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Woman in India admits poisoning six family members
with cyanide
Murders took place over 14-year period and each victim
ate a meal prepared by the killer
A woman in the southern Indian state of Kerala has confessed to poisoning
six members of her family over a 14-year period by adding cyanide to
their food.
Police began investigating earlier this year when the brother-in-law of
47-year-old suspect Jolly Thomas became suspicious that she may have
forged his parents’ will.
Authorities discovered that Thomas had been at the scene of all six deaths,
and that each death had occurred after eating a meal she had prepared.
Up to that point the deaths had not been treated as suspicious because
of the timeframe.
Thomas, a popular member of the community in Kozhikode, was allegedly
motivated by wanting control of the family finances and property, police
said.
According to police, the first poisoning was of Thomas’s mother-in-law,
who died in 2002 after eating mutton soup. In 2008, her-father-in-law died,
followed by her husband in 2011, who police said died after eating rice and
curry. An autopsy conducted on his body at the time confirmed poisonous
substances in his stomach, but police treated his death as suicide.
Thomas’s husband’s uncle was then allegedly given coffee laced with
cyanide as punishment for insisting that a postmortem be carried out on
his nephew.
In 2014, police said Thomas killed the two-year-old daughter of her dead
husband’s cousin, Scaria Shaju. The cousin’s wife was then killed in 2016.
A year later Thomas and Shaju married.
Shaju told police he had no idea that Thomas was behind his wife and
daughter’s death, but he has been arrested along with a third person.
On Friday, police exhumed remains from the local cemetery and said that
they confirmed cyanide poisoning in each of the deaths. On Monday, they
said Thomas confessed to all the murders.
SOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/07/woman-in-india-admitspoisoning-six-family-members-with-cyanide access on Oct. 7th, 2019.