Days before serial killings, accused fought with parents: ‘Why did he do this?’

Worried about the wayward ways of his younger son, Nanheveer Gond, a small farmer, says he had prodded Shivprasad to settle down in the village, tend to the fields and get married. This was the second time they had brought up the issue, and Shivprasad had flown into a rage.

“He asked me for money… I gave him the Rs 2,000 that I had. He left on his bicycle, taking his laptop along. It was the first time he left home without touching my feet,” recalls Sita Rani Gond.

That was the last she saw of her son or heard from him until, on September 1, a fortnight later, police personnel came knocking on their doors to inform the family of Shivprasad’s arrest.

Pointing to the sacks of grains stacked in their two-room house, Nanheveer says, “Why did he do this? Why did he have to leave home? It is not that I could not have provided for him. We could have easily managed two meals a day. I just wanted him to settle down.”

But Sita Rani knew it was not what her son wanted. “He wanted to live in a place where movies are made. He would often say that he would fly there in an aeroplane. He would keep watching something on his laptop,” she says.

After his arrest, Shivprasad is said to have told police that the killings were borne out of an urge to become a “famous and rich gangster”. Police said he was motivated by violent social media videos.

As a child, though Shivprasad was enrolled in the government primary school in Kekra and later, in a bigger school a kilometre away, he rarely attended school. Even on days that turned up, he remained aloof, “hardly participating in the class”, said his primary school teacher Sanjay Jain.

At age 13, Shivprasad, like many other youngsters in the village, left home in search of jobs in neighbouring states. Over the last five years, he worked in hotels in Kerala, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Goa.

But as the lockdown hit the country, Shivprasad is said to have cycled all the way home from Goa, taking lifts from truck drivers when possible.

Rajesh Mehra, deputy sarpanch of Kekra, says Shivprasad, who spoke “fluent English” after his return from Goa, would talk to them about his time there, how “people were willing to pay over Rs 2,000 for a bowl of soup”.

Sita Rani says Shivprasad would often urge his father to sell off his farm land and give him money to set up a shop. “This often led to fights in the house,” she says.

Shivprasad’s childhood friend Mukesh says Shivprasad mostly kept to himself and would often be spotted sitting alone, his bicycle parked nearby, busy peering into his cellphone.

In the end, it was a cellphone trail that led police to Shivprasad.

On August 27, a security guard identified as Kalyan Lodhi was found dead, his head smashed in while he was asleep, outside a factory in Sagar’s Bhainsa locality. Police found that the guard’s cellphone had gone missing.

The second murder was recorded on August 28, when Shambhuram Dubey was found dead in the college canteen of Government College of Arts and Commerce in Sagar, his skull hammered with a stone. Lodhi’s cell phone was found near Dubey, but now Dubey’s cell phone was missing.

As police began investigating the two cases, a third incident was reported on Tuesday, August 30. A guard, Mangal Ahirwar, was killed in the Moti Nagar area of the town, his head smashed in with the handle of a sickle.

According to police, with Sagar district on alert following the three back-to-back murders, Shivprasad took a train to Bhopal.

After his arrest, Shivprasad is said to have told police that he left the cellphone belonging to Lodhi — his first victim — beside the body of his second victim, Dubey, because it wasn’t a smart phone. But Dubey’s was a smart phone and he kept it, with its SIM card intact that enabled him to watch videos.

It was the location of Dubey’s cellphone that led police to Shivprasad when they traced him to Koh-e-Fiza locality of Bhopal in the early hours of September 2. Police say he confessed to the murder of Sonu Verma, 23, a security guard outside a marble factory in Bhopal’s Khajuriya area.

Neha Gurjar, Town Inspector of the Civil Lines police station in Sagar, told The Indian Express, “We found that Shivprasad was greatly inspired by Ujjain-based gangster, Durlab Kashyap, and had been watching his videos. He also told us he liked gangster movies and named KGF, Pushpa and Hackers as some of those he had watched. He said his friends told him that killing people would make him a big gangster and would earn him lots of money.”

Meanwhile, unsure of what fate awaited their 19-year-old, Sita Rani holds back her tears to say, “Jab bachche maa-baap ki baat nahi maante hai tab bura hi hota hai. Par beta toh beta hota hai naa (When children don’t listen to their parents, they come to no good, but he is our son after all).”