Hajipur’s Marri Srinivas Reddy, 28, the main suspect in the teenage girls’ rape and murders here, according to most villagers was “a silent creature”.

“He would walk like a robot, speak to none and stared strangely at people,” is what a senior citizen or a child in the village says.

They recollect that he was beaten up by residents of neighbouring Mysireddypalli village last year, when he misbehaved with a woman. But there was no police case made at that time.

And some six months ago, Srinivas Reddy, villagers say, beat up a mason from Andhra Pradesh who built their new house. Subsequent panchayat by village leaders decided that he pay ₹ 20,000 compensation.

Police sources say that he has no crime history in Telangana, however, he has cases against him in Kurnool and Karnataka.

Villagers seeing bodies being exhumed from the abandoned well one after the other, one case even dating back to April 2015, are furious. “Only now we all realised that Srinivas Reddy was not just silent, but a killer too,” they say.

But the police failed their basic role – crime prevention, or even responding to public grievances, they all complained.