From Thrissur to Meerut and back: The three-decade hunt for a Kerala murder accused

In 1996, an 18-year-old accused of murdering an elderly woman in Keralam’s Thrissur jumped bail and vanished. He changed everything about himself: moved cities, assumed a new identity, married, had children and quietly built a new life. Then, a phone record helped police unravel it all.

On November 7, the Keralam Police arrested 49-year-old Krishnakumar in connection with the robbery and murder of 64-year-old Martha, who was killed at her home in Thrissur on October 31, 1995. The arrest, in a three-decade-old murder case, came after police pieced together clues from three regions, an old photograph, family connections and call records to track him down to Kundara in Kollam district.

For the police, the arrest was a significant breakthrough, bringing to a dramatic close a manhunt that took investigators across Kerala, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh several times. It was the result of painstakingly connecting seemingly unrelated fragments of information.

“In the initial years after arriving in Keralam, Krishnakumar lived in fear that the police would track him down. But as the years went by, that fear gradually faded,” one officer says.

The alleged crime

On October 31, 1995, 64-year-old Martha, who lived alone in Thrissur city’s Lourdupuram area, was smothered to death and robbed of 7.5 sovereigns of gold ornaments (about 60 grams) and cash of Rs 5,800. Days later, police arrested one suspect, Prasad, 19, of Koratty, who worked at an eatery where Martha was a regular customer.

“Prasad, who had lost his job at the eatery sometime before the incident, took up odd construction work and met Krishnakumar, a native of Ottapalam in Palakkad who had already been involved in petty theft cases. The duo allegedly plotted a robbery, with Prasad suggesting Martha as their target because she lived alone. While Prasad was nabbed immediately after the murder, Krishnakumar remained elusive till 18 February 1996, when he was arrested,” one officer said.

Three months later, Krishnakumar was granted bail, but he allegedly went into hiding.

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Soon after, a manhunt ensued, with the police continuing to send teams to hunt him down. A summons issued by the court was returned to the sender, and in 1998, a magistrate’s court transferred the case to its long-pending warrant register. The case eventually went where many such cases go – consigned to the list of unsolved crimes.

The hunt for Krishnakumar

According to the police, Krishnakumar belonged to a joint family at Vengassery village near Ottappalam and was abandoned by his father in his early days. He studied in a Delhi school up to Class 7 under the care of his uncle Gopalakrishnan Nair, then with the Army. According to investigators, when he was still young, Krishnakumar had stolen Rs 500 from his uncle and fled to Keralam, where he lived with his mother Parvathy until the 1995 murder.

In 2022, 27 years after the killing, a special team began actively pursuing the case. But it wasn’t until recently that it got fresh impetus. That push came after the City Police commissioner, Nakul Rajendra Deshmukh, put long-pending cases like the 1995 one on top of its agenda. A special team headed by ACP Rajesh T R, CI Nandakumar, sub inspector Adarsh S, civil police officers Shanoj V S, Hareesh Kumar, Deepak V B, and Ajmal M S was constituted. A few of them had been on the case since 2022.

“The team revisited the old case records, examined the probe done by previous investigators and went again to the accused’s native village Vengassery, in Palakkad’s Ambalapara panchayat. He was the only son of the family, and his mother had died years back. Hence, very little was known to local people. Team members camped in many places where the alleged accused was suspected to have stayed. Frequently, people were not forthcoming — repeated inquiries irritated them,” one officer said.

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There were dead ends too. Police learnt that Krishnakumar had an uncle in Kochi. The new lead took them to Kochi, but the elderly uncle, Ramooty, had died a few years ago. “His family members had little idea about Krishnakumar, but they told about another uncle, Gopalakrishnan Nair, an Army man who lived in Delhi. The Delhi uncle had visited Keralam only once in the past three decades.”

Ramooty’s family had no live contacts with Nair in Delhi. While the Kochi uncle had died a few years earlier, the search for the other in Delhi, including its popular Keralite hubs, initially came to nought.

Then the police pulled on yet another thread – a mobile phone that their Kochi uncle had left behind. The phone was being used by one of his family members, the police found. “We looked at call records, and spotted a landline number in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh,” one officer said.

A special team was rushed to Meerut and traced the number to a sugar factory.

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The arrest

It was allegedly Krishnakumar’s Delhi uncle Gopalakrishnan Nair who worked at the sugar factory. Nair had moved to Meerut after retiring from the Army.

“Local Malayalis in Meerut told us that Nair had an adopted son, who lived in Meerut for years and worked in the factory, but moved to Keralam more than a decade back. They told us that he had married a Keralam woman, who is a relative of a Malayali family settled in Meerut,” the officer said.

The “son” was allegedly Krishnakumar. According to investigators, after his flight from Keralam, the suspect had lived briefly with his Delhi uncle but had eventually moved to Meerut, where he briefly worked at the same sugar factory.

This was the lead the police seemingly needed. They pulled up old records that contained a photograph of Krishnakumar in his late teens and, using AI, enhanced it to get an image of what he might look like today. They then allegedly circulated this image to the local Malayali residents of Meerut.

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According to investigators, some locals recognised the face as resembling a man who had lived in the area for several years. Nair had died a few years ago, the police allegedly found.

But the probe allegedly found another lead. With the help of Keralites in Meerut, police tracked down a relative of Krishnakumar’s wife, who had also died a few years ago. Following this lead, the police delved deeper into the deceased relative’s family connections, eventually establishing that Krishnakumar was alive and had since moved to Keralam .

“She (Krishnakumar’s wife) had travelled to Meerut for a short stay with that relative (now deceased) and met Krishnakumar. The relationship eventually led to marriage. [We also found] that, following a dispute with the Nair family 13 years ago, Krishnakumar had left for Keralam,” the officer said.

What followed was a meticulous mapping of relatives – identifying and verifying them, examining their call records and eventually narrowing the search to Kundara in Kollam district.

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A quiet life in Kundara

In Kundara, Krishnakumar’s life was quiet: he had allegedly changed his identity and used his wife’s address in his documents. Here, he was known as Krishan Kumar, an Uttar Pradesh man married to a Malayali woman who had settled in her hometown with two minor children. He had allegedly gone to great lengths to live by his new identity – according to investigators, he faked an ID, held no bank account and cut all ties to both Meerut and Ottapalam.

On November 7, when the police arrested him, Krishnakumar had gone to condole a recent death. “The moment he realised that he had finally been caught, he went numb and then turned emotional,” the officer said.

The trial of the co-accused Prasad in the 1995 murder is going on in a court in Thrissur and Krishnakumar will also face trial soon.