The Kanpatimar: India's Most Prolific Serial KillerIn September 1973, three men sleeping in a Gurdwara in Ganganagar, northern Rajasthan, were struck on the temple while they slept. Two died. The attack left behind a sealed iron cashbox bearing a set of latent fingerprints, and the first trace of the man who would become India's most prolific serial killer.The Kanpatimar reconstructs the full arc of the Kanpatimar Shankariya case: from the forensic investigation that secured his first conviction in 1975, to the catastrophic systemic failure that allowed him to commit seventy additional murders across Rajasthan, Punjab, and Haryana before his second arrest in January 1979. Drawing on court records, forensic science, criminological theory, and the social history of 1970s north India, this book examines not only who Shankariya was, but what conditions made his crimes possible, and possible for so long.This is a story about a killer who confessed to targeting the temple because the screams sounded like music. It is also a story about the rural poor who slept unprotected in dharamshalas and on railway platforms, about the institutional failures that left them there, and about a justice system capable of forensic brilliance and administrative catastrophe in the same breath. Owen Geary is a writer and scholar whose work sits at the intersection of criminal history, forensic science, and narrative nonfiction. With a long-standing fascination with the psychology and sociology of serial violence, he has spent years studying the case records, court documents, and social histories that lie behind some of the most consequential and under-examined criminal cases of the twentieth century.Geary's approach is shaped by a conviction that serious true crime writing carries obligations that popular treatments of the genre often neglect: obligations to the victims, whose humanity is too easily reduced to their role in a perpetrator's story; to the historical record, which demands precision and epistemic honesty rather than dramatic simplification; and to the broader social analysis that explains not just who committed a crime but what conditions made it possible. His work consistently challenges the romanticisation of violence and the institutional narratives that have historically obscured it.His study of the Kanpatimar Shankariya case represents the most sustained application of these commitments to date - combining forensic history, criminological theory, and social history to produce what he hopes is a full and honest accounting of one of India's most important and most neglected criminal cases.He lives and writes in the United Kingdom.
