Bareilly serial killer targeted victims in sugarcane fields: police

Barring a nearly seven-month lull (from December 2023 to June 2024) — which coincided with the sugarcane harvest season — between June 2023 and July 2024, six women between the ages of 45 and 65 years were found dead in a 20-km radius of Bareilly district. All the six were found strangled with either their saris or dupattas. Police said the tall sugarcane crops provided the perfect cover for Kuldeep to allegedly carry out the killings.

“Multiple injuries were found on the victims’ bodies. Some had injuries on their inner thighs, the others on their chins. Attempts to sexually assault them are confirmed,” Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Anurag Arya told The Indian Express, adding that he targeted women around the same age as his stepmother. The Indian Express has withheld the names of the victims.

Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Anurag Arya confirmed the victims were sexually assaulted. (Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav)

A day before Kuldeep’s highly publicised arrest, the local police had shared sketches of three suspects. His sketch, identical to his photograph shared with the media — from the crease in his grey shirt near the right shoulder to the shadow on his neck — sparked doubts about the investigation.

The first victim

A pair of slippers on a decomposing body found in his uncle’s sugarcane field was all the farmer needed to identify his wife on the morning of June 19, 2023. Two days earlier, his wife, 45, had left the house saying she was going to a nearby village to get medicine for her nagging backache.

Sitting on a plastic chair in the angan (courtyard) of his brick house, surrounded by his family, he says that when his wife didn’t return home by 1 pm, they went looking for her “all over the village, even the nearby jungle”. On June 18, 2023, a missing complaint was filed at the police station.

A day later, her body was discovered at the most unexpected of places — minutes from the house, in the field owned by her husband’s uncle. “Her body was lying between the sugarcane. It had decomposed due to the heat. Her slippers were the only thing I could still recognise about her,” he recalls.

An FIR was finally registered on July 21 last year.

On June 29, 2023, another woman, 55, was found strangled in a nearby village. Her murder spooked the women in all nearby villages and they refused to step out without an escort. “Work in the fields stopped since the women never left their homes. The police installed CCTV cameras all over the village from July 21, 2023, onwards to catch the killer,” adds the local.

Local police said 1,500 CCTVs cameras were installed across affected villages after the first murder FIR was filed. For the rest of 2023, sugarcane fields became synonymous with terror in the region. Three more murders followed, including that of a 65-year-old with snow-white hair on November 20, 2023. The serial killer’s last victim in 2023, she was last seen walking towards her field that afternoon. Her body was spotted in her field around 6 pm by locals that day. Then, the sugarcane was harvested and the killings paused for nearly seven months. On July 2, 2024, the sixth woman was murdered.

Meanwhile, the families of two victims have called for a reinvestigation.

The son of the June 29, 2023, victim says, “She had a heated argument with the owners of a brick kiln in the village 10 days before her death and even filed a complaint against them at the local thana. Ten days later, her body was found with her sari tied around her neck.”

The husband of the sixth victim suspects she was killed by those he is involved in a land dispute. “Now my wife is dead. The police should take another look into her murder.”

Necks tied with a cloth, knot on the left

A station official, however, says all six murders were too “precise“ to be a coincidence. “In fact, Kuldeep took us to the locations himself,” he says.

“He strangled the victims with either his bare hands or with their clothes. All victims had a piece of cloth tied around their necks, with the knot always on the left. He would always kill in a sugarcane field so he could move around undetected by CCTV cameras,” SSP Arya says.

Police say Kuldeep had a “troubled” childhood. “During questioning, he kept saying that his father would, at the behest of his stepmother, physically torture his mother,” an official says, adding that Kuldeep got married in 2014, but his wife left him four years later “due his violent outbursts each time she said no to him”.

“Because he saw his mother get beaten, he spoke softly with women. But he would get enraged if they resisted his advances. That rage led to the six murders,” the police claims.

After the July 2 murder, the police distributed sketches of suspects in all affected villages.

Stating that they suspect Kuldeep may have been imvolved in more killings, police said that during interrogation, he referred to his six victims as “shikaar (prey)”. They claimed that Kuldeep showed “no signs of remorse” and instead hoped to get married again.