The Udayamperoor police, on Wednesday, exhumed the body of a woman, who was allegedly murdered by her husband and his girlfriend in September. According to reports, the husband, Prem Kumar, confessed to the police that he and his girlfriend Sunitha had murdered his wife Vidya and abandoned her body in a forest in Valliyur, Tirunelveli district, Tamil Nadu. The exhumation was carried out as a part of scientific evidence gathering to substantiate Prem Kumar’s version of events, as told to the police.
The Udayamperoor police had, on December 9, arrested 40-year-old Prem Kumar and his high school classmate Sunitha Baby three months after the couple killed Prem Kumar’s wife Vidya. According to the police, Prem Kumar confessed that he and Sunitha planned and murdered his wife in order to start a new life together. They were high school sweethearts. He also reportedly told the police that after murdering Vidya, the couple had abandoned the body in a forest area in Valliyur in Tirunelveli district, Tamil Nadu.
The TN police had buried the body after it was recovered, since nobody had claimed the body. The police have now exhumed the body, based on Prem Kumar’s confession, to conduct an autopsy again to affirm the identity of the deceased.
On September 21, Prem Kumar and Sunitha had allegedly murdered Vidya in a private villa in Thiruvananthapuram. They had strangled her to death after she was inebriated. Two days after the murder, Prem Kumar had filed a missing complaint on Vidya in Udayamperoor police station and had also told the police that she had gone to Goa to live with her son from her previous marriage. To distract the police, Prem Kumar had also switched off Vidya's phone and hid inside a waste bin in Netravati express which runs between Mumbai and Thiruvananthapuram.
Though Prem Kumar was on the police’s list of suspects around the murder, the Kerala police took three months to confirm their suspicions and arrest the couple. An FIR has been filed against the couple under sections 302 (murder), 120 B (criminal conspiracy), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence), 202 (intentional omission to give information of offence), 364 (kidnapping or abducting in order to murder) and 34 (acts committed by several persons in furtherance of common objective) of the IPC.