He Killed, Cut Up Bodies, Made Skull Soup: Chilling Case Of ‘Brain Eater’ Raja Kolander

Ram Niranjan, a.k.a. Raja Kolander, was found guilty in the murder of journalist Dhirendra Singh in the year 2000, which unearthed the world of Kolander’s grisly crimes.

A timeline of a society is often marked with events that shake its conscience and do not let it forget for many years to come. A killing spree in the early 2000s by Raja Kolander is one such case. The man would not only kill people but dismember the corpse and reportedly in some cases, boil their skulls and eat their brain. 

Kolander was awarded life imprisonment by a sessions court in Uttar Pradesh after a 12-year-long trial following the murder of a journalist, Dhirendra Singh. The court also found his involvement in the murder of 14 other people but could not convict him even though skulls and bones were recovered from his house, as per media reports. 

Dhirendra Singh’s Murder 

A journalist with a Hindi daily, Dhirendra Singh went missing on December 14, 2000. He had left his office for home but never reached home, as per an Amar Ujala report. When he did not return even after two days, police started a search. Going through Dhirendra's call records, the police zeroed in on a phone number that belonged to the son of a Parliamentarian, the report added. 

The police reached the MP’s son and found the location from where the call was made. Swinging into action, the then Station House Officer of Prayagraj’s Kydganj police station, SN Tripathi, raided a pig farm in Naini and found Raja Kolander. 

Ram Niranjan, a.k.a Raja Kolander, was a resident of Shankargarh area in Uttar Pradesh’s Prayagraj, erstwhile Allahabad, where he lived with his family. He was an employee at a government ordinance factory in the city’s Naini area, according to a Jagran report. 

It was reported that Kolander would first befriend his victims before executing his murder plan. 

A Fatal Invitation 

According to a Navbharat Times report, Kolander called Dhirendra to his farmhouse on a cold winter night in December. Wearing an overcoat, the journalist arrived at the venue where a feast was awaiting him. The two men indulged in some conversation at the lavish farmhouse. Kolander asked Dhirendra to go near the fireplace as the weather was cold. 

What followed next was a gunshot aimed at Dhirendra. Kolander’s brother-in-law Vaksharaj had pulled the trigger, killing him on the spot. The duo then severed Dhirendra’s corpse and disposed of the parts across a distance of around 300 km extending up to Madhya Pradesh’s Rewa and Shahdol, as per the Amar Ujala report cited above. 

Drinking Skull Soup: Kolander’s Perceived Way To Increase His Cognitive Abilities 

During the course of interrogation, Kolander revealed that he had lent Rs 50,000 to one Kali Prasad Srivastava, also an employee at the ordnance factory. While Kolander was awaiting his repayment, Srivastava would offer him advice on how to dodge the police after committing a crime, which left an impression on Kolander, as per the Amar Ujala report. 

But when Kolander became wary of not getting back his borrowed money, Srivastava met the same fate as Kolander’s other victims but what made him distinct was Kolander’s admiration for his tactics. 

Kolander separated the skull from the body, boiled it, and drank the soup hoping to get a smart brain like that of his smart lender. 

On another occasion, Kolander killed one of his workers, Mohammed Moin, after telling him that he knew hypnotism, as per the NBT report. 

Confession And Trial 

Like Srivastava and Moin, several other individuals like drivers, colleague, and workers fell prey to Kolander’s grisly crimes. As per several media reports, Kolander confessed before the police that he had killed 14 people. 

In December 2012, Kolander and Vaksharaj were sentenced to life imprisonment after the court of additional sessions judge Mehtab Ahmed found the duo guilty in the Dhirendra Singh murder case, as per a Times of India report. While journalists had demanded a death sentence for him, the same could not be pronounced due to lack of adequate evidence. 

Following the arrest in the journalist murder case, on the basis of phone call details and location, the police had recovered three dead bodies from his farmhouse in Naini, five dead bodies from Chitrakoot, clothes of two dead bodies from Chakhindola, and two headless torsos from Naini, according to another report published in Amar Ujala in December 2012. 

Initially, Kolander and Vaksharaj were sent to Naini jail but were shifted to Lucknow jail later. Currently, both of them are serving their sentence in an Unnao jail in Uttar Pradesh.