Resembling the Koodathayi murders, a 39-year-old woman allegedly killed her mother by giving rat poison and also tried to kill her father the same way near Kunnamkulam in Thrissur district of Kerala. According to police, Indulekha added rat poison in tea to kill her mother and father in order to inherit their property. But due to a difference in taste, her father did not consume the tea and survived. She was arrested on Thursday, August 25.
Fifty-eight-year-old Rugmini, Indulekha’s mother, was admitted to hospital on Monday, August 22 after she collapsed. She later died the same day. The postmortem report revealed that the cause of her death was poison after the police filed a case of unnatural death on August 24.
Rising suspicions over her death, Rugmini’s husband Chandran told the police that she collapsed after drinking the tea that was given by Indulekha, the couple’s elder daughter. He also gave a statement that he did not drink the tea as he could feel a difference in taste. Police said that they found search history on Indulekha’s phone on ways of killing a person.
Indulekha confessed to the police that she wanted the 14 cents of land and house where her parents Chandran and Rukmini lived. She was so much in debt that she pledged her gold without the awareness of her husband who is abroad. She was in a hurry to take back the gold before her husband came back, police said. Police doubt that even earlier, there were attempts by Indulekha to kill her parents.
The investigators also found the remaining portion of the poison from the house. Police are also inquiring as to how Indulekha ended up in debt and whether someone else also helped her in committing the crime. She had apparently planned to sell the property of her parents after their death.
In the Koodathayi serial killings that came to light in 2019, it was revealed that a woman named Jolly Amma Joseph killed six of her family members, including her husband, over a span of 14 years by giving them cyanide mixed in food.
In another similar case, in 2018, Soumya, a 30-year-old woman had poisoned and killed her nine-year-old daughter and her parents over a span of four months. Police arrested Soumya after rat poison was found in all three bodies. She later killed herself in Kannur jail the same year.