In a matchbox-like tailoring shop in Uttar Pradesh’s Shahi village, the rhythmic sound of the sewing machines suddenly halts as a Hindi news channel’s anchor announces the sansanikhez khabar (sensational news) of the day. In a fraction of a second the volume of the audio goes up and passersby stop to hear what the local news channel has to say about the man who had allegedly killed six women from that village.
‘Loitering in the sugarcane fields, this man would target women in the age group of 45-55. These were women working or walking all alone,’ blares the news channel. People voyeuristically crowd the entrance of the tailoring shop that stands 300 metres away from the local police station, to steal a glance of the alleged serial killer.
For the residents of Shahi, a village dotted by sugarcane fields and mango orchards, the fear of a killer on the loose has been growing over the past 14 months. According to Uttar Pradesh police’s records, nine women were found dead in a 10-kilometre radius around of Shahi and its adjacent village Seeshgarh, in U.P.’s Bareilly district.
When walking back home or working in the fields all by themselves, the middle-aged women were strangled with their own saree pallu or dupatta, the knot always on the left. All their bodies had bruises indicative of sexual assault.
Despite their similarities, the killings, eight of which took place between June and December 2023, were treated as separate incidents. Four people were also arrested. On July 1, after nearly seven months, a ninth murder took place. A 46-year-old woman of Hauspur village was strangled and her body left in a sugarcane field in Bujhiya Jagir village.
It was then that the police started considering the possibility of a serial killer, says the senior superintendent of police, Bareilly, Anurag Arya.
Operation find-the-killer
“We divided our force into two streams of investigation, with a total of 22 teams; one would look at all the killings from the lens of a serial killer, and another team would treat each case as a separate one,” Arya says. They called it Operation Talaash (hunt, in Hindi).
A month later, on August 3, the police released three sketches: one of a man, who was cross-eyed, thin, and short; another that looked closely like this; and a third of someone who looked completely different. “The first sketch was prepared after a woman from Milakh village told the local police about being attacked by a man while she was working in the fields,” says another member of the police force.
“The woman said the man approached her without hesitation, and asked if she would like to have sexual intercourse with him. When she refused, he tried attacking her, but she freed herself from his grip and ran. As she was running, she found her father-in-law,” says the officer, adding that they filed a report thereafter.
The other two sketches were based on intel from locals who would frequent the roads of Shahi and Sheeshgarh, says the officer. All three sketches were made viral through local journalists, sarpanches of various villages, and locals, following which the police started getting leads when a similar-looking man was spotted.
On August 9, around 6:45 p.m., the U.P. police arrested a man named Kuldeep Kumar, 35, from a sugarcane field between Bujhiya Jagir and Dara village. According to them, Kuldeep was found intoxicated on a local intoxicant called sulpha, a byproduct of sugarcane leaves.
The police claim that they then sat down with Kuldeep to understand his alleged motivations. Medical experts and a psychologist were present. “I spoke to him in an almost childlike tone and assured him that if he took us to the places of the murders, I would find him a meherbaan (wife) and get him married. His face lit up with a childlike joy while explaining how he had killed the six women,” the officer says.
The police also claims that unlike many serial killers, Kuldeep would not stalk his targets for days, but would target them while loitering in the sugarcane fields, in search of intoxicants, when he found them alone. “He called these women his shikaar (hunt) and believed that they were not “good” women,” adds the officer.
According to the officer, Kuldeep told the police during interrogation that he never intended to force himself on the women. “He would directly ask them to sexually engage with him, and when they would refuse, he would immediately lose his cool and attack them,” he says.
The psychologist who was part of the team that interrogated Kuldeep diagnosed him with a clinical psychological condition, says SSP Arya.
In the ‘war room’ set up in the Bareilly SSP’s office, the walls are covered with paper, say the police: a map of the villages in Bareilly district, the three sketches, the profiles of the women killed, the information from Kuldeep’s interrogation, information around the 1,500 CCTV cameras, 600 of which had been installed after the fourth murder in a few villages.
“During the interrogation Kuldeep told us that after his father married for the second time, he saw his mother being beaten up by his father. He held his stepmother responsible for his mother’s abuse,” adds Arya. They allegedly also found that his wife Longshi had left him because he would beat her up, and had tried to kill her.
Childhood violence, hatred towards women of the age group his stepmother belonged to, poor impulse control, no accountability to any kin, no friends, and eccentric behaviour were some of the characteristics that were on the charts of the Bareilly police station’s war room description.
Questions around whodunnit
While the police claim their investigation pieced everything together, locals feel Kuldeep has been framed in a bid to solve the case quickly.
For Rajeev (surname withheld to protect identity), whose mother’s body was found in a sugarcane field on July 3, the Uttar Pradesh police’s investigation was not satisfactory. He says the family had informed the police about a few people they suspected who might have killed his mother, but the police want to club her killing with the rest, just to close the case.
“We have had problems with a neighbour from the Gangwar community over a land dispute and they had threatened us, but the police have arrested a paagal (mad) man to get these cases off their back,” says Rajeev, using the outdated derogatory term for those with mental health conditions.
Village women walk in the isolated sugarcane fields with a male family member after the string of murders in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh.
| Photo Credit:
RV MOORTHY
The 23-year-old’s mother had left their house in Hauspur on July 1 to visit her father in Khirka village in the same district. She had said that on her way home she would withdraw money from her account and leave some for her ailing father and bring the rest for her other son who was to have an appendix operation.
The next morning, she was supposed to board a bus from Khirka village, get down near Bhujiya Jagir and then walk down to Hauspur. Her body was found almost 40 minutes away from her home, a distance she was covering on foot. She was identified by villagers by the bank passbook and other documents she was carrying with her.
Her body bore the signatures: saree pallu used to strangulate, a knot on the left side, dishevelled clothes. “The post-mortem report says she died of asphyxiation, and the time of death suggests that Kuldeep had attacked her around noon, just like all his previous victims,” says the officer.
Kuldeep allegedly first killed a woman in Kulchcha village, in June 2023. The 45-year-old had left her house to buy medicines, and the hour-long walk back home from Shahi market turned deadly. Her body was found two days later, in a sugarcane field a little over 300 metres away from her house.
Now, a year later, Premraj (surname withheld), her husband, holds photographs of her dismembered body, and explains the condition in which her body was found. “Parts of her body had turned black, and we could see a geedhar (jackal) next to her,” says Maurya.
Case controversy
In Bakargunj, where Kuldeep and his family stay, almost 50 kilometres away from the villages where he allegedly committed the crimes, the villagers are intently following the case. Many are not satisfied despite the police producing evidence at press conferences.
In their first address to journalists, SSP Arya presented Kuldeep as the murderer, and what he said were ‘prizes’ that Kuldeep had collected from four crime scenes: an Adhaar card; two hasiyas (tools to cut grass) from different locations; bangles, a comb, and bindis from a fourth. These were collected from the homes of extended family members he had stayed with over the past couple of years.
Raj Kumar, Kuldeep’s stepbrother, says he is being made a scapegoat. “I have never seen him get angry with anyone, let alone being violent with a woman,” says Raj. The single-storey pucca house has a crowd around it. More than 20 villagers are there to show the family support. The media swirls around.
Radha Devi, a resident of Bakargunj, says that she had never seen him socialise with anyone, but neither had felt uncomfortable around him. “He has always been eccentric, would answer if asked anything, but never showed any interest in striking up a conversation with anyone, male or female,” said Radha says.
Kuldeep’s father, Baburam, says the police’s claims about Longshi leaving him because of domestic violence were incorrect. “Longshi left him because he would disappear for days without any explanation. It was his sustained absence that made her abandon him,” he adds.
Residents have taken to social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) to point out how the police sketch perfectly matches the clothes Kuldeep was wearing — a chequered shirt — on the day he was produced before the media, suggesting that the police had arrested him much before they shared the sketches. A photograph with creases and shadows in certain places seemed oddly similar to the sketch.
Countering the doubts over the arrest, the platform also saw strategic video leaks, where Kuldeep was seen recreating the crime scene with a dummy, with a gleeful smile on his face.
Kuldeep is at present in police remand, and has been booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) that deal with murder and sexual assault.
The killings in U.P.’s sugarcane fields are not isolated. In Indonesia, Ahmad Suradji claimed he had supernatural powers, strangling 42 women in sugarcane fields, from 1986 to 1997. In 2007, Thozamile Taki, known as the sugarcane killer, murdered 13 women in South Africa, dumping their bodies in sugarcane plantations.
“The sugarcane fields grow so tall, and all the murders took place in tandem with the growth phase,” says Arya. There were no killings when the crop was cut.
