Six murders, one sinister betrayal Premium

Uncover the chilling story of 6 murders in Telangana's Kamareddy district & the hunt for the perpetrators.

Trigger warning: the following article contains potentially distressing material; please avoid reading if you feel disturbed by violence. S Raman, circle Inspector of Sadashivanagar in Telangana’s Kamareddy district, had just wrapped up a tele-conference with his colleagues on December 14 morning when he was informed about a woman’s charred body being found in their jurisdiction.

The body was recovered from the bushes along a mud road off Padmavajiguda crossroads-Banswada State highway, nearly 145 kilometres north of the State capital, Hyderabad. The crime scene abutting a low-depth irrigation canal was on the fringes of Bhompalle village under Sadashivanagar police station limits.

Investigators had a tough time ascertaining the victim’s identity as the body was charred with only remnants of burnt cloth and a pair of silver anklets being retrieved. A few feet away, a piece of coir rope was found. “There were, however, clear car tyre marks on the mud road. It appeared that a four-wheeler had come to the spot and driven in reverse before leaving the place,” Raman says, recalling the crime scene.

Going by the body’s condition, police surmised the crime could have been committed between midnight and the early hours of December 14. They first suspected that the perpetrators may have come to the spot from Banswada, but ruled this out due to the thick wooded areas along that route, which would have made disposing of the body easier for the perpetrators.

Police then turned their focus to the Padmavajiguda crossroads which joins National Highway 44 covering the Hyderabad-Kamareddy-Nizmabad stretch in Telangana. This highway has two toll plazas — Bhiknoor on the Hyderabad side and Indalvai on the Nizamabad side, nearly 17 km and 40 km respectively from the crime scene. A CCTV camera installed by a chicken centre owner offered the first crucial lead.

Between the midnight of December 13 and 5 a.m. of December 14, seven cars had passed from Padmavajiguda crossroads to Banswada. Of those, only one car retraced its path. Naturally, this particular vehicle raised suspicion, but the video footage was not clear. Three specialised police teams scrutinised video recordings from numerous cameras for hours. They uncovered another lead, indicating a car similar to the one in the initial video footage had passed through the Indalvai toll plaza.

Within no time, they traced the owner of the five-seater sedan — M. Jagdish of Nizamabad. An employee of a private company, he said that he routinely rented out his car to a person named Ramesh in the same city. Ramesh, in turn, rented it out to Medidha Prashanth, also from the same city, on a daily basis. This information helped the police achieve a breakthrough.