From 1988 to 1989, nine teenage girls went missing in and around Chennai.
Earlier it was believed that the families of those girls sold them for prostitution due to poverty but after a lot of requests from the families and investigation, police believed it to be a gang act.
Later police discovered that an auto rickshaw driver named Shankar was being named for these crimes.
After painstaking probe police finally arrested him for killing teenage girls and burying them in residential houses.
After his arrest he became known as Auto Shankar. He blamed movies for provoking him to commit those murders but later he also confessed that his victims were supplied to famous politicians who raped them and were killed and buried at the end.
Shankar and his gang were found guilty of six murders, committed over a period of two years in 1988–1989.
They were tried for the murders of Lalitha, Sudalai, Sampath, Mohan, Govindaraj and Ravi. The bodies of the victims were either burnt or buried inside residential houses.
Shankar was sentenced to death along with two of his associates, Eldin and Shivaji, on May 31, 1991.Auto Shankar was hanged to death in Salem central jail on April 27, 1995 at the age of 41.
