Keerthi was 11 when her father was suddenly taken away by the police. Jayanandan, a fisherman in a Thrissur village, was on his way to work on a November day in 2006 when the police nabbed him in a murder case. Within days, he was charged as an accused in five cases of murder that happened between 2004 and 2006 in Kerala’s Thrissur and Ernakulam districts. Now, 17 years later, Jayanandan – branded ‘Ripper’ Jayanandan by the media – has been granted parole for two days to attend Keerthi’s wedding.
“All these years, I don’t remember any mediapersons approaching us to hear what we had to say. Only journalist Nidheesh came and researched the many details of the cases. Other than that, recently, a reporter from Asianet (a Malayalam news channel) approached us,” says Keerthi, a day before her wedding. The findings of the months-long research of journalist Nidheesh MK was published in TNM on March 21.
Keerthi, a lawyer now, went to court to bring her father out on parole for her wedding. It is not that she had always wanted to be a lawyer, she says. When Jayanandan’s cases dragged on, she had seen the challenges the family went through. Her mother was sexually assaulted by a lawyer, after which the mother no longer went to the court.
“In the early days, my mother wouldn’t take me to the prison where my father was, or to the court hearings, because I was too young. A relative suggested that I study and become an advocate to help with the case. But by the time I enrolled as one, the verdict in all five cases had already come. I haven’t been able to do much in the sixth case charged against him yet,” she says.
The sixth case was filed in 2021 when Jayanandan was accused in another case of murder that happened in 2004. This is believed to have wrecked his chances of getting a pardon on the occasion of India's 75 years of independence, when a number of prisoners who had served three-quarters of their sentences were let off.
Of the six cases charged against him, Jayanandan was acquitted in three, but convicted in two. He was sentenced to death in one of them by a trial court, which was reduced to life imprisonment by the Kerala High Court, and further reduced to 20 years by the Supreme Court.
Project 39A, a legal aid and research organisation, took up Jayanandan’s case to get the death sentence reduced to life imprisonment. Keerthi says that her family is indebted to Anup Surendranath, executive director of Project 39 A, for all that the firm has done.
When her turn came, Keerthi was very apprehensive to appear for her father's parole, she says. “My parents were sure of getting parole, but I was very tense. Luckily, by then, we were able to get an affidavit stating that my father was acquitted in three of the five cases he was accused in,” she remembers.
The three acquittals had however received little media attention, and the public, especially those in the family’s village, still thought of Jayanandan as the convict in five murder cases. Nidheesh’s story brings out how the evidence used to convict Jayanandan in the two cases raise many questions. He interviewed several witnesses and unearthed many key details related to the cases. He kept Keerthi in the loop, getting her to file Right to Information requests when necessary. The family hopes to go to the Supreme Court with the second case in which Jayanandan was convicted. Keerthi has a younger sister called Kashmira, who is a medical student.
“We will be going for an appeal, yes,” Keerthi says. She has been visiting Jayanandan ever since he was moved to the Viyyur Central Jail in Thrissur in 2019. Before that, he had stints in jails in Ernakulam, Thrissur, and Thiruvananthapuram. Twice, Jayanandan broke out of jail, after which he was shifted again.
Keerthi and her father don’t talk much about the cases when they meet in jail, she says. But when Anil, her fiancé, had first proposed to her, Keerthi wanted it presented to her father. So Anil and his father (incidentally, a police official) went to see Jayanandan in jail. “My father told me that what matters is my choice, nothing else,” she says.