THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India — A Chennai woman was sentenced to two life terms yesterday for her role in last year’s murder of her husband while on honeymoon in the Kerala hill station of Munnar.
The court found that Vidyalakshmi, 24, plotted with her lover and childhood friend Anand, also 24, and his accomplice Anburaj, 21, to kill her husband Anantharaman, 30, in June last year.
The Thodupuzha sessions court also sentenced Anand to two life terms while Anburaj got a life term besides a fine of 10,000 rupees. All four belong are from Chennai.
In the absence of eyewitnesses, the court accepted photographs taken on Anantharaman’s mobile phone, SMS messages and phone calls between the defendants as evidence.
Vidyalakshmi, whom Anantharaman had married just eight days before the murder, was seen intently messaging on her own mobile. Minutes later, the two men approached the couple and strangled him with the nylon strap of his camera.
Vidyalakshmi then took out and handed her necklace to one of the killers, waited for the two men to vanish, and ran screaming the other way telling villagers that someone killed her husband and robbed her.
Vidyalakshmi told police that two local young men had attacked and killed her husband in a secluded place in the Kundala dam site in Munnar. However, auto-rickshaw driver Anbazhagan told police that two men had hired his vehicle to the dam site and returned after sometime.
He had overheard them talking suspiciously. When they were going to the dam site, the men had received SMS messages on Anbazhagan’s mobile as their own mobile had bad connectivity in Munnar.
The SMS messages from Vidyalakshmi, asking them to come to the dam site, gave away the whole crime and the police picked up the two men from the lodge where the driver dropped them.
Vidyalakshmi made a stream of telephone calls to her lover preceding the crime, all of which were used as evidence. The two men followed the couple during their entire honeymoon tour right from Chennai.
Vidyalakshmi, a medical transcription practitioner, is from a wealthy Iyengar Brahmin family while her lover, an auto-rickshaw driver, is from a poor Christian family. She could not refuse the marriage with Anantharaman, a distant relative who worked as an assistant manager with a Chennai firm.
