In two months, he murdered three women. T Siddalingappa, who was arrested along with his girlfriend Chandrakala by the Mandya police on August 4, says he killed them to avenge the love of his life. He was also planning to murder five other women, all for the same reason, he tells the police. A resident of Kudur in Karnataka’s Ramanagara, Siddalingappa was reportedly enraged by the story of how Chandrakala was forced into a life of sex trade, which triggered him to go on a killing spree that included all the women who he thought had a hand in his girlfriend’s tragedy.
It was on June 7 that the police first discovered severed body parts of two women near two water canals in Mandya. The first body was discovered in the Baby Lake canal near K Bettanahalli, and the second in the CDS Canal near Arekere village. The bodies were found at a distance of 25 km away from each other, but there was an undeniable link between them — only their lower torsos were to be found. According to Praveen Madhukar Pawar, Inspector General of Police (IGP), Southern Range, Mysuru, however, the police were unable to find any other evidence to connect or identify the victims.
Unable to find a solid link between the cases, the police launched a large-scale investigation by forming a task force of nine teams, with a total of 45 personnel. They reviewed missing reports of women between the age of 25 and 35 (like the two victims) across the state, distributed 10,000 handbills about the severed bodies in the surrounding areas, and confirmed as many as 1,116 missing women cases in Karnataka and the neighbouring states.
Finally, the police discovered that the details of a woman who had gone missing from Chamarajanagar matched one of the victims. While conducting further investigation, one of the Sub Inspectors examined the victim's old photographs, which led to a shocking revelation. The skirt found on one of the bodies bore a striking resemblance to the one worn by the woman from Chamarajanagar in Mysuru.
Soon, upon tracking the location of her mobile phone, the police realised that the device had been moved from Mysuru to Mandya, based on which they traced her call records and came up with a list of suspects. The rest of the story eventually became clear.
It was Chandrakala who had invited both the victims to her rented house at Metagalli in Mysuru on June 5. After spending the day exploring the city, on the next night, Chandrakala and Siddalingappa suffocated and severed the victims’ bodies. They then placed the decapitated bodies in two separate bags and dumped one near Pandavapura, and the other near Arekere.
A Special Squad, led by Srirangapatna Sub-Division Deputy Superintendent of Police Sandesh Kumar, arrested Siddalingappa from his house in Bengaluru on August 4. “Siddalingappa confessed that he had murdered another woman in Bengaluru a few months ago, and that he was planning to murder five more,” says IGP Praveen Madhukar Pawar, adding that the murder might not have been carried out for the purpose of revenge alone, considering he had also stolen money from the victims. The upper torsos of the two women and the body of the third victim have not yet been traced.
Watch: Serial killer arrested in Karnataka: 3 women murdered out of vengeance