor and introduce himself to his prey as a businessman. Even his choice of alias complimented the woman’s name. For instance, in January 2009, he took the names Govind for Gulabi and Yogesh for Yogita, his final victim. When he claimed that his father had chosen some of the women to be his wife, some of the other women fell for his trick. He only had one request of them: they had to keep the match a secret until they met his sister and aunt, naturally donning their finest jewelry.

When they first met, he always offered the women ice cream, acted out a quick romance, and then invited them to his house to meet his family. Anyone who volunteered to accompany him was robbed and murdered. Mahanand changed this template once in the beginning. He had used a rock to smash Gulabi’s head, but from Darshana on, he strangled each of his “brides” with her own dupatta, earning the nickname “dupatta killer” for himself.

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Free run of Dupatta killer for 15 years

A short glance at the case files reveals that Dupatta killer Mahanand’s victims lived within a 40-kilometer radius of Panaji, in Shiroda, Ponda, Bicholim, Margao, and Quepem. When he killed a woman in a field, he would take her jewellery to a goldsmith and have a distressed sale while claiming that someone in the family had a major illness. His tracks were all around, and if the police had connected the dots, they might have apprehended him much earlier than 2009. But because to their extreme poverty, none of Mahanand’s victims were able to get competent counsel or demand an investigation from the authorities.

The majority of the families live in mud huts, as was discovered while interviewing the victims’ relatives for this article. Between the third murder of Mahanand in 1995 and the fourth in 2003, there were eight years. Following that, he continued to murder women ruthlessly, doing it again in 2008 and three times each in 2005, 2006, and 2007. His final murder in April 2009 would prove to be his downfall.

The hunter hunted

Yogita Naik, a 30-year-old resident of Nagzar Curti in Ponda, was the subject. She was reported missing with jewellery worth Rs 80,000 on January 14, 2009, and her body was discovered at a cashew field the next day. The incident would have been ignored like the others, but Yogita’s family asked Chetan Patil, the new inspector at the Ponda police station, to look into the incident in March. Yogita’s call log served as Inspector Chetan’s starting point for the inquiry. The last two calls to her were sent using a SIM card that belonged to a Goa Engineering College student who had misplaced his phone.

Chetan then examined the lost SIM’s call history and discovered that it was still in use and had been often used to call a 23-year-old lady. When the woman was questioned by the police, they learned that she had been raped herself and that Mahanand, the rapist, had made the call. It was a shocking discovery that the initial suspect in the 15-year-old Gulabi case was most likely connected to all 16 homicides.

Serial liar and abuser

More information about the crime and Mahanand’s personality emerged following his arrest in April 2009. He was discovered to have been raping and torturing the woman, a friend of his wife, for the previous four years. She had forgotten how many times he had attacked her, but she recalled the first incident occurred on June 21, 2005, at his place. “If I talked to a man, he would threaten me,” she claimed to the police. When a Ponda resident made a marriage proposal to her, Mahanand crushed her expectations by confessing that she was his lover. Additionally, he attempted to mislead the police by saying Yogita eloped with her lover after giving him her phone for Rs 500.