BENGALURU: The cover-up scene was crafted with care, the lifeless body of a man lay on the ground with his car parked a few feet away. An empty poison bottle lay beside it. A distraught wife wailed over her husband’s death, crying out, “Why did you do this? Why did you leave me?” When police descended on the desolate spot near Kanva dam in Bengaluru South district, everything screamed suicide. But just as the case was about to be filed and forgotten, sharp-eyed cops broke the script. Police inspector BK Prakash and sub-inspector Sahana Patil combed the spot and asked a simple but important question: “If he drank the poison and left the bottle next to him, where is the cap of the bottle?” There was silence, for no one could find the cap.Then came another unsettling detail: the deceased was wearing only one chappal. Deputy superintendent of police (Channapatna) KC Giri looked at his juniors and wondered: “Why would anyone kill himself with one slipper on?” By then, police had established the identity of the deceased as 45-year-old Lokesh Kumar, a resident of Krishnapuradoddi and former president of Makali gram panchayat. He owned two chicken shops, one in Channapatna and another in Sunkadakatte. His wife Chandrakala, currently a gram panchayat member, came to the spot and became inconsolable on seeing her dead husband. A day later, on June 24, Chandrakala convened a press meet in Channapatna and wept so much that a few media personnel had tears in their eyes.Family’s allegationMeanwhile, Lokesh’s family approached police with a chilling allegation: Chandrakala was having an affair with someone and Lokesh had recently discovered it. Acting on the information and their own instincts, the cops chose not to get derailed. Superintendent of police Srinivas Gowda told TOI they held off on jumping to conclusions until the autopsy report from the Channaptna govt hospital came in. “Though poison was confirmed as the cause of death, doctors noted something unusual. In cases of suicide, poison typically travels straight to the stomach. But here, a large concentration was found in the chest, raising suspicion of forced ingestion,” Gowda said. To be doubly sure, the cops had a second postmortem conducted at a private super-speciality hospital. The findings were consistent: “Lokesh may have swallowed the poison voluntarily or been forced to consume it.”While reconstructing the sequence of events by interacting with villagers near the dam, police got another tip-off: a black car had been spotted near the site on the night of June 23. The cops collected CCTV footage from a hotel and a fuel station on the road leading to Kanva dam, and the black car appeared in both pieces of footage.Detention & confessionSimultaneously, call detail records of Chandrakala’s phone were analysed. A pattern emerged: she was in frequent communication with a man named Yogesh, an employee at the General Post Office in Bengaluru. Location data placed Yogesh near the dam the same night Lokesh died. With mounting circumstantial evidence, police detained both Chandrakala and Yogesh for questioning. Subsequently, the duo confessed.A cop elaborated: “Lokesh had discovered his wife’s affair with Yogesh. Fearing exposure and humiliation, Chandrakala and Yogesh decided to eliminate him. On June 23, after Lokesh left his chicken shop in Sunkadakatte, Chandrakala allegedly alerted Yogesh. Along with three accomplices in a black car that was purchased just a week earlier, they followed Lokesh and rear-ended his vehicle near Kanva dam. When Lokesh stepped out to inspect the damage, he was attacked and forced into the car. The poison was emptied down his throat. Once he died, they removed the body from the car and placed it a few feet away from the vehicle. Before escaping, they placed the empty poison bottle next to the body to make it look like a suicide.” “One, the cap was not found near the bottle as it was thrown away near the car when they forced poison down his throat. Two, they failed to pick up one of the chappals that had fallen off while shifting the body,” the officer continued.The arrests followed swiftly. Along with Chandrakala and Yogesh, police apprehended four others allegedly involved in the murder: Shantaraju, C Anand alias Surya, G Shiva alias Shivalinga, and R Chandan Kumar.
