How a full-sleeve shirt helped cops crack India's first murder-for-insurance case

Ep 1: Sukumara Kurup: How one of India’s first murder for insurance cases twisted & turnedThe Sukumara Kurup case, a macabre tale remains alive 38 years after a body was found in a burning car in Kerala. One of the most distinctive as well as notorious acts in Kerala's criminal history took place in the Alappuzha district, a tourist paradise. This is where the Achankovil river flows through the quiet, picturesque village of Cheriyanad. Sukumara Kurup was born and raised in a prominent family here. The stage of the gruesome crime was also the banks of this beautiful river. The date was January 22, 1984.Body in a burning carThere was a temple festival that night. In the late hours, a passer-by saw a burning car by the road at a place called Kunnam in Kollakadavu. He took a closer look and found there was a body in it. Startled, he ran to the houses nearby and woke up the families there. All of them inspected the scene together. The first responders say that the door of the car was open. A man's body was found burning in the driver's seat. The body was almost completely gone. The face was charred beyond recognition. But someone realised that the car belonged to Sukumara Kurup. The local young charming chap, a Gulf returnee, Sukumara Kurup, had met with a horrible death. The telephone at Mavelikara police station soon started to ring. A team led by then Chengannur DSP PM Haridas reached the spot by around 5.30 am. He was told that the car belonged to Kurup. The cops found a matchbox, glove, and plastic can near the car. There were footprints in the mud, indicating the possibility of someone running away from the spot. The smell of petrol was still hanging in the air. Something was off, the policemen felt. Before sending the body for the post-mortem, DSP Haridas expressed his doubts in the records as well. Instead of writing that the body was of Kurup, he wrote: 'Body of a man said to be Sukumara Kurup'.Sukumara Kurup: Gulf-return, envy of townBack in the 80s, Keralites used to envy Malayalees who had found jobs in the Gulf. A typical Gulfu-karan, as they were called, would return wearing shiny watches and gold chains. Another striking feature of a Gulfu-karan was a big suitcase, filled with goodies enough for the entire village, brought all the way from Arabia. Friends and family of a Gulfu-karan would always look forward to such visits. Kurup was such a person. Good-looking, jovial, benevolent to many.Kurup's family was well off and had strong political connections. Kurup had married against his family’s wishes. He used to work with the Medical Corps of the military in Maharashtra. His relationship with his future wife, Sarasamma, who also hailed from his village, is said to have blossomed when they were both there. He knew that his family would not approve of the relationship because she was not from their economic strata. So he married without his family's knowledge and consent and later sent photographs of the wedding to his relatives and friends, asking them to persuade his parents to accept them.James Mathew is a neighbour of Kurup. His family was quite close to the Kurup family. "Sukumara Kurup was quite the Glamour Man. He had the body language and hair style of the actor Mammooty from the 80s. He was tall and had a good physique. He had a moustache. He never created any trouble in the village. But he did not mingle with a lot of people," Mathew said."He had got a job with the air force but one fine day he absconded from the force. After a while, we came to know that he had gone to the Gulf. But it was only after the murder that Sukumara Kurup became a recognised name. It was only after the body was found that stories about his Gulf journey started to spread. It was even said that he swam for miles to reach the Gulf!" he saidMathew said their families were close because both their fathers had served in the military."Kurup's father and my father had served in the military together. The idea that there was another side to him came to all of us after this incident. Our family was among the few in Cheriyanad who received a wedding photo of the couple in the post. There was a letter as well. In the letter, Kurup had asked my father to talk to his father about the marriage and convince him to accept Sarasamma."Sarasamma was a nurse, and she too had a job in the Gulf. Kurup’s family couldn’t accept the relationship because her family was not from their social and financial strata," he said. Murder or smokescreen?Due to his family's disapproval of his marriage to a woman from a financially weaker background, Kurup grew closer to the family of his wife's sister. Her husband Bhaskara Pillai was a close friend. After the initial investigation, the police had decided to hand over the body to Kurup’s family based on the presumption that the body was his.After the autopsy, the body was buried in the compound of his parental house. While awaiting the autopsy report, DSP Haridas sent a few cops to conduct preliminary enquiries with the family of Kurup. The policemen reported back that the family's behaviour was somewhat unusual for a grief-stricken household. The investigators smelt that something was amiss.Policemen were sent out again, this time to check on the family of Bhaskara Pillai. The cops who went to Pillai's house saw something very unusual. The family had made chicken that day. In a household, it was then unthinkable to have meat immediately after the death of a relative. Policemen were quite sure by then that something was fishy about the case. The shadow of doubt became thicker.The renowned forensic expert Dr B Umadathan conducted an examination that revealed that the initial conclusions were a smokescreen. The body had no ornaments, watch, or even footwear, nothing with which the victim could be identified. The only clothing left on the body was a pair of burnt undergarments.Umadathan first examined the unburnt portions of the body and couldn't find signs of the victim being alive when he caught fire. He then cut open the body and examined the lungs and trachea. His fears were proved right. There was no residue of charcoal in the respiratory tracts. If the man had been alive when he burnt, smoke and soot would have gone in and that would have been found in the trachea and lungs. While examining the body’s stomach, Dr Umadathan also found signs of possible poisoning. His conclusion was that the dead man’s face and hair were burnt elsewhere, and not in the car. The police became almost sure that it was not an accident that killed the man in the car.Full-sleeve shirt reveals half the truthPillai was summoned for questioning. He came to the police station wearing a full sleeve shirt. In Kerala back in 1984, it was very unusual for people to wear full sleeves. Even if someone wore a full sleeve shirt, most rolled it up neatly under the elbow. Pillai ducked many of the police’s questions. He told the cops that Kurup had many enemies. The investigators not only found Pillai's narrative dubious, they also grew more suspicious due to his unusual attire. Soon, a policeman asked him to roll up his sleeves, and that's when the case took a turn.Pillai reluctantly rolled up his sleeve and cops saw burns, barely a day old, on his arm. They also found burns on his right leg. He couldn't explain them and kept changing his story. Soon he broke down and claimed that he had killed Kurup. Pillai said he nursed a grudge against Kurup for not taking him abroad and had killed him because of it. The officers still did not believe him. Kurup's driver, Ponnappan, was also missing. The cops soon found that Kurup had another car. Ponnappan eventually showed up, and his story completely contradicted Pillai's narrative. Ponnappan claimed that their car had accidentally hit and killed a pedestrian and that they had burnt the body to destroy evidence of their crime. He also claimed that he had dropped Kurup off at a lodge in Aluva a few days after that. But, there were no injuries on the body consistent with this new twist in the story either. After several rounds of questioning, the duo of Ponnappan and Pillai told the cops about Shahu, an employee of Kurup, who had returned from Abu Dhabi along with him. And how they were all behind what had happened.Police were able to pick up Shahu from Thrissur. The cops also reached the lodge in Aluva where Ponnappan had said he had dropped Kurup off. The staff at the hotel recognised Kurup's photo and said that he had left. That finally confirmed the police's suspicion. The burnt body in the car was not that of Kurup! But there was still no trace of Kurup, who had gone from dead victim to possible absconding accused in a case that still had many unanswered questions. Whose body was it? Why was he killed? 107181604Ep 2: Sukumara Kurup: How killer was never caughtWho was the victim?Back then, it was common for a person called a film representative to be present at movie theatres to check the accounts. Hours before the car went up in flames at Cheriyanad, one such film representative was having tea with a theatre owner after the evening show. The film that was playing that night was Keni, which means The Trap. And a trap awaited the film representative in real life. Usually, the film representative spent the night at the theatre. But his wife was pregnant, so he had promised to get back home. He did not keep his promise. A couple of days later, the family learnt from the theatre owner that he had left for home that night. The family lodged a missing person's complaint with the police.By this time, the Kurup case investigators had alerted all the neighbouring stations seeking information about missing persons who matched the description of the body from the car. Soon, police found a match, the film representative.The family was alerted, and the body was exhumed from the compound of Kurup's house. The scientific analysis confirmed that the person who was found dead in Kurup's car was KJ Chacko, the film representative who was reported missing from Hari Talkies in Alappuzha.Forensic expert Dr Umadathan's team had used a technique called superimposition to match the x-ray of the skull with the antemortem images of the suspected deceased to confirm that the body was of Chacko. CP Maniyan, who hails from the village of Sukumara Kurup, had helped police in exhuming the remains of Chacko from the Kurup property. The events of that day are still fresh in his memory nearly four decades later. "There were so many people there that day," Maniyan told The Times of India. "Some policemen wanted water. So, I volunteered to collect the water from a nearby well. They were collecting whatever remained of the body in small plastic covers. If I remember right, there were a few packets. Chacko’s wife had come. There was no dead body as such. What was left were just charred remains."How Chacko was killedFrom the statements of Shahu, Ponnappan and Pillai, police figured out how the gang of four had murdered Chacko. Chacko was planning to hitchhike home that night to reach early to meet his pregnant wife and planned to take her to church the next morning. Bhaskara Pillai, Ponnappan, and Shahu saw him waiting outside the theatre, realised he had the same build as Kurup, and offered him a lift.Kurup was following them in another car. Pillai, Ponnappan and Shahu forced Chacko to drink alcohol. It was spiked with poison. Then, they strangled him.The two cars sped off towards the village of Cheriyanad and reached Smitha Bhavan, the house of Kurup's wife. The body was taken to the bathroom. The four then took the clothes, wedding ring and watch off the body and dressed it in Kurup's clothes. They burnt the face in the bathroom to make it unrecognisable. The body was then stuffed into the boot of one car and the four sped off towards Kollakadavu.In the middle of the night, the two Ambassador cars made their way in the eerie silence. The cars took a sharp turn as they neared the Achankovil river and moved on a narrow road parallel to it. The vehicles came to a stop next to a paddy field.Three people came out of one of the cars. Kurup was in the second vehicle. Chacko's body was taken out of the boot. It was placed in the driver's seat of a car. They had brought a huge amount of petrol with them. Over 10 litres of it. The killers drenched the vehicle in petrol. A lit match was tossed into the car, and it went up in flames.Murder plot goes wrongBut the plan quickly started to go wrong. The killers had kept a can of petrol aside and the flames leapt onto it. Soon, Pillai's clothes were on fire. He sustained major burns. All four of the killers dived into the muddy waters of the paddy field to fight the fire. By then they had created a big enough mess that eventually led to the questioning of Pillai about his burns and the subsequent revelations.The road that the gang took to reach Kollakadavu is now known as Chacko Road.So far, the police had confirmed that the victim was Chacko and the murder was Kurup's plan all along. But one question still remained: Why was such an elaborate murder staged?Kurup was on the run, and sleuths struggled to investigate the case alongside organising a manhunt for him. That was when Shahu agreed to confess. Police offered to make him an approver in return.Superintendent of police George Joseph was part of the special investigation team that probed the case back in the 80s. Joseph, who has now retired, spoke to The Times of India Gold."Shahu admitted that it was part of insurance fraud. He admitted that the ploy was to make it look like Sukumara Kurup died and that they had killed Chacko as they were unable to find a dead body that looked like Kurup," Joseph said. Kurup had taken an insurance policy of around Rs 30 lakh in Abu Dhabi. The gang had killed Chacko to fake Kurup's death and to pocket the insurance money, which was a huge amount back then. Kurup committed Chacko's murder only due to his greed. It was one of the first and biggest cases of insurance fraud in the country.Kurup was building a palatial house in Alappuzha and he needed funds. That was why he hatched the elaborate plan. Bhaskara Pillai, his relative, was the first person he called in to assist him with his devious plan. Next was Ponnappan, his trusted driver. Shahu, an employee of Kurup back in the emirates, had come home along with Kurup and joined the group.Three plans and a murderKurup had three plans. The first was to find a body in the medical college mortuary. When that failed despite several attempts, they tried to look for a body in cemeteries. That did not work out either, as they needed someone who would match the description of Kurup.The gang then decided to kill someone who looked like Kurup. That was how Chacko's fate was sealed.The police filed charges against Pillai and Ponnappan. Both received and served life sentences in the case. Ponnappan died by suicide after the prison term. Shahu was made an approver and still lives in Thrissur. Bhaskara Pillai was released from prison after he served his life sentence. He lives a secluded life now in Puliyoor in Chengannur. Though police alleged that the wives of Pillai and Kurup were in on the plan, the court acquitted them.Where was Sukumara Kurup?One question still remained unanswered. Where was Sukumara Kurup? Even after the charge sheet was filed and the co-accused were punished, police were unable to track down the mastermind of the sensational crime.He has been on the run for the past 37 years. From Dhanbad in Jharkhand to Las Vegas in the US, Kerala police have been to towns, cities, and villages across the world in search of Sukumara Kurup. Though they were unable to nab him, police were able to retrace Kurup's escape route to a great extent. There were unconfirmed reports that Kurup visited his house nearly a month after the crime. According to investigators, Kurup went to Aluva and then to Chennai. He is suspected to have gone to Bhutan as well as Nepal. The Andamans and Bhopal were also among the places where the cops searched. There were reports that police once even caught Kurup but let him off before they couldn't recognise him. The man had apparently undergone surgery and changed his looks!It was alleged that his family's connections had helped him evade cops in the initial days of the investigation. However, finding Kurup became a matter of prestige for Kerala's police. Policemen secretly camped atop the house next to Smitha Bhavan, his wife's house, for nearly eight years in the hope of finding a lead.Hundreds were detained and questioned to find Kurup but all of them were later set free. Retired SP George Joseph is convinced that Kurup is dead. Even though there is no hard evidence for this claim, Joseph relies on a statement given by a nurse who worked in Dhanbad. She knew Kurup. She said that Kurup came to her hospital for treatment as he was facing cardiac ailments.Joseph says that Kurup went by the name of CP Joshy in his final days and had been to various district hospitals around Dhanbad seeking medical help. The doctors whom the police interviewed claimed that the man had severe cardiac issues and he must have died within a couple of years.Kurup's family assets were attached by the government after he was declared a fugitive. His wife and son also live in Puliyoor. Chacko's son Jithin has always maintained that he can never forgive Kurup who killed his father before he was even born. He wants him arrested. Forgiveness for a killerIn July 2018, Chacko's wife Santhamma reached out to Bhaskara Pillai through a Catholic priest. She met with him at Chengannur and publicly announced that she forgave them. "I don't know whether Kurup is alive or not but I forgive him,” Santhamma had said. Eby Kuriakose, a political activist who had contacted Bhaskara Pillai and arranged the meeting with Santhamma, still remembers that day clearly."The meeting took place at the premises of a Malankara Catholic Church in Chengannur. I was one of the people who arranged this meeting and I was present at the meeting. Shanthamma, Chacko’s widow, had come to express her forgiveness to her husband’s killer and to comfort him," Kuriakose said."When we informed Pillai, he was unable to believe it. He was guilt-ridden and couldn’t express his relief when the wife of the man he killed came to him and told him that she had forgiven him. It was such an emotional scene. Bhaskara Pillai’s remorse and his relief were quite evident. Shanthamma had then told us that the love of Jesus Christ was what made her forgive Bhaskara Pillai."Over the years, the Sukumara Kurup case has become the stuff of urban legend in Kerala. Movies were made inspired by the events. The latest was a film titled Kurup, starring Dulquer Salman. Kurup's tale is a story of triumph to some. The narrative of a man who dodged an entire police force. It is also a tale of cowardice, the one of a man who wasted his life hiding from everyone including his wife and children. It is also a heart-wrenching tale of the lives he destroyed through an act driven by nothing but greed.Voice: Arun RamAudio production: Sahil Gupta