Karnataka Police on Wednesday said they have arrested a 32-year-old woman for allegedly killing five people – a woman and four children – in Krishna Raja Sagar (KRS). Mandya District on the intervening night of Saturday and Sunday.
The accused have been identified as Lakshmi, a resident of Mysore and a relative of the deceased woman. The victims have been identified as Lakshmi (30), their children Raj (10), Komal (8) and Kunal (5) and their nephew Govinda (13)
Police said the accused had an extramarital affair with Gangaram, the husband of the victim Lakshmi, who was a plastic goods trader and forced her to commit the crime after she refused to marry him despite repeated attempts to convince her.
A police officer said: “We initially suspected Gangaram in the murders, but as of now, we do not have any evidence against him. He was in Hyderabad at the time of the incident. But we came to know that Gangaram and Laxmi were having an affair and after taking information from the local people and analyzing the CCTV cameras installed near her house, we found that Laxmi was there late at night on her two wheeler. When questioned, he confessed to his crime.
“It was a difficult case as Lakshmi stole some ornaments from the house to make it look like murder for profit. But since the children were also killed, we suspected personal enmity in the case and an acquaintance could have done so as there was no sign of forced entry into the house,” the official said.
The police decided the sequence of such incidents on the basis of the evidence gathered and the interrogation of the accused.
The Gangaram family was from Rajasthan and had gone to Mandya. Police said the accused Lakshmi used to visit their house frequently, but after Gangaram’s wife asked him to stay away, he started avoiding her.
Angered by this, the accused decided to kill his wife and came home on a two-wheeler when Gangaram was away on Sunday at around 12.45 pm, police said.
Police said Gangaram’s wife Lakshmi woke up and the accused attacked her on the head with a sickle and later killed her with a pillow.
Hearing the loud sound, two children woke up and requested the accused not to harm them. But he killed them and later the other two sleeping children also joined the police.
Police said that after the murder, the accused tried to destroy evidence and rob the ornaments before leaving for Mysore. By the time the locals came to know about the death the next day, she came back and even started crying in front of the dead bodies pretending to be ignorance, the police said.
Police said the investigation was still on and they were probing whether anyone else was involved in the murders.