Mohan Kumar to Cyanide Mohan: From mild-mannered school teacher to dreaded serial killer

Mohan, 57, was convicted of murder on Saturday.

It was 2009. The coastal district of Dakshina Kannada in Karnataka, often described as the laboratory for Hindutva’s experiments, was tense. Just a year earlier, there had been a series of orchestrated attacks on churches in the city of Mangaluru, allegedly by teams allied with the Sangh Parivar. Marginal Hindu groups were also locked in pitched street battles with Islamic fundamentalist groups like the PFI, especially around Bantwal, a town 30 kilometers from Mangaluru.

“The situation at the time was really bad. All the policemen were afraid of being transferred there, “said a police inspector, who did not want to identify himself.

On the morning of June 17, 2009, Anitha Mulya, a 22-year-old girl who shot beedis for a living at her home in the Barimar village of Bantwal Taluk, disappeared. For two days, her family and neighbors toured the town looking for her, but with no luck. And then someone in the community raised suspicion of “jihad love,” a theory that Muslim men seduced Hindu women with the goal of converting them, which seemed appropriate in the community atmosphere of the time. Right-wing Hindu teams, finding an opportunity, jumped on the bandwagon and led feverish protests across the district. They laid siege to the local police station, demanding that the “kidnappers” be arrested.

Feeling that the situation could spiral out of control, the Bantwal Police formed a high-level investigation team under the leadership of then Circle Inspector Nanjunde Gowda and then Assistant Superintendent Chandragupta. Unknown to Gowda and her team, who began to search frantically for her, Anitha’s body, with foam in her mouth, had been discovered in a women’s restroom at the intercity bus stop in Hassan, a city 160 km away, just 160 km away. km. One day after his disappearance.

Almost at the same time, his lifeless body was pulled out of the bathroom, a short man with a thick mustache in his 40s slipped silently. Unaware of the crowd gathering around his body, the man ran out of the bus stop and headed to the room of the nearby cabin where he and Anitha had spent the last night. There, he rummaged through a plastic bag and collected Anitha’s gold ornaments in another. Emptying the room, he left the cabin and got on a bus that would take him away from Hassan.

That man was Mohan Kumar, a former Dakshina Kannada elementary teacher whose transformation into Karnataka’s dreaded serial killer has puzzled many for years. On October 21, 2009, Kumar was arrested by police in a village on the outskirts of Mangaluru and, during interrogation, admitted to killing Anitha and at least 19 other women between 2004 and 2009 by poisoning them with cyanide. He also confessed to befriending them with the marriage offer and then stealing their jewelry after killing them.

On June 24 of this year, Kumar was convicted and sentenced to the life of a court of the first instance in Mangaluru in the twentieth murder case registered against him. In five previous cases against him, Kumar has handed down the death sentence by the court of the first instance, one of which has been upheld and two others commuted to life by a bank of the Karnataka High Court. Except for five cases, he was found guilty in all.

BC Road bus stop near Bantwal where Mohan first met Anitha

Many names, one reason

For Anitha Mulya, he was Sudhakar Kulal. For Sunanda Poojary, he was Shashidhar Poojary. For Kaveri, he was Sudhakar Acharya.

According to the detailed case files accessed by indianexpress.com and the accounts of investigative officers, Kumar rarely used his real name when approaching women. He mainly wandered around the bus stops and other public places, keeping an eye on the women he could befriend.

“He targeted single women who belonged to poor and indigent families, especially those who appeared to be past the age of marriage. He would present himself primarily as a government official and enter into talks with them. If I received a positive response, I would go on to exchange phone numbers and establish a relationship, “said Sanjeev Purusha, an officer who was part of the investigative team that arrested Kumar in 2009.

Among the things, Kumar considered when approaching his victims was his caste. During initial conversations, he asked about his caste and then claimed to be from the same person. If the victim was an Idiga woman, so was he. If she belonged to the Poojary community, he was, too.

If the women he courted responded positively to his romantic proposals, Kumar would propose to elope to marry in a temple or in a registry office. I would ask them to bring their best jewelry and gold clothes for the wedding. However, he would clarify that he did not want dowry of any kind. He had little contact with the families of the women with whom he became friends and prohibited him from informing their relatives of their marriage plans.

“Mohan Kumar was a quiet man of speech and was able to attract women with his false credentials of a government official. Sometimes he volunteered to organize jobs for them too, ”said Jnanasekhar, a police writer, who is also part of the investigative team.

Police reports confirm that Kumar’s modus operandi of killing his victims was similar in all cases. Once the date for the “marriage” had been set, Kumar and the victim left on a bus from their hometown to distant cities such as Mysuru, Bengaluru, Hassan, and Madikeri. They checked into a hostel, always near the main bus stop, where Kumar entered false names and addresses in the visitor registry. He then engaged in sexual relations with the victim at night. He was so meticulous that he would even delineate her fertility cycles to make sure she was ovulating at the time.

Before leaving for the temple the next day, Kumar would tell his victims to leave the gold jewelry in the hostel room. On the way to the temple, authorities said Kumar would stop by the women’s restroom at the bus stop and offer victims a repackaged cyanide pill as a contraceptive. His justification for taking the pill down the toilet was that the woman would feel the need to urinate immediately after consuming it. Once they collapsed into the toilet after consuming the cyanide, Kumar ran to the hostel room, collected the jewelry, and left the city immediately.

On some occasions, a few days after the murder, Kumar telephoned the families of the victims and assured them that they had married. They lived a comfortable life and did not have to worry about their daughters, I would say.

Purusha said Kumar had the idea to use cyanide as a poison from a goldsmith he met during his days as a school teacher. A goldsmith he became friends with told him that they used cyanide powder to polish the gold jewelry. Posing as a jeweler, Kumar used to buy cyanide powder in batches from the goldsmith.

Bantwal Police Station in Dakshina Kannada

Kumar’s overtures to women in socially and financially powerless communities also signaled her position in the vicious caste realities of rural Karnataka, one official agreed. When a man with a stable government job proposes marriage to them and refuses to accept the dowry, it is a difficult offer to reject.

“Most of these victims come from families of daily wage earners and marrying them, in any case, is a costly affair. It is quite difficult for a woman to get a suitor if she crosses a particular age, “the officer said.

“The family can file a complaint when it disappears, but once they find out that he has escaped and is safe, they don’t bother to proceed with the complaint. They forget about it and move on.”

Police officers said Kumar became bolder and more arrogant after each murder when he noted that investigations into the murders went nowhere. When each of their victims was found in the bus stop restrooms, local police would invariably present an Unidentified Death Case (UDR), wait for the families to be identified, and then perform an autopsy. In almost all cases, they were not initially identified and the bodies were quickly cremated. Similarly, photographs of victims have always been published in local newspapers but were not widely circulated outside the district boundaries. Since the victims were always found far from their home cities, families did not notice such announcements.

A police document, detailing his mishandling of some of the cases, noted: “Because there is a delay in conducting the post mortem examination, the actual cause of death may not appear. In many cases, due to the delay … the forensic science laboratory did not detect poisonous substances in the viscera. ”

Even when multiple victims were found in public toilets in places like Mysuru within days, local police did not thoroughly investigate the UDR cases, ruling them out for suicide. The presence of poisonous substances in their bodies did not raise suspicions either. This worked for the benefit of Kumar, who continued his killing spree. The number of victims grew every year: one in 2004, three in 2005, four in 2006, three in 2007, two in 2008 and nine in 2009.

After each murder, Kumar, Jnanasekhar said, would spend time between his second wife Manjula and the third wife Sridevi who stayed in Kasaragod and Deralakatte, respectively. Of both wives, he has two children each. He would pawn his victims’ jewels at gold financial companies in Mangaluru and use the money to care for their families. Until his arrest in 2009, neither wife knew of the other’s existence or of her husband’s exploits.

“There was never any reason for us to suspect that he was doing something wrong. He was just like any normal person, having casual conversations over dinner. He used to come home regularly, stay for a few days and then leave saying he had to travel for work, “said Putta, the brother of his third wife, Sridevi, who is now divorced.

“Initially, after his arrest, we visited him several times in prison. But for many years, we have not known him. It has caused us great anguish and mental torture and I am tired of explaining all this to the media. We are trying to forget all of that now. ”

Sridevi, who declined to comment, works at a financial company near Mangaluru to raise his two children.

The government school in Kanyana where Mohan studied

Right pressure put the cops on the right track

The circumstances that led to Kumar’s arrest in October 2009 began with the vigorous police investigation into Anitha Mulya’s disappearance a few months earlier. Under pressure from the right-wing crowds who were all but ready to seal their disappearance as a ‘love jihad’ case, the Bantwal police, under Gowda, took on the task by examining cell phone call records used by Anitha and the landline at home.

In the records, a cell phone number, that of a Madikeri resident named Sridhar, was highlighted. When the police arrived at Sridhar’s home, they were informed that her sister Kaveri, who also disappeared on March 17, used the number. When the details of Kaveri’s call were traced, they took police to the homes of two other missing women: Vinutha in Puttur. and Pushpa in the Kasaragod border district of Kerala.

A thread had begun to form. The suspect was making calls from one missing woman’s SIM card to the next, police deciphered.

By then, the police had realized that they were no longer dealing with a missing woman’s complaint. It was something much bigger. Her first suspicion was in a trafficking scam targeting single women. But then those doubts were discarded when they couldn’t find any clues about how such an uproar worked.

“Along with the call logs, what turned out to be most useful were the basic intelligence data,” said Gowda, now retired from the police force.

The investigative team connected with neighboring police stations to look for more complaints from missing women and then to build a timeline based on the dates of their disappearances. The breakthrough eventually came as police intensified their search for common IMEI numbers on phones that used the missing girls’ SIM cards. Among them, a phone with one of the IMEI numbers was found to be in continuous use for nearly 20 minutes with the location traced back to Deralakatte, a town on the outskirts of Mangaluru.

“The cell phone owner admitted it was his phone, but added that he had given it to his nephew by the name of Mohan Kumar, a teacher,” said Purusha.

Kumar has three brothers: two brothers and one sister.

And for the first time, Kumar’s idea as a potential suspect was brought up with the police. Before concentrating on him, they sought the help of Sumithra, a female tailor from Deralakatte, who testified that she had seen him and Anitha at the bus stop leaving for Hassan and therefore could identify him. Sumithra also told police that it could be the same man who had approached her in 2005 posing as a plantation supervisor with the offer of marriage.

“We called him from Sumithra’s SIM card and set a trap for him at the local bus stop. When he arrived, we arrested him,” added Purusha, who now works with the police intelligence security wing in Mangaluru.

During a raid on the home of his third wife Sridevi, police found incriminating evidence that included large amounts of cyanide dust, forged government stamps, business cards, and receipts from gold financing firms where the victims’ jewelry was promised. After the arrest, when his exploits hit the front pages of newspapers in India, Kumar had earned a new nickname: Cyanide Mohan.

On October 12, 2017, Karnataka High Court of Judges Ravi Malimath and John Michael Cunha, while commuting the death sentence handed down by a trial court for the murder of Anitha Mulya, noted: “The documents seized from the possession of the accused, namely the business cards printed in various names by which the accused was posing as him, demonstrate that using fictitious names, the accused was found attracting gullible women and single girls with false promises of getting a job or marrying them and then fatally administering them by poisoning and stealing your valuables. Hiding your identity and disguising yourself under different names as evidenced by the various identity cards printed with your photographs and fake letterheads is clear evidence of guilty intention and motive. ”

In court, Kumar represented himself, routinely questioning police officers and other witnesses in the case, taking detailed notes, and going through the law books to find loopholes. Also in prison, he had a stack of textbooks that he used to familiarize himself with the details of the law.

Jayaram Shetty, the prosecutor who confronted Kumar in the last two cases, said: “He is very thorough and presents the case very well. He is quite intelligent in that way. But, during questioning, he still makes mistakes because he is not a lawyer. certified. ”

A school teacher who spoke less.

The road to Kanyana, Kumar’s hometown, is a dusty road that cuts the Mangaluru-Kasaragod highway just before Ullal. It stretches up and down along the reserved Kalanjimale forest, passing a handful of thatched-roof houses, the occupants of which are mostly wage-earning farmers who grow coconut and arecanut, the main crops in the area. In a moment, the road enters a part of Kerala, where signs in Malayalam shore up, before crossing back to Karnataka and finally reaching the limits of the Kanyana panchayat.

It was here that Kumar was born to Maielappa Mogera and Tukru in a family of Castas Programadas (SC) on April 6, 1963. He has three brothers: two brothers and one sister. His parents were day laborers who worked on agricultural land that belonged to wealthy farmers. In the 1970s, courtesy of the state government’s rural housing plan for backward sections, the family obtained a one-story house with a concrete tile roof where Kumar’s brother Ramesh continues to reside.

The house in the village of Kanyana where his brother is staying. This was also where Mohan’s family stayed when he attended high school.

“In those days, there was not much academic interest among children here. Many of them were lazy and dropped out of school. But these four children (Kumar and his siblings) were brilliant and studying well, ”said Rama, a relative of Kumar’s. While one of Kumar’s brothers is director of the state bus transportation corporation, his sister works in the postal department.

After completing high school, Kumar enrolled in a bachelor’s course at Uppinangadi First Grade College in Dakshina Kannada.

Abdurrahman, a friend from Kumar’s school and now vice president of the panchayat, said he remembered him as an athletic boy who played kabaddi and cricket. “His parents worked on our family farm for years, so I knew him quite well. At school, I used to talk to him often and he was a clean guy. He was average in studies, but he used to work hard in his physical condition. I would play kabaddi and cricket at school, “recalled Abdurrahman.

Kumar’s older brother Ramesh, who retired from odd daily wage jobs due to heart disease, said he couldn’t recall anything unusual from his childhood that pointed to his brother’s future psychopathic inclinations. “Soumya swabhavakkaran aayirunnu (was kind),” he said, in broken Malayalam. “But he was reserved and talked less.”

A critical point in their lives was when their father abandoned the family and left them to fend for themselves. “I was 14 years old when my father left. We were small children and we did not ask our mother why she left. But Mohan was deeply attached to his mother, “said Ramesh.

Kumar entered the government service as a contract elementary school teacher right after graduation, even though he did not have a teaching diploma. In those days, the Dalits reserve ensured direct entry into the teaching service without a diploma (D.Ed). According to police records, Kumar began his career at Shiradi Elementary School in November 1984 and has since worked at different schools across the district. However, he was under long periods of suspension due to irregular attendance and misdeeds.

Kumar’s first marriage was to Mary, who ended in divorce allegedly because she refused to convert to Christianity. His second marriage was to Manjula, a woman from the same community as him, who his family had arranged in 1992. Through Manjula, he has two children, both in college now.

Abdurrahman, a friend from Kumar’s school

“He was always kind to me. In the early years, he did not speak much. He would go home from school, eat, and go to sleep. After we moved from my mother’s house to another place, she started talking a little more. But like other couples, we have never been out hiking or shopping. I only accompanied him once when he was taking his students on a school trip, ”Manjula said by phone.

Although Kumar would frequently advise him to take care of children’s studies, he never did anything by himself. “He has never bought chocolates for children. I just raised them, with little participation from him.

“He often told me that he had been transferred and that he didn’t have the money to travel back home, so he stays there. He would come once a week and I believed him thinking he was working very hard for us. Later in the newspapers, I realized I was there looking for women, “added Manjula.

News of Kumar’s arrest and subsequent general coverage by local Kannada television channels were followed by police officials and journalists who entered Kanyana to gather information about the serial killer. Before long, the small town was propelled into the spotlight.

“We were stunned. We couldn’t believe it, “said Abdurrahman.

Kumar’s family felt the same. “I think if I had good friends, it wouldn’t have turned out that way. When you feel lonely, you can have all kinds of terrible ideas on your mind,” Ramesh said, stressing that he has never had communication with his brother after his arrest.

In Kumar’s house, the dirt and soot-covered walls are filled with framed photographs of everyone but him. When Ramesh was asked why this was so, he replied, “There is no need. I burned them and threw them away.”