Bones behind the bungalow: How the Nithari serial killing case unravelled

‘She ran away’ or ‘she must have eloped’ were some of the responses.

It wasn’t till May 2006 and the disappearance of Payal Sarkar that the horror story came to light. And it wasn’t till December of that year that the bodies were found. They were found – dismembered and decomposed, some of them worn down by time to skeletal remains – in the drains behind a bungalow in Noida’s Sector 31.

Media reports from that time read like a horror story.

From the drains behind and between that house and its neighbour, the police began pulling out skulls, bone fragments, torn dresses, and children’s toys. A school bag – dirty and torn and faded, roiled in mud – bore silent witness.

Surendra Koli suicide news: Koli was a Dalit from Uttarakhand. (Express Photo/File)

Moninder Singh Pandher owned the house – D-5, Sector 31, Noida. Koli was his domestic help.

The Indian Express visited the bungalow – abandoned then – in July 2025. It was a pristine white building, once.

Pandher and Koli weren’t unknown in the area.

The Express spoke to Jhabbu Lal – a dhobi who sat opposite D-5 and who used to sometimes chat with Pandher. His daughter Jyoti, 10, was among the victims. He recalled one instance when Koli gave him one of Pandher’s shirts, it was blood-stained.

“He (Koli) said it was from ‘sahab‘ slaughtering a chicken…”

Moninder Singh Pandher in Noida. (Express file photo by Gajendra Yadav) 24.07.2017.

By Christmas of 2007 Pandher and Koli were arrested, and Koli ‘confessed’.

But that was just the beginning.

Back at Nithari, pressure grows

Angry with the police for having dragged their feet for months – in which time more girls were raped and killed – there were violent clashes between residents and cops. The police were corrupt, the grief-stricken families raged.

Six cops were sacked amid claims some had colluded with Pandher. But then, two years later, Sub-Inspector Simarjeet Kaur – then in charge of the police outpost in the village – got her job back. She spent time in jail for allegedly accepting a bribe.

RECAP | Cop sacked in Nithari serial killings case reinstated

There were rumours also of human trafficking, that the girls were being abducted and killed for their organs. There was a doctor who lived near Pandher whom the police suspected in an unrelated illegal kidney transplant racket. Was he in on this?

Pandher’s maid – Maya – was questioned too. Did she lure some of the girls?

There were even rumours of cannibalism.

The web of suspicion and unease spread relentlessly.

Much was claimed but little was proven. The ‘strained’ relationship between Pandher and his family was a dead end. Old kidnapping cases in Chandigarh, his hometown, were dug out of storage and a link was sought. Then they were dropped.

In early January the Central Bureau of Investigation took over the case, and more skeletal remains were found: this time a skull, a torso, and parts of a leg.

The convictions

On paper it seemed an open-and-shut case.

Nineteen girls missing, a house of secrets and horror, and a ‘confession’. The verdict that opened the floodgates came in February 2009. Pandher and Koli were convicted of murdering 14-year-old Rimpa Haldar, and sentenced to death.

In May 2010 Koli was found guilty of killing seven-year-old Arti Prasad. In September, he was found guilty of murdering nine-year-0ld Rachna Lal.

The verdicts kept coming. The death sentences piled up. By the December 2012 verdict in the murder of Kavita, 5, he was to have been put to death five times.

In February 2011 the Supreme Court agreed. In July the President of India – then Pranab Mukherjee – rejected a plea. In September a death warrant was issued.

Koli was to be hanged on September 12, 2014.

And then it fell apart

Questions over flawed investigation protocols and poor record-keeping counted against the police. A knife and axe ‘recovered’ from the Nithari house were dropped.

Questions over the police failing to properly investigate the neighbour – the doctor – and disregard for some evidence, including how the bodies were cut, were flagged.

And questions over when exactly Koli was taken into custody – December 27 or December 29, added to the confusion. The difference was key; it meant Koli may have been illegally detained by the police before being produced in court.

Under law that is illegal. And the ‘case’ against Koli started to break down.

The confession was allegedly recorded under duress – he was reportedly tortured, including being subject to electric shocks, and beaten, and then told what to say. He claimed his genitals were burned and fingernails pulled out.

The story that began to emerge was not of a killer but a Dalit man cast as a depraved villain, underlining systemic, socio-cultural inequalities that remain today.

By October 2023, the Allahabad High Court acquitted Koli in all 12 cases against him, and Pandher in the two that he had faced. The court was left ‘disheartened’ by the prosecution’s handling of the arrest, confession and evidence recovery.

It was all in a ‘casual and perfunctory’ manner, the court complained.

The state’s appeals against the acquittals were dismissed by the Supreme Court in July 2025. The top court called the earlier verdict a ‘manifest miscarriage of justice’.

By then Koli had spent 19 years in custody. Pandher spent over a decade. Neither, the courts eventually said, had anything to do with the deaths. But then who killed the 19 girls?