A 45-year-old Chennai woman was found murdered in a hotel room in Tirupati on Sunday. The woman was in the temple town with her husband, as per reports. According to the police, the woman and her husband had travelled from Chennai to Tirupati on Saturday. M Cynthia and Murugan, residents of RA Puram in Chennai, reached Tirupati on Friday and booked a room in a hotel near Peddakapu layout.

On Sunday night, the hotel staff noticed foul smell emanating from Cynthia’s room and opened the room as it was bolted from outside, in which they found Cynthia’s decomposed body. There were stab injuries on her neck and face. They immediately alerted the police who secured the body and sent it for autopsy to the Government General Hospital in Tirupati.

While the Tirupati police confirmed that Cynthia was murdered, they also realised that Murugan was not to be seen anywhere and his mobile phone was allegedly switched off. A team of policemen from Tirupati reached RA Puram on Monday morning and sought Abhiramapuram police’s help to question the couple’s family.

Speaking to TNM about the case, a police officer at the Abhiramapuram police station said that a team from Tirupati had indeed reached Chennai for verifying the address of the couple. “The postmortem is over and they wanted to verify and take a look at the place where the couple lived. Murugan is still missing and the police is trying to trace him. We are also questioning their relatives,” the officer said.

Earlier this month, a 30-year-old tattoo artist was found murdered in her house in Anna Nagar, Chennai. She was living with her partner in the house and was found dead in a pool of her own blood. The police then scourged through the CCTV camera footage and arrested two men who had last visited her before she was found dead.