Bengaluru shocker! Woman kills husband for love, stages suicide – cops crack case with bottle cap, slipper

When cops reached a desolate spot near the Kanva dam in Bengaluru after receiving information of a distraught woman crying over her husband's body, everything pointed towards a murder case.

But an officer's eye caught two things missing from the scene – a bottle cap and a slipper. According to a TOI report, cops found a man's body, his crying wife, his car parked a few feet away, and an empty bottle of poison.

However, it was when Police Inspector BK Prakash and Sub-Inspector Sahana Patil combed the spot and asked, “If he drank the poison and left the bottle next to him, where is the cap of the bottle?” that set everyone's minds racing.

Another unsettling detail – a missing slipper – made even the Deputy Superintendent of Police (Channapatna) KC Giri wonder, “Why would anyone kill himself with one slipper on?”

That's when a shocking story of a well-crafted murder and a suicide cover-up started to unravel. In fact, the cover-up story for the murder was so well thought-out and executed, that when the wife of the deceased convened a press meet, she wept so much that a few media personnel had tears in their eyes, the TOI report said.

A grisly tale of murder and then a cover-up

Police have identified the deceased man as 45-year-old Lokesh Kumar, a resident of Krishnapuradoddi and former president of Makali gram panchayat. He owned two chicken shops, one in Channapatna and the other in Sunkadakatte. His wife, Chandrakala, a gram panchayat member, was reportedly inconsolable after seeing her dead husband near the Kanva dam.

Police's suspicion grew further when Lokesh's family approached them with a chilling allegations against Chandrakala – she was having an affair with someone and Lokesh had recently discovered it.

While this new information could have led the cops to investigate a murder angle, they decided to wait for the autopsy report from the Channapatna government hospital, the report added.

“Though poison was confirmed as the cause of death, doctors noted something unusual. In cases of suicide, poison typically travels straight to the stomach. But here, a large concentration was found in the chest, raising suspicion of forced ingestion,” SSP Srinivas Gowda told TOI.

Another autopsy conducted at a private super-specialty hospital were constant with the government hospital's autopsy report – Lokesh may have swallowed the poison voluntarily or been forced to consume it.

Call details, a black car, and location data help cops crack murder case

Cops then started reconstructing the sequence of events by interacting with villagers near the dam. That's when they were told that a black car had been spotted near the site on the night of June 23. A thorough checking of all CCTV footage from a hotel and a fuel station on the road leading to the Kanva dam revealed the car in both videos.

According to the TOI report, an analysis of call detail records of Chandrakala's phone threw up a a pattern. She was in frequent contact with a man named Yogesh, an employee at the General Post Office in Bengaluru. When location data placed Yogesh near the dam site on the same night Lokesh died, cops detained both him and Chandrakala for questioning. The duo confessed to murder.

“Lokesh had discovered his wife's affair with Yogesh. Fearing exposure and humiliation, Chandrakala and Yogesh decided to eliminate him. On June 23, after Lokesh left his chicken shop in Sunkadakatte, Chandrakala allegedly alerted Yogesh. Along with three accomplices in a black car that was purchased just a week earlier, they followed Lokesh and rear-ended his vehicle near the Kanva dam,” a cop told TOI, giving more details on how the crime and the cover-up were committed.

“When Lokesh stepped out to inspect the damage, he was attacked and forced into the car. The poison was forcefully given to him. Once he died, they removed the body from the car and placed it a few feet away from the vehicle. Before escaping, they placed the empty bottle of poison next to the body to make it look like a suicide,” the cop added.

“One, the cap was not found near the bottle as it was thrown away near the car when they forced poison down his throat. Two, they failed to pick up one of the slippers that had fallen off while shifting the body,” the cop further said.

Along with Chandrakala and Yogesh, the police have arrested four others allegedly involved in the murder – Shantaraju, C Anand alias Surya, G Shiva alias Shivalinga, and R Chandan Kumar, the report said.