Days after an ex-serviceman from Hyderabad allegedly claimed to have killed his wife and disposed of her body parts in different locations, the Rachakonda police in Telangana on Tuesday arrested him after gathering the required evidence against him.
The police had earlier said they were verifying the claims by Gurumurthy, 45, who said he had dismembered his wife’s body after killing her and cooked the parts in a pressure cooker. The accused, according to Rachakonda Police Commissioner G Sudheer Babu, is “remorseless” and expressed no guilt in the way he killed his wife, Putta Venkata Madhavi, 39, and disposed of the body to erase any shred of evidence.
“This is a rarest-of-the-rare case where the accused has no remorse or guilt. He is fully mentally fit but evil. The way he has behaved shows his nefarious designs and sinister mindset,” Sudheer Babu told the media on Tuesday.
According to the Commissioner, Madhavi, a homemaker, was killed by Gurumurthy on the morning of January 16. He allegedly smashed her head against the wall and then strangled her to death. He then cut the body into pieces, boiled the body parts, crushed the bones, said the police. He allegedly disposed of the bone powder and smaller pieces in the toilet while dumping the remnants in the neighbourhood lake.
The Victim, Putta Venkata Madhavi, 39, was a homemaker. (Express IMAGE)
“All this took him four to six hours and after cleaning the house, he brought his children back soon after as if nothing had happened. He misled the children about the smell of phenyl and told them their mother had gone away,” the Commissioner told indianexpress.comadding that “it was a clearly pre-meditated and planned brutal crime and not a spur-of the-moment crime”.
knife, stove, water heater among materials seized in Hyderabad women’s murder
The police, who had earlier said they could not merely go by the accused’s claims, reconstructed the crime and sequence of events, collected forensic evidence such as skin tissues, hair and ash remnants, and technical evidence, including CCTV visuals and cellphone locations. They also seized the materials used in the crime, including a knife, stove, water heater, clothes, phenyl and acid bottles, room freshener, as well as two mobile phones.
According to the police, the accused sent their children to his sister’s home, and killed his wife due to a personal quarrel. The wife wanted to reunite with her family for Sankranthi, and the accused, who had disputes with his in-laws for five years, was against this.
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Gurumurthy served in the army between 2003 and 2020 and retired as a naib subedar. He has been working as a security guard with a Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) facility in Hyderabad’s Kanchanbagh.
After committing the crime, he allegedly confessed to killing his wife to one of his relatives. The police discovered this information during their investigation into Madhavi’s disappearance. Gurumurthy attempted to mislead the police by claiming that his wife had left home following a quarrel between them, said the police.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
