Thug Behram

By the 1830s, Behram was a thuggee jemadar (gang leader) and had been active for 40 years.^[2][3] According to the 1837 testimony of Ramzan, a thug-turned-approver who had worked under Behram and was based in Oudh, he was asked by East India Company officials if he could point out Behram, upon whom the British had placed a Rs 100 reward.^[a] That night, Ramzan led eight sepoys to Behram's house in the village of Sohanee. Behram came out to greet him and, while warming himself up by a fire that Ramzan had lit, he was surrounded and seized by the guards. He immediately confessed to being a thug and pledged to cooperate.^[5][6]

In Behram's first deposition in 1836, Captain James Paton, the Assistant Resident at Lucknow and in charge of the Anti-thuggee Campaign in Oudh from the mid-1830s, quotes him as confessing: "I may have strangled with my own hands about 125 men, and I may have seen strangled 150 more". A year later, Paton quoted him as having "been present" at 931 murders.^[7][8] Paton described Behram as "a notorious Jamadar or leader of Thugs of 65", and as "one of the best approvers".^[3][9] In his interviews with Paton at Lucknow, Behram emphasised the status of thugs: "The Thug is the Badshah! King of all these classes!".^[3] On the subject of other robbers, Paton recorded Behram as responding:^[3]

with his usual great animation, 'a chor! a thief! (here he imitated a skulking thief) but a Thug! (rising with animation) rides his horse! wears his dagger! And shews affront! 'choree na! Kubbee nyhen!' thieving! never! never! If a bankers' treasure were before me, and entrusted to my care, though in hunger, and dying, I would spurn to steal! but let a banker go on a journey, and I would certainly, ('albutta') murder him! but not a Mahajun whom I knew; (indignantly) I despise a Dacoit! a robber! ('pajee!') contemptible! let him come before me! 'our Keea!' (what else!)

Number of murders

On an 1838 map of thuggee activity in the Kingdom of Oudh, Paton ascribed to Behram's gangs "931 Murders in 40 years of actual Thuggee", with an average of "about two murders monthly".^[12][13] James L. Sleeman (grandson of William Henry Sleeman, the General Superintendent of the Thuggee Department)^[14] begins his 1933 book Thug: Or a Million Murders with his grandfather learning incredulously of Behram's supposed murder count of 931.^[c] In Sleeman's invented account, Behram responds: "Sahib, there were many more, but I was so intrigued in luring them to destruction that I ceased counting when certain of my thousand victims".^[15][16] Guinness World Records holds Behram to be the most prolific murderer in history, claiming that he strangled at least 931 people between 1790 and 1840.^[17]

Mike Dash notes that, spread across the four decades of Behram's career and taking into account that thugs were rarely active outside the cold season, this would require there to have been 24 deaths a year over four months, or one murder every five days of his career. Taking this together with various thuggee depositions that suggest the whole process of luring and killing their victims often took more than 20 days to complete, Dash finds this improbable. Paton never addressed the discrepancy between this and Behram's earlier confession to having been involved in 275 murders, personally strangling 125 of them.^[13] Kim A. Wagner describes Behram's claim to have been involved in 931 murders as a brag.^[18]

• List of serial killers before 1900
• The Deadly Dozen: India's Most Notorious Serial Killers
• Feringheea