Woman Poisons Parents And Daughter, Killing Them, To Live Freely With Lover

A woman from Kerala, India, accused of killing her parents and two children, was arrested Tuesday. The Thalasserry principal sessions court approved an order to remand the woman in police custody for four days Wednesday.

“It took almost 10 hours of questioning to unravel the murder plot. We asked for five-day custody but the court granted us four days,” Kannur deputy SP, PP Sadanandan said, Hindustan Times reported. According to a few reports, it took the police 13 hours to unravel the complicated murder plot that was hatched by the suspect.

Finally, after prolonged questioning, 34-year-old Soumya confessed she did poison her father, Kunhikannan, 76, mother, Kamala, 68, and her eight-year-old daughter, Aishwarya, because they were “impediments to her wayward life.” Soumya had a younger daughter — Keerthana — who died at age of one in 2012. However, Soumya denied having to do anything with her death.

According to the police, Soumya had separated from her husband and lived with her parents and children in Pinarayi, a village in Kannur district, Kerala. Both her parents and her elder daughter had displayed similar symptoms — nausea and indigestion — before their death.

Soumya’s elder daughter died on Jan 13, her mother died on March 7, her father passed away on April 13. The suspect was taken into custody after she was admitted to the Thalaserry Co-operative Hospital, a state-run facility, for the treatment of similar symptoms that claimed the lives of three of her family members. Soumya might have gotten admitted to the hospital to avoid suspicion, the police suspect.

A forensic examination of the bodies of her parents revealed the acute presence of aluminium phosphide, a poisonous substance, which is commonly used in pesticides and rat poison in India.

After Aishwarya died, her body was allegedly buried inside the premises of their residence near Pinarayi, without post-mortem. After the deadly chemicals were discovered inside Soumya’s parents’ bodies, the relatives and neighbors voiced their suspicions to the investigators who exhumed the body of the eight-year-old Monday. Her body has been sent for post-mortem, Deccan Chronicle reported.

The police said the suspect confessed that she wanted to “lead a new life with her lover” and that is why she had killed her parents and daughter. According to her, Soumya’s elder daughter had witnessed some intimate moments with her new lover and reported it to her grandparents.

Soumya also added once her elder daughter’s murder went unnoticed, she became emboldened and hatched a plan to kill her parents too.

Incidentally, Pinarayi, the village where the incident took place, is also where Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan used to live before relocating to Trivandrum with his family after being sworn into state office. It was only after his intervention that the police sped up their investigation and uncovered the truth, Financial Express reported.