It is 8.05 pm at JJ Marg near the hospital on Saturday. A man is walking down the busy pavement. He crosses a man sleeping on the pavement. He stops, walks back some 10 m, picks up a heavy stone lying there, returns to the spot where the man is sleeping and proceeds to smash his head with the stone four times.
The sleeping man did not put up a struggle. He is inert from the first blow. People are passing by on the pavement the entire time this scene unfolds. Traffic on the road is heavy. No one stops the man who committed the crime as he walks away.
When a senior police officer received a phone call from J J Marg police station some 15 minutes later, informing him of the gruesome murder, it was the second call about a murder he had got in the space of a few minutes. The first one was from Byculla police station, to inform him that a man had been smashed to death on a pavement outside the Byculla fruit market, with a paver block at 7.50 pm.
The officer was quick to link the two crimes, committed within a distance of 1.5 km, occurring just 15 minutes apart. The police scoured CCTV footage for possible suspects. Suresh Shankar Gauda was arrested on Sunday morning at Mohammed Ali Road, He was hiding just 100 m away from the J J Marg police station where the second murder case was registered.
In the CCTV footage, Gauda is seen getting off a Badlapur-CST local train at Byculla station. He is walking in the direction of Dongri. He spots a man sleeping on the footpath outside Byculla fruit market. He picks up a paver block lying nearby and smashes it on his head several times.
It is a crowded area, filled with commuters rushing to and from the station, shoppers and traffic, but Gauda walks away from the scene without being stopped. Fifteen minutes later, he smashes the head of a second man, the one at J J Marg.
The 40-year-old Gauda told the police that he did not know either of the victims. Police discovered while questioning him that he had been arrested six years earlier for a similar killing of a pavement dweller in Kurla, but was acquitted due to insufficient evidence. Now police suspect he could have committed other murders too.
Calling him a “psycho killer”, a senior officer, requesting anonymity, said, “He likes to see people suffer, is what we have gathered.”
Police said Gauda told them he hid close to the J J Marg police station because it is assumed that the culprit would have fled faraway from the spot. Police said they are yet to ascertain the identity of the two murdered men.
“He just saw them sleeping on the road, picked up a stone and smashed it against their heads. He is then seen walking away from both spots,” an officer said.
Police said after his arrest, Gauda readily admitted to the murders, and also told the police on Tuesday that he had been arrested by the Kurla police for a murder in 2015. The investigators made inquiries with Kurla police and were told that he had been suspected of killing a sleeping man on a pavement. The man’s head had been smashed with a stone, just like in Saturday’s murders.
The police had identified the deceased as Tiger. Gauda told the police that at the time, he had given his name as Raju alias Ravi Shankar Shetty. However, Gauda was acquitted in the case in December 2016 after which he walked out of jail.
He also told the police that his parents live in Hassan in Karnataka. The J J Marg police will be sending a team to verify his identity.
“We suspect that he has attacked more people between 2016 and now. We are trying to check with all the police stations whether anyone in the city or the neighbouring districts was killed in the similar style,” said an officer.
“Often in a case where a footpath dweller is killed and the body is unidentified, the police do not take the trouble to identify the victim and close the case by submitting a ‘Summary A’ report in court, which means that the case is true but undetected.”
The officer added that they had started scrutinising all previous cases of murders of footpath dwellers in south Mumbai. “If we identify a case identical in modus operandi to the one used by Gauda, we will check CCTV footage of that incident and accordingly reopen the investigation of that case,” said the officer.
Gauda was sent to judicial custody on Thursday. The Byculla police will soon move an application seeking his custody, where the case relating to the first murder is registered.
Accused Suresh Shankar Gauda (in green shirt) outside court. (Express photo by Sagar Rajput) 
Share
