He Married 20 Brides Just to Kill Them | Cyanide Mohan Kumar

Between two thousand four and two thousand nine, across the neighboring states of Karnataka and Kerala, India. A series of women were found dead in bus station bathrooms. They had no identification. There were no witnesses, just bodies with froth around the mouth, a detail quietly noted in police reports. Local police treated each case the same way. An unnatural death, possibly self inflicted.

Each woman was buried or cremated as an unidentified person, and the investigation ended there. Over a dozen women were found this way, but no one raised the alarm. How could that be? Well, the women were all found in completely different places, different districts, different police stations, and different case files. No one was seeing the pattern because no one realized there was a pattern to see. And that is why over six years, 20 women died in exactly the same way.

And the exact same man was responsible for every one of them. This is the case of Cyanide Mohan. June 17th, 2009, a village called Barimaru in the state of Karnataka. A 22-year-old woman named Anitha Bangueira left home without telling anyone where she was going. She took the gold jewelry her brother Madhav gifted her, some cash, an expensive cell phone, and her finest clothes. She said nothing. She left no note.

When her family realized she was gone, her father, Dugapamulya, went straight to the police station to file a missing persons report. The police were dismissive, telling him it was probably a case of love jihad. This was a prominent conspiracy theory in coastal Karnataka at the time. The idea was that Muslim men would deliberately seduce Hindu women in an attempt to convert them to Islam.

The officer suggested that Anita had simply run away with a Muslim man, and they told the family to keep quiet and not make trouble. The police asked us to keep our mouths shut, Nugapo would later say. They were not willing to listen, despite no one having seen Anitha talking to any person of another community.

Fortunately, Anitha's community refused to accept that answer. They began staging protests at the police station. The pressure building until officers were facing a genuine threat of violence if they didn't act. And so, driven not by institutional protocol, but by the force of communal pressure, investigators finally formed a proper investigative team.

And what they found when they eventually began looking changed everything. The day after Anitha disappeared, june eighteenth, two thousand nine, roughly one hundred and forty kilometers away at the Hassan bus station. a woman in a wedding surrey had been found dead in a public bathroom. Local police had assumed she was an unidentified vagrant. They recorded the death as a natural

and buried her without making any attempt at identification. It took investigators roughly twenty days from the start of the inquiry to connect that buried woman to Anitha's missing persons report. to exhum the body, to conduct an autopsy, and to finally understand what they were dealing with. The toxicology result came back clear. Cyanide poisoning. This was murder. The corpse of detectives, Karnataka's premier investigative agency were brought in. They began pulling an Etha's phone record.

One number kept appearing in her call history, registered to a man named Striedhar from the district of Madikeri. When investigators tracked Striedhar down, he told them the number wasn't his at all. It belonged to his sister, Kaveri, who had been working across the state border in Kasaragod, Kerala. Kaveri, it turned out, had also been missing since early two thousand nine. Her body, investigators learned, was

had reportedly already been found at a different bus station. She had also been classified as an unidentified person, and her body was disposed of without any investigation. The man responsible for her death had been using Kaveri's phone to contact Anitha. Investigators pulled more records, more namesurface. Vinutha from Putur, Pushpa from Kasaraga.

A chain of women who had never met each other, all of whom had been in contact with the owner of this number, all of them last seen in the company of a man using a different name each time. At first, the investigators assumed they were looking at a human trafficking ring. But then they began cross-referencing, checking missing persons reports against unidentified female bodies found in bus station bathrooms across the state.

Deaths recorded as pesticide poisoning, filed as probably self-inflicting. Closed without further inquiry. They realized that these women had not been moved anywhere. They had been killed one at a time across jurisdictions over a period of several years, and every thread led back to the same man. The break in the case came through the phone.

After killing Anitha, the man had discarded the SIM card, but handed her handset to his nephew as a gift. And the boy put his own sim into it and started using it. Why wouldn't he? He had no indication as to its grisly origins. But thanks to the man's short sighted decision, detectives were able to trace the device, which led them to the nephew.

He told them his uncle had given him the phone. His uncle's name, Mohan Kumar. A search conducted at the home of Mohan's wife Sri Devi turned up eight cyanide tablets. four mobile phones, jewelry that was later identified as belonging to Anitha, and a collection of counterfeit government seals, and official letterheads made out in various names.

These counterfeit tools were what Mohan had been using to present himself as a senior government official, giving every woman he approached a reason to trust him. To make the arrest, investigators needed a way to draw him out. They found it through a woman named Sumitra, who had seen Anitha board a bus toward Hassan with a man shortly before she disappeared.

Sumitra also knew Mohan Kumar personally. Some years before, he had approached her with a marriage proposal, presenting himself as a plantation supervisor. She had turned him down. The police asked her to call him and arrange a meeting, and she agreed. October twenty first, two thousand nine, at a bus station in Banto, Karnataka State, Mohan arrived at the meeting point where the police were waiting for him, and he was immediately taken into custody.

Under interrogation, he confessed to killing twenty women across the states of Karnataka and Kerala. Investigators who were present later described how he recalled the physical appearance of each victim and the locations of their bodies with a level of composed, detailed precision that left them feeling deeply unsettled.

So who was this man and how had he managed to pull off the same crime twenty times? Mohan Kumar Vivekanand was born on April sixth, nineteen sixty-three in Kanana, Dakshina, Kannada district. His mother was a domestic helper, raising seven children alone as their father abandoned the family when Mohan was still young. Mohan dropped out of school in the seventh grade, but later returned to his studies. Securing work as an elementary school PE teacher, a position he held from 1980 to 2003.

He was a man with a government job, a stable salary. Nothing from the outside attracted suspicion, but it should have. At the time of his arrest, Mohan was 46 and had married three times. He split his time living between two households, one with his second wife, Manjula, who had two daughters, and another with his third wife, Sri Devi, who had two sons.

Neither woman knew the other existed. Both believed he was a teacher on a government posting that required time away from home. An explanation that explained his absences and discouraged questions. The first recorded sign of the kind of man Mohan was came in 2003, the same year his teaching career ended. He was arrested in Dharmastala, a Hindu pilgrimage town on the banks of the Netravati River, after he tried to throw a woman from a bridge into the fast moving water below.

Hearing the woman's screams, bystanders came to her rescue, beating Mohan and handing him over to the police. He was charged with attempted murder, but later acquitted due to a lack of evidence. Investigators who later reviewed the case believed that this was the turning point. The moment Mohan understood that he could commit crimes against women, and the system would not hold him accountable for it.

His first confirmed murder happened in 2004. Juan had a very clear type, unmarried women from poor families, typically in their mid twenties or older. Women whose families were under pressure to find them as well. to match, but could not afford a dowry that a suitable marriage would require. He found them at bus stations, at temples, in public spaces. He would approach them and introduce himself using an alias chosen specifically to match their cast.

a small, calculated detail that established instant familiarity. He would present himself as a senior government official, stable, respected, And then he would say that one thing that transformed the entire dynamic. I don't need a dowry. I just want a wife. Those two sentences were dreamlike to those facing dowry pressure in coastal Karnataka. A family unable to pay an adequate dowry carried serious social shame. In those circles,

A daughter who reaches their mid twenties without a marriage prospect is often seen as a problem, as a source of quiet, persistent embarrassment for everyone around her. Neighbors notice, other families notice, And the weight of it accumulates over the years. For a woman in that position, a man who said he would marry her without asking for what her family couldn't afford, was the answer to years of worry.

Wuhan would spend weeks building trust. Then he would convince the woman to elope with him. It was framed as a practical solution, a way to skip formalities that made everything so complicated. He would take the woman to an inexpensive lodge in a different town and tell her they would be married at a temple the following morning. The next morning, at the bus station, he would hand her a small pill and tell her it was a contraceptive.

The woman would go into the bathroom to take it, as he had instructed, and she would not come back out. Symptoms of cyanide poisoning escalate within minutes. Confusion, collapse, cardiac arrest. Death comes fast. There is little noise. There is no struggle with an assailant. Local police. would find a woman in a bus station bathroom. No identification, no witnesses to any foul play, froth around the mouth, and it would be noted in the report, and the case would be closed.

And that is how Mohan succeeded for so long. He rotated names, rotated phones, rotated districts. He had built his entire method around a system that was not designed to search across boards.

Anita Bangueira had only been educated until the seventh grade. To make a living, she made small hand-rolled cigarettes at home. It paid almost nothing. For her wedding fund, Anita's family had set aside roughly 72 grams of gold and a 5,000 rupees, which is around 55 US dollars in cash. Money they had borrowed. And were still repaying at the time of her death. Her brother Madhav had given her an expensive mobile phone, a genuine luxury in that household.

When she left that morning, she took all of it the gold, the cash, the phone, and her best clothes. She believed she was starting a new life. Her family never saw her body. She had been buried before they even found out she was dead. We saw his smirk on TV whenever he was brought to court, her father would say years later. but we were not witnesses, nor did the police ask us to come to court. Our only regret is that we could not see Anita one last time.

But her mother, when asked how she felt about the verdict, answered How could I be satisfied with the verdict if my daughter will not come back? Another of Mohan's victims, Pushpavatya Acharya, was also twenty-two. She was the fourth of six daughters of a man who had died in 2000. Leaving their mother Shisama to raise the girls alone. Pushpabati had found work as a dormitory housekeeper at a medical college.

On june ninth, two thousand nine, she dressed in her Bessari and told her sisters she was going to the nearby temple and would be back soon. She never returned. When the police informed Pushpavati's mother about her death, she suffered a stroke that she never fully recovered from. The family also suffered negative reactions from the community. Pushpavati's three unmarried sisters received no proposals for nine years. Neighbors shunned them, treating them as people to be avoided.

as though proximity to a murder victim had somehow contaminated them. All three sisters finally married in twenty eighteen, only after pledging their house to raise the money for three weddings. When it came to building a case against Mohan, investigators had an enormous challenge on their hands. They had only circumstantial evidence, and no direct witnesses to any of the 20 killings. But the chain of events, once investigators discerned it, was hard to dispute.

Mohan had checked into lodges under false names, but lodge managers and housekeeping staff testified that they had seen him arrive with the women and and leave alone. Loan records show he had pawned the women's jewelry within hours of their death. His absences from work, flagged in a government suspension notice for unauthorized leave, placed him out of school during the exact periods when the killings occurred.

A chemical dealer named Abdul Salam testified that he had sold Mohan Cyanide powder on multiple occasions, believing him to be a jeweler with a professional need for it. Salam was arrested for selling cyanide without a license, and later attempted to retract his testimony, but the court upheld his original statement.

Investigators also reportedly found a diary in which Mohanna tracked every woman he approached, the names of those who died recorded alongside entries for the ones who had gotten away. But the evidence that ultimately mattered most came from the one woman who had survived. She was from Bantoil. Mohan had followed his exact method with her. They stayed at a lodge in another town, and the next morning he gave her a pill at the bus station. She licked the pill instead of swallowing.

And collapsed in the washroom almost immediately. Mohan assumed she was dead, took her jewelry, and left. She was found and taken to a hospital, and it took her five days to recover. She went home, told no one, and married within months. Investigators found her through Mohan's call records. They gently persuaded her to testify, and she agreed on one condition that her husband's family not be informed.

In a closed courtroom, she had told the truth, and her testimony became the cornerstone of the prosecution's case.

Mohan represented himself in court. He cross examined police officers, studied law books, took detailed notes, and argued repeatedly that no autopsy report made direct mention of cyanide. He showed no remorse throughout the proceedings. On december seventeenth, twenty thirteen, Judge BK Naik convicted Mohan Kumar of the rape and murder of Anita Bangeira and Lila Vasi, and the following day of the murder of Sunanda Pujari.

In his ninety one page judgment, Judge Naeg wrote that the evidence proved Mohan had committed the acts intentionally. He was sentenced to death in all three cases simultaneously, something the prosecution described as unprecedented in the state of Karnataka's legal history. Trials in the remaining seventeen cases continued from twenty fourteen through twenty twenty, with additional death sentences handed down in subsequent proceedings, and life imprisonment and the others.

By june twenty twenty, Mohan Kumar had been convicted in all twenty cases. The Karnataka High Court reviewed some of the sentences in 2017. It determined that two of the three original death sentences. those for the murders of Anita Bangera and Lila Bati did not meet the threshold that Indian law requires for capital punishment. Those were commuted to life imprisonment.

The death sentence for the murder of Sunanda Pujari was confirmed, and at sentencing, Kumara submitted a written plea for mercy, citing his wives, his children, and his sick mother. But it made no difference. The sentences were upheld. Today Mohan Kumar remains in Hindalga Central Prison in Karnataka, awaiting execution.

The case prompted the state police to formally review how missing persons reports are handled across district boundaries. Anitha left home with the gold her brother gave her, and the belief that someone had finally seen her work. Pushpavati dressed in her best sari and walked toward what she thought was a better future. Twenty women lost their lives due to flaws in the system.

What brought down Mohan Kumar was not a forensic breakthrough. It was a nephew unknowingly using a dead woman's phone. A tailor who remembered a face from years before. A survivor, who, despite every reason to stay quiet and protect the life she had built, agreed to walk into a courtroom and tell the truth. And a community that refused to let the police look away. That is all for today. Thank you for watching.

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