A man who had burnt his wife to death and dumped her body parts in a septic tank, and then almost successfully spread the rumour that she had eloped with a lover, was sentenced to rigorous life imprisonment nine years after the crime was committed.
He has also been slapped a fine of Rs 60,000, which if he fails to pay would invite an additional one year rigorous imprisonment. The verdict was delivered by the Additional District Sessions Court, Thiruvananthapuram, on Tuesday.
The crime had taken place in Anad, a small village in the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram. The accused, an auto driver named Joy Antony, managed to cause confusion for a while using what criminologists call the "murderer's luck".
No one had seen him burning his wife to death, and this perverse luck came very close to letting him off the hook.
What the daughters saw
His two daughters, then aged five and seven, had seen their mother Sunitha falling unconscious after their father had hit her hard on the head with the handle of a hoe (manvetty). The children also saw him pour kerosene over their mother's body.
By this time their grandmother (Joy's mother), not wanting to expose the kids to a ghastly sight or perhaps even fearing that her son would harm the children, pulled them away from the scene. She hurried them to the neighbouring house.
The children, now 14 and 16 and legally adopted, gave their statements to the court, detailing all that they remembered. Initially, the girls,who came to the Court with their foster parents, looked hesitant. It was clear the presence of the father was causing them serious unease. They opened up only after the Court asked that Joy be removed from the hall. Joy's mother died a year after Sunitha's death.
Jilted lover defence
Joy's defence was that he did not burn his wife. He argued that the body parts (it turned out that he had cut the body to pieces and stuffed them in a sack) found in the septic tank were not Sunitha's. It was somebody else's. His legal team argued that Sunitha was living, perhaps with her name changed, in some unknown place with her lover.
Joy had even managed to convince his little daughters that their mother had eloped with another man. The children had said so to the mother superior of the convent in which they were staying as boarders.
Fearing her husband's abusive behaviour, Sunitha had put her two daughters in a convent. She worked overtime as a housemaid to find money for this. Sunitha visited the convent every Friday to bring the children home for the weekend.
How the body was uncovered
When Sunitha stopped coming, the mother superior asked the children why their mother was not coming to take them home on Fridays. The girls told her that their mother had run away with a man.
The mother superior then made a visit to the children's house. Joy's behaviour alerted her to something sinister. The mother superior's suspicions eventually led to the digging up of the sack filled with body parts from the septic tank behind the house.
It was the then Nedumangad tehsildar who ordered the fishing out of the body from the septic tank. It was a neighbour, Suku, who went down the septic tank to take out the sack filled with Sunitha's body parts.
The post-mortem revealed that it was a woman's body. It also confirmed kerosene burns. The post-mortem report also pointed out that the victim was alive at the time of burning.
Police failure
Though DNA tests were done to confirm that the body parts belonged to one person, the police failed to carry out basic scientific tests to prove that the body was Sunitha's.
No DNA tests of Sunitha's children or her parents were done to establish without doubt that the body was indeed hers. A skull-face superimposition test, an electronic forensics technique in which the skull is superimposed with a photograph of the assumed victim, was also not conducted.
Breakthrough idea
In the absence of conclusive proof, the District Sessions Court would have had no choice but to go with Joy's fiendish defence that Sunitha had eloped. It was then that public prosecutor Salahuddin came up with an inventive solution.
"When I read the forensics report submitted in 2013, I came across a sentence that said that the bones that had been collected for analysis have been preserved in the State Forensics Laboratory for future analysis," Salahuddin told Onmanorama.
He immediately placed a request before the court saying the blood samples of Sunitha's two children should be sent for DNA profiling. The court granted his prayer on November 20.
The scientific examination proved beyond doubt that the body parts were Sunitha's.
Killer's sadistic ways
The court proceedings also brought to light Joy's sadistic behaviour. Sunitha was Joy's third wife. After the death of Sunitha, he married for the fourth time.
His second wife told the court that Joy would get a high on seeing blood. She said Joy had once punched her nose and, on seeing blood oozing out, had behaved like a man caught in a sexual frenzy. The second wife told the court that Joy used to derive great delight in getting hold of her hair, hurling her around and dashing her body on a coconut tree.
The former ward member of Anad, Sunitha's village, told the court that Sunitha had complained to him about Joy's violent behaviour and that he had warned him several times.
