Necrophiles

Supposedly, according to one account in the Times of India, Koli was inspired when Pandher requested that he bring prostitutes to the home, and then asked for little girls when no one else was available.  Koli learned how to lure them with sweets, and then both men would rape them.  When he lured boys by mistake, he simply killed them.  But the details of this story changed until it seemed that Koli was acting on his own initiative for at least some of the murders.

In another version, Koli's method was to bring the victims to the house and strangle them on the first floor.  He would then sexually violate the corpses and chop them up for disposal, using the bathroom to drain out the blood.  While he dumped the torsos in the back drain, he said, the remaining body parts were packed tightly in plastic bags and thrown away in the trash. Apparently in this confession, he did not repeat the stories of cannibalism but did confirm his necrophilia.  He was sexually aroused by dead bodies and freely indulged his appetite.

A crowd stands around the home of Pandher, the ditch wassearched by police for bodies and other evidence

One parent of a murdered child said he had met with Koli three times since his arrest and Koli recalled many details about his daughter.  "His memory was so sharp that he remembered each and every detail related to the killings.  When I asked him about my daughter, Surendra even remembered the exact color of the dress she was wearing on the fateful day." 

As Koli gave this confession, it seemed that perhaps Pandher was innocent, as he had originally claimed, unaware of how Koli was using his premises for these nefarious acts.  But that did not mean that Koli operated alone.  A six-year-old child told police there was another participant as well; she identified Pandher's domestic help, Maya Sarkar, as a person who, with Koli, had stalked her and nearly taken her into the very bungalow where the axe had been found.

Sarkar was taken in for questioning, and she said that on one or two occasions, she and some of the other maid servants had been lured by Koli, but she had resisted his overtures.  She denied knowledge of the killings, although her polygraph proved inconclusive.  Since she had been identified by a near-victim as a potential accomplice, she will be questioned again.

As parents of missing and murdered children pondered the case, they suspected some of their neighbors were implicated as well.  They believed that Koli, and whoever his accomplice was, could not have operated without the assistance of villagers who took the children out of their neighborhoods to hand over to the killer.  In fact, some stated that they were being threatened by these very accomplices to keep them from talking to the police or press.  The threats began with the announcement of a transfer of the lead investigator, RKS Rathore, and they wanted his transfer order revoked.  Two parents said that if their demands were not met, they would take the extreme step of self-immolation.

Although the case is not yet finished, and might yet take three months to complete, it's clear that Koli was not only a necrophilic predator of children, but also someone who could persuade or force others to assist him.  How many others might be identified is still unknown, as is the disposition of Pandher's situation.