Seema Gavit and Renuka Shinde

Had their original sentences been carried out, the sisters would have been the first women to be executed in India since 1955, and only the second overall.

Hailing from Nashik, Anjanabai had fled to Pune with a truck driver, who deserted her soon after Renuka was born in 1973.

Mother and daughter most probably survived by stealing.

Sisters Seema Mohan Gavit (born 1975) and Renuka Kiran Shinde (born 1973) are Indian serial killers convicted of kidnapping thirteen children and killing five of them between 1990 and 1996.

In association with their mother Anjanabai, they were active in various cities in western Maharashtra – Pune, Thane, Kalyan, Kolhapur, and Nashik.

The reason for kidnapping the children was to take them to crowded places where one of the trio would try to steal people's belongings.

If the thief was caught, she would either try to evoke sympathy through the child, or create a distraction by hurting it.

The kidnapped child would later be killed.

Anjanabai later married Mohan Gavit, a retired soldier, following which Seema was born in 1975.

However, Anjanabai's history of crime, mostly petty thefts and pickpocketing, resulted in repeated police harassment.

Mohan Gavit ultimately abandoned his wife and daughter and remarried.

The trio continued stealing, with the younger daughter sometimes being used as bait.

Elder sister Renuka got married in 1989 to Kiran Shinde, a tailor working in Pune, at a temple near Shirdi.

In 1990, a theft attempt at the Chaturshringi Temple in Pune went awry, and Renuka was caught.

She, however, managed to free herself by using her toddler son whom she had taken with her, arguing that a mother with a small child cannot steal.

The crowd let her go, and Renuka shared this incident with her mother and sister.

It was then that the family decided to conduct these thefts with small children in tow, with the children serving both as a foil and a distraction to help them escape easily.

Between 1990 and 1996, the family kidnapped an estimated 40 or more children, mostly from crowded places such as temple compounds and fairgrounds in Pune, Thane, Kalyan, Kolhapur, and Nashik; they would ultimately be charged with 13 kidnappings (mostly children below five years of age) and 10 murders.

While missing children reports were filed in some cases, many of the kidnappings likely went unreported as the children came from poor families and the police did not pay heed.

Kiran Shinde would drive the getaway car in the kidnappings.

Their first murder victim was the son of a beggar in Kolhapur who was picked up by Renuka in July 1990.

They brought him to Pune and named him Santosh.

In April 1991, they took him to Kolhapur, where Seema was caught while trying to steal the purse of a devotee at the Mahalaxmi temple.

To divert attention away from Seema, Anjanabai threw Santosh down with force.

Barely a year old at the time, he sustained injuries.

In the melee that ensued, Seema managed to escape.

As the bleeding Santosh kept crying, the family became worried of getting caught.

To silence him, Anjanabai bashed his head against an electric pole, with the others reportedly "witnessing the killer eating Wada-pav".

Santosh died on the spot, and they disposed of his body near an old rickshaw heap.

The children were mostly killed when they wouldn't stop crying, with post-mortems indicating injuries from being thrown downstairs or hit repeatedly.

In one instance, they killed a two-and-half-year-old girl, stuffed her body in a bag and took it to a cinema hall, where they watched a film and later dumped the body on the way home.

A two-year-old boy was hanged upside down, and his head was slammed repeatedly against the wall.

The trio were arrested in November 1996, along with Renuka's husband Kiran Shinde, who later turned approver and was pardoned.

Anjanabai died of illness within two years of being arrested, with the trial yet to begin.

In 2001, the Sessions Court at Kolhapur found the sisters guilty of kidnapping thirteen and murdering six children.

The Bombay High Court in 2004 upheld the conviction but acquitted them of one murder.

The death sentence handed down by these courts was confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2006.

After this ruling, Seema and Renuka filed mercy petitions in 2008 and 2009, respectively, which were rejected by President Pranab Mukherjee in 2014.

Because of this delay in seeking a decision on their mercy petitions, the Bombay High Court ultimately commuted their death sentence to life imprisonment in 2022.

The sisters currently remain lodged at Yerwada Jail in Pune.