A Ride to Nowhere: How Police Solved a 2008 Cab Driver’s Murder Buried in a Quarry

Crime Features Correspondent

It began as just another missing persons report. A young man, barely three days into his new job as a cab driver, vanished without a trace in Mangaluru’s quiet suburbs.

No drama. No scene. Just silence.

His name was Praveen Shetty, and in November 2008, he stepped out for a routine pickup. He never came back. Family members first assumed a delay, maybe even a detour. But as the hours turned into days, and the phone rang unanswered, dread replaced hope.

What followed was a police investigation that would drag officers into the grim underbelly of desperation, theft, and premeditated violence. What they found shocked even the most seasoned among them: a decomposing body dumped in an abandoned quarry, a stolen cab, and a trail of suspects who vanished into the night like ghosts.

From Missing to Murder

At first, investigators had little to work with. No leads. No last calls. Just the unsettling reality that a new driver had simply... disappeared.

What’s more, there was no ransom, no message — nothing to suggest motive.

Then came the break.

Police traced the last known movement of Praveen’s vehicle through toll booths and roadside shopkeepers. A tip-off from a villager near the Moodbidri region — a foul smell from an old quarry pit — led to the grim discovery: a body, partially buried, still clad in a driver's uniform.

It was him.

Blunt force trauma to the head, bruising around the neck. The murder wasn’t a crime of passion — it was cold, calculated, and chillingly efficient.

The Robbery That Turned Deadly

The motive, it turned out, was heartbreakingly banal.

Two young men, short on money and long on reckless intent, had flagged Praveen’s cab pretending to be customers. Somewhere along the deserted stretch leading out of the city, they attacked him, dumped his body in the quarry, and fled with the vehicle.

For what? A second-hand car and a few hundred rupees.

“Sometimes we expect monsters to have a face. But these were just ordinary boys,” said a retired officer who worked on the case, preferring not to be named. “That’s what makes it scarier.”

The killers made their way north, attempting to cross state lines, but eventually fumbled under pressure. Within three weeks of the crime, both were nabbed thanks to alert railway authorities and a well-coordinated inter-district chase.

A Case That Lingered

Even with arrests made and a confession in hand, the case never quite left public memory. It lingered — because of its sheer pointlessness. Because it could’ve happened to anyone. Because it did.

On social media, when the case resurfaced recently during a true-crime discussion, reactions were sharp and raw.

“I still remember that face on the ‘missing’ posters. We used to live near his house. Chilling to know what actually happened,” posted @CoastalHeart_82.

“This is why I can’t trust strangers on night rides. The world’s lost its mind,” wrote another, @KanKanChronicle.

Closure, But Not Comfort

The Shetty family finally had answers, but no justice can restore what they lost. Praveen was 27 — a brother, a son, and a hopeful worker chasing an honest living. His life was snatched not by a vendetta or feud, but by opportunistic greed.

In the years since, the site of the quarry has been fenced off, and local taxi drivers still talk about “the boy from 2008” with hushed tones. For the police team, it was a reminder that behind every “missing” poster might lie a deeper, darker truth.