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The house on Munnekolal Main Road in Marathahalli had fallen eerily silent that April morning. The IV line still hung by the bedside, the room faintly smelling of disinfectant and despair. Hours earlier, Dr Kruthika Reddy — a young, ambitious dermatologist — had been chatting with her husband over WhatsApp, complaining of pain from the drip he had inserted into her arm. “Don’t remove it,” he had told her. By dawn, she was gone.
For months, her death was treated as a tragic medical mystery — a 29-year-old doctor succumbing, it seemed, to an undiagnosed illness. But on Tuesday, October 14, police arrested her husband, Dr Mahendra Reddy, a surgeon at Victoria Hospital, turning what once looked like a case of gastritis gone wrong into one of Bengaluru’s most shocking crimes.
According to reports, investigators found that Mahendra had allegedly administered Propofol, a powerful anaesthetic normally used only in operation theatres. The drug was detected in multiple organs after a meticulous Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) analysis.
Their marriage in May 2024, just eleven months old, had once been celebrated as the union of two promising doctors. However, Mahendra had grown frustrated after Kruthika’s family refused to finance his dream of building a hospital. Her father, K Muni Reddy, said he had offered help to set up a smaller clinic instead. “Our daughter trusted her husband completely. But the same medical knowledge that should have saved lives was used to destroy hers,” he said.
On April 21, Mahendra began treating Kruthika at home for what he described as gastric discomfort. He returned on the 23 to administer another IV dose. At midnight, he went to her parents’ home in Marathahalli and gave her yet another injection. The next morning, she was unresponsive.
When Kruthika was rushed to Cauvery Hospital and declared dead, Mahendra insisted there was no need for a post-mortem. He even persuaded his father-in-law to appeal against it. But her sister, Dr Nikitha Reddy, a radiologist, refused to let it pass as a natural death. Her persistence led police to register an unnatural-death case.
The Scene of Crime Officer (SOCO) team later recovered syringes, a cannula set, and vials from the couple’s home. When the FSL report confirmed the presence of Propofol, police reclassified the case as murder and launched a hunt for Mahendra, who had disappeared.
He was finally traced to Manipal in Udupi, attending a medical conference. He was arrested on October 14 and produced before a magistrate the next day, who remanded him to nine days’ custody.
Family members later revealed that Mahendra had once faced a criminal complaint along with his twin brother and had maintained an affair with a woman from his college days. “He pretended to mourn, visited us often after Kruthika’s death, asking whether the police had any updates,” said Mohan Reddy, Kruthika’s brother-in-law.
Police believe Mahendra’s act was planned with “clinical precision.” He exploited his wife’s low blood pressure and gastric issues, using her trust to mask the administration of a fatal anaesthetic dose. “He knew her medical vulnerabilities and used that knowledge against her,” said Whitefield DCP M Parashuram.
Just days before her death, Kruthika had designed the board for her new clinic - Skin and Scalpel. It was to open on May 4.