Kozhikode: Four months after the arrest of 47-year-old Jolly Thomas, the Kerala Police probe team on Monday filed the sixth charge-sheet, completing the first stage of the investigation process.
Six members of the Ponnamattom family at Koodathayi in Kerala’s Kozhikode district were eliminated one after the other by Jolly after giving poison-laced food or drink over a period of 14 years from 2002.
The first in the Thomas family to die in 2002 was Jolly's mother-in-law Annamma, a retired teacher. She was followed by Jolly's father-in-law Tom Thomas in 2008. In 2011, their son and Jolly's husband, Roy Thomas, also died to be followed by the death of Roy's maternal uncle, Mathew, in 2014. The last one in the extended family to die was Sily in 2016.
The six and last charge-sheet explains on how Jolly killed her mother-in-law Annamma, her first victim, back in 2002.
Police have found out that while Jolly used cyanide in eliminating five of the six, in the case of her mother-in-law Annamma, she used the poison normally given to kill rabid dogs and sourced it from a veterinary clinic on the grounds that she wanted to eliminate her dog.
Police began the probe into these deaths after Roy Thomas' brother, Rojo, now settled in the US, approached the Superintendent of Police and voiced his suspicions about the series of mysterious deaths and exhumed all the bodies.
Last year on October 5, the police arrested Jolly and her two accomplices who are currently in jail, and registered separate cases in each of the deaths.
