From pits to postmortem table: How Dr Shirley Vasu exposed hidden crimes, saved the innocent

Kasaragod: She hitched her saree up, tied an apron over it, slipped on a rain cap, and climbed barefoot into a five-metre-deep pit by the river. That image from Goa in 2012 is how Kerala Crime Branch - Malappuram SP K V Santhosh Kumar remembers Prof Shirley Vasu (68), Kerala's first female forensic surgeon, who passed away from a heart attack on September 4.

Prof Shirley Vasu had done this countless times before -- wading into ponds and descending into wells across Thrissur, Kozhikode, and Kannur in search of bodies or fragments of them. "When we took her to Goa, she was already a household name in Kerala because of the Govindachamy case," recalls Santhosh Kumar.
A year earlier, in 2011, she had conducted the autopsy of Soumya, the 23-year-old woman from Shoranur who was allegedly pushed off a moving train and raped by Govindachamy, the one-handed convict who recently escaped from Kannur Central Prison.

But the Goa case was different. Marked by police apathy, a poor family from Karnataka struggling to locate their missing 14-year-old daughter, Safiya, and the people of Kasaragod rallying to their cause, it drew Prof Shirley Vasu once again into the heart of the fight for justice.

On July 6, 2012, the second day of digging for Safiya, Santhosh Kumar watched her at work. "I've worked with ma'am in many cases, but nothing like this one," he says. It was the biggest case for both of them.
"We had information she was buried there by her employer," says Santhosh Kumar, then DySP of Kozhikode Crime Branch. "We feared we wouldn’t get the technical support we needed in Goa, so we took Ma'am along." Dr Shirley Vasu was then Head of Forensic Medicine at Kozhikode Medical College.

Standing in the slush of the excavated pit, she sifted through muddy water with her hands, pulling out skeletal remains -- a skull with all teeth intact, ribs, vertebrae, a thigh bone. "We didn't get in," recalls Santhosh Kumar. "Only she could tell if her hand had caught a branch or a bone." By late evening, she ensured the last piece of evidence had been picked.
The site was near a check dam at Mollem, in North Goa’s Sangod village, off the Panjim-Belagavi national highway.

On reaching the hotel room, the forensic surgeon was not done for the day. She washed each bone clean and laid them out, piece by piece, into the rough shape of a human skeleton. Later, the remains were sealed and transported to her autopsy table in Kozhikode.

Safiya's grim story
Safiya’s story was grim. Daughter of daily wage workers Moidu and Ayesha of Kodagu, she dropped out after class VI.

In 2006, Kasaragod resident and Goa-based civil contractor K C Hamsa and his wife Maimoona took her as a babysitter for their toddler.
But without her parents' consent, they carried her along to Goa, where Hamsa worked as a civil contractor.
When Moidu and Ayesha kept calling Hamsa to know the whereabouts of Safiya, the family returned to Kasaragod from Goa, but without the girl.

When Moidu arrived to collect Safiya, carrying a kilo of gooseberries she loved, Hamsa claimed she had gone missing while playing in the courtyard in their Kasaragod house. He even accompanied Moidu to the Adhur police station to file a missing person complaint.
For a year, Adhur Police stalled the case by confining their investigation to Safiya's parents.

In 2008, after the case had stalled for over a year, Ayesha launched a satyagraha in the middle of Kasaragod town -- sitting through day and night, rain and shine -- demanding a proper investigation. Poet-activist Sugathakumari and others joined her protest. After 90 relentless days, the government finally handed the case to the Kozhikode Crime Branch. But it was not until 2012 that the Crime Branch got information that Safiya was buried next to a check dam being built by Hamsa at Sangod.

Hamsa had claimed Safiya died accidentally -- that boiling porridge spilt on her, that he tried paracetamol, but she didn’t survive. Fearing prosecution for employing child labour, he said, he disposed of the body.

But Shirley's scalpel told a different story. She found deep ante-mortem wounds on the jaw and cervical vertebra, evidence of Safiya being held upside down and hacked. The body had been cut into three, stuffed into her silk flared skirt cinched into a bag with its drawstring, and buried near the check dam.

Her testimony was unforgettable. “When she took the witness stand, the entire court shrank into silence,” recalls Adv C Shukoor, the special public prosecutor in the Safiya case. "She carried the child's wounds in her voice. For an entire day, the court was absorbed in that single witness."

In July 2015, Kasaragod Sessions Judge M J Shakthidharan sentenced Hamsa to death. His wife was given three years for destruction of evidence, and a relative three years for concealment. The trial court acquitted an Assistant Sub-Inspector charged with sabotaging the investigation. The High Court later acquitted Maimoona and the relative, and commuted Hamsa's sentence to life.

The Soumya case
If Safiya's case showed Shirley’s persistence, Soumya's case made her a household name. Soumya, 23, was attacked on the Ernakulam-Shoranur passenger train on February 1, 2011, pushed out, grievously injured, and raped. She died five days later.

Shirley, then at Thrissur Medical College, conducted the autopsy. Soumya's skull was fractured, her face battered, jaw and cheekbones broken, fourteen teeth shattered, her mouth filled with blood. It was after these injuries, Shirley testified, that Govindachamy raped her.
The Thrissur Fast Track Court Judge K N Raveendra Babu sentenced him to death, finding him guilty of rape and murder. The Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction, noting no one had seen him push her from the train, but upheld life imprisonment for rape.

The prosecution's case was nearly derailed when Prof Shirley Vasu's junior, Dr N K Unmesh, claimed she hadn’t been present for Soumya’s autopsy. The defence seized on it. A government inquiry proved otherwise, and Unmesh was suspended.

The trailblazer
Born in 1956 in Thodupuzha, Idukki, Shirley was the daughter of court employees. Her father, a Communist, gave her an English name to break community barriers. She pursued medicine at his urging, later specialising in forensic science.
"I started by cleaning the mortuary in 1981," she once recalled. "Not just autopsies -- I've got into thousands of ponds and wells."

Her career as a tutor began in 1982 at Kozhikode Medical College. She earned her MD in 1984, taught at Kottayam, was posted at Pariyaram, and returned to Kozhikode as Associate Professor. In 2001, she became Professor, in 2010 Head of Forensic Medicine at Thrissur, and in 2014 Principal of Thrissur Medical College.

'Thank you'
In her memoir 'Postmortem Table' (2012), she recounted how her reports had saved innocents from false charges and cut through politically sensitive cases without fear.
She recalled one instance where a KSRTC bus driver turned up to thank her. He was falsely accused of a pedestrian's death. Her autopsy showed the victim had been struck not by the bus but by a small vehicle like a jeep. Thanks to her report, the police had to let go of the KSRTC driver. She later found that the jeep that caused the accident was driven by a person who later became an MLA, and his father was already an MP.

She said she was never under pressure to change the findings of her report. Her work brought her the Kerala government's Justice Fathima Beevi Award in 2017. By her retirement in 2016, she had conducted around 15,000 autopsies. Yet she had said that the Safiya case was the hardest of all.

Prof Shirley Vasu is survived by her husband, Dr K Balakrishnan, and their children, Nandana and Nithin.