Nearly a week after a 35-year-old woman went missing in Hyderabad, her ex-serviceman husband has claimed that he killed her, dismembered her body, boiled the parts and disposed them of in a lake at Jillelaguda on the city outskirts, a senior police officer said on Thursday, adding they are still to confirm the claims or the crime as no body parts have been recovered yet.
While a missing complaint of the woman, Venkata Madhavi, was registered by her mother at the Meerpet police station on January 18, ex-serviceman Putta Gurumurthy, 39, made the confession before the police on Wednesday night. Police, however, are yet to find any body parts of the woman.
“The Meerpet police registered a case of the missing woman on January 18. Though her husband has claimed that he killed her, we are still investigating. As of now, we have not come to the conclusion that she was killed,” Ch Praveen Kumar, deputy commissioner of police (DCP), LB Nagar, told reporters.
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The officer said that efforts are being made to verify the claims, but as of now, they have not found any body parts.
Meerpet police inspector K Nagaraju said that as of now, the police are investigating it as a missing person’s case.
“No solid evidence has been found to confirm that the woman was murdered. We are still looking for clues that would give us some lead in the case,” he said.
The officer said Gurumurthy, who hails from Prakasam district in Andhra Pradesh, came to Hyderabad a few years ago with his wife and their two children — a son and a daughter. The family lived in a rented house at New Venkateswara Nagar Colony in Meerpet locality.
A retired army jawan, Gurumurthy works as a security guard at the Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) facility at Kanchan Bagh.
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The inspector said that Gurumurthy tried to initially mislead them by joining his mother-in-law Subbamma to lodge a complaint on January 18, alleging Madhavi was missing for the last two days. He had told the police that his wife left home in a fit of rage after an argument between them in the early hours of January 16 and did not return. The Meerpet police then registered a case of missing person and started looking for her.
During the investigation, the police went through the footage obtained from CCTV cameras installed near Gurumurthy’s house in the colony. While the footage showed Madhavi entering the house on January 15, she was not seen leaving the house in the next two days, the inspector said, adding the CCTV footage showed Gurumurthy’s movements during that period.
“We took Gurumurthy into custody on Wednesday for questioning. Initially he provided inconsistent responses, but later he claimed to have killed his wife and disposed of the body,” Nagaraju said.
In his alleged confession, Gurumurthy told the police that on January 15 night, while their children were at their native place for Sankranti holidays, a heated argument broke out between the couple over bringing the children back home.
“He claimed that in a fit of rage, he struck his wife on the head twice with a rod, leaving her unconscious. Believing her to be dead, he decided to dispose of the body. He dismembered the body with a knife, boiled the body parts in a water bucket using a water heater, separated the bones and grinded them to powder, and disposed them in the Jillelaguda lake,” the inspector said.
On January 17, Gurumurthy called up his mother-in-law, who stays at her native village in Andhra Pradesh, and told her that Madhavi left the house after an altercation with him.
“We have roped in forensic experts to find any kind of evidence about the missing woman,” Nagaraju said.
