Devaky was sleeping peacefully in her house in Puthenvelikkara, a gram panchayat without street lights in the suburbs of Ernakulam in Kerala, unaware that a burglar was standing over her, ready to strike. This was around 1 am on October 2, 2006. What happened next has inspired many horror stories, and is now part of folklore as Kerala’s own version of Jack The Ripper. But last summer, I uncovered a trail of facts that challenged everything that is known about the case.
What we know from the police version is that the burglar stood about 5 feet tall, with thinning hair, a small beard, and a heavy moustache. He had come to Devaky’s bedroom after knocking out her husband Ramakrishnan, who was asleep in another room, with two strikes to the head using an iron rod. He used the same rod on Devaky’s head and face, splashing blood on his green shirt and saffron mundu (dhoti). He wasn’t done.
For some twisted reason, he stripped her bare and brought her knees up. Using a large knife he sliced off her left hand at the wrist to remove her six gold bangles. He searched other rooms before leaving; by the time he did, he had murdered the 50-year-old homemaker and left her 60-year-old retired-soldier husband with irreversible brain damage. He made off with the six gold bangles and a gold necklace totally weighing 96 grams, and Rs 1,300 kept in a clay piggy bank.
When relatives and friends came looking for Ramakrishnan at his house on October 3, 2006, they detected a strong smell of cooking gas and kerosene. One of them, Devaky’s friend Shyamala, opened the window of one of the rooms and was the first to witness what she described as a “dreadful scene.”
Kerala had rarely witnessed such violent murders. Malayalam newspapers, competing with a new generation of 24x7 television channels, reported the killing in vivid detail. The police had come up with the description of the suspect based on the testimony of a woman in the neighbourhood who said that a man had broken into her own house the day before the crime. He took an electric torch from her house, which was found in Devaky’s house. So, the police assumed it had to be the same person.
Several others in the neighbourhood also reported missing other things. Most prominent among the missing items: an iron rod, a large knife, a green shirt and a saffron mundu. These details would later become crucial in the investigation. The police located some of them, like the rod and knife, in Devaky's well. Sniffer dogs barely found a scent to follow as the murderer discharged the gas cylinder and spilled kerosene all over the house.
A man was finally arrested nearly two months after Devaky’s murder based on a tip-off from a secret informant with a history of petty crime. To everybody’s horror, the suspect began to confess to a string of other brutal killings that had confounded the police until then. The media immediately gave him a nickname – ‘Ripper Jayanandan’ – a moniker that has stuck with him to this day.
According to the police, Jayanandan confessed to committing five unsolved murders between 2003 and 2006, including two double murders and the murder of Devaky, which was by then notorious as the Puthenvelikkara case. The police said that he had killed seven people in total. His modus operandi, according to the investigation, was to bash the heads of elderly people while they were sleeping and loot their valuables.
All the stories about him in the public domain are based on his alleged confessions to the police. But few people know that he retracted his statements as soon as he was produced before a magistrate, and has consistently maintained in these 17 years that the confessions were extracted through torture.
A little digging led me to another discovery. He was acquitted in three of the five murder cases filed against him — but none of these acquittals were covered as enthusiastically by the media as his arrest. While there is a Wikipedia page about Jayanandan’s alleged crimes, even this page doesn’t mention the acquittals.
According to his family, ‘Ripper’ Jayanandan or KP Jayanandan, a Class 8 dropout, was born and raised 10 km away from Puthenvelikkara, in Thrissur’s Poyya, a village known for picturesque backwaters and shrimp farms. When he was nabbed, Jayanandan was 38 and living in a modest house with his wife, two school-going daughters, and elderly parents. He was saddled with debt. His neighbours were labourers, tea-sellers and mechanics.
Starting when he was still a child, he had worked all his life as an estuary fisherman proficient with Chinese fishing nets. His life in the village was no different from others of his caste, the Kudumbis. An extremely marginalised Konkani-speaking social group that fled Goa during the Portuguese inquisition, the Kudumbis or Kudubis settled in the marshlands of Kerala where they subsisted on shrimp cultivation for centuries.
But there was allegedly more to Jayanandan’s life than subsistence fishing. According to a judge who presided over the trial in one of his cases, he was actually living a double-life as a "gruesome, diabolic, revolting" killer.
Jayanandan was convicted in two of the five murder cases, and received the death sentence in one — later commuted to life imprisonment. He has been in prison for 17 years since the police first arrested him for Devaky’s murder. He made the headlines twice during his imprisonment when he broke out of two different heavily guarded prisons. Jayanandan had mostly faded from public memory when, in December 2021, the police booked him in yet another unsolved murder case from 2004. According to the police, Jayanandan had confided to a cellmate about this murder.
Traditional news outlets competed with social media and excitedly rehashed his violent crimes to feed the boom in true crime shows. Each recounting added fantastical narratives of him relishing gruesome murders and even necrophilia.
When Project 39A — a legal aid and research organisation of the National Law University, Delhi — approached me to take a look into this case to file a report, I found it strange that there hasn’t yet been any media scrutiny of the acquittals and nobody had, until then, reached out to the man himself. Call it a pursuit of journalistic objectivity or plain curiosity, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what Jayanandan’s side of the story is.
I set out to meet him at a high-security facility inside Thrissur's Viyyur jail in July 2022. The prison administration prohibited a one-on-one interview. So I waited across a barricaded window in an area where visitors can contact inmates during particular hours, over the din of other convicts and guests shouting, and guards listening.
As he emerged in the white jail outfit, he looked nothing like the photographs of a thin young man with a messy beard and wide, dark eyes that I had seen so often in the media. He had grown older. Turning 54 that year, he was heavier, grayer, clean-shaven but for a bushy moustache, and wore thick-rimmed glasses. He spoke calmly but with authority.
“I didn’t do any of it,” he said, in Malayalam. “The police framed me to solve unsolved crimes. I confessed under torture. The police fabricated evidence against me. I was an easy target, because I had no money, no social leaders or political parties to help me,” he said.
He avoided providing case facts as he was surrounded by officers. He claimed it would make his life in prison more difficult.