Convicted serial killer ‘Cyanide’ Mohan on Saturday was found guilty again, this time in a 2007 Bengaluru murder case where a 33-year-old music teacher from Kerala was killed. The Sixth Additional District and Sessions Court in Mangaluru will announce his punishment on September 25. This is incidentally 16th case that he has been convicted of.
Cyanide Mohan was found guilty under sections 302 (convicted of murder), 328 (causing hurt by poison), 392 (robbery), 394 (causing hurt in robbery), 417 (punishment for cheating) and 201 (causing disapperence of evidence) of the Indian Penal Code, based on 38 witnesses and 49 documents.
According to police, Mohan had befriended the woman who was based out of Mangaluru in 2007 after introducing himself as a forest department official. He had promised to give her a recording assignment with a recording company in Bengaluru.
It was when they travelled to Bengaluru and stayed in a city hotel in Cottonpet Road. According to police, Mohan convinced her to sleep with him and on the following day Mohan asked her to leave her jewellery behind on the pretext of going for a puja.
It was then at a KSRTC bus stand, Mohan gave her a cyanide-laced contraceptive pill and left her to die at the bus stand in Upparpet. Police had found the victim’s body at around 9 am and registered an unnatural death case. As planned, Mohan returned to the hotel and made off with her jewellery.
‘Cyanide’ Mohan was first arrested in 2010 after which police uncovered as many 32 murders allegedly committed by him following the same modus operandi. The victims were all women, who had been poisoned with cyanide and found in the restrooms of bus stations.
Mohan would lure them with the promise of marriage, rape them, take them to the nearest bus stand where he would ask them to take a birth control pill. The pill was laced with cyanide. The women went to the restrooms to take the pill as he had told them it would make them sick.
Although the bodies of these women were being found in various towns across the south and coastal Karnataka, the police had never connected the killings. They were all declared suicides, even after the autopsy of two victims showed traces of cyanide in them.