Mohan Kumar, “Cyanide Mohan”

The victims

Between 2003 and 2009 a series of young women from Dakshina Kannada in coastal Karnataka and from neighbouring Kasaragod in Kerala left home believing they were about to marry. Many came from poorer families and some had struggled to arrange a marriage. Among them were Anitha, a 22-year-old from Barimar village in Bantwal taluk, and a 25-year-old woman who worked as a cook at a ladies' hostel in Kasaragod. Several were later found dead in places such as lodge bathrooms and bus stand toilets, far from home, and for years nobody connected the cases.

A false promise of marriage

The man eventually convicted was Mohan Kumar, a schoolteacher from Kanyana in Bantwal taluk who became known as "Cyanide Mohan". Prosecutors said he befriended women, promised to marry them and persuaded them to travel with him to towns such as Mysuru or Bengaluru, where they stayed in lodges. He then gave them a cyanide-laced tablet, presented as a contraceptive pill, and took their gold and money. In the Kasaragod case, for example, prosecutors said he met the woman in 2009, visited her home three times and promised marriage before she left with him in July of that year.

The investigation

The breakthrough came after Anitha went missing in June 2009. Her disappearance became a flashpoint: groups that claimed, without evidence, that she had been lured away for religious conversion protested at the Bantwal police station, and a high-level team was formed. Officers analysing her phone records found links to other missing women, and within weeks had connected her case to more than twenty others. A common handset identity number used with several missing women's SIM cards led police to a phone in Deralakatte, whose holder said Mohan Kumar had given it to him. Kumar was arrested on 21 October 2009. Accounts of how many killings he admitted differ between reports, but 20 murder cases were registered against him.

Trials and death sentences

Kumar was tried case by case, largely in Mangaluru, and later argued his own appeal before the High Court. On 21 December 2013 Judge B K Naik of the fourth additional district and sessions court sentenced him to death in three cases, including Anitha's, calling them "the rarest of rare". Trials in the remaining cases continued for years. Further death sentences followed in later trials, including one in 2019 for the 2005 killing of an anganwadi (childcare) worker from Bantwal, while other cases brought life terms. In June 2020 a Mangaluru court convicted him in the 20th and last case, the 2009 killing of the Kasaragod woman, and sentenced him to life imprisonment along with prison terms for related charges including abduction and rape.

The High Court's review

Death sentences in India must be confirmed by a High Court. In October 2017 a Karnataka High Court bench of Justices Ravi Malimath and John Michael Cunha commuted one of the 2013 death sentences, in a 2009 case from Hassan, to life imprisonment meaning imprisonment until death, finding in part that the rape and abduction charges in that case had not been proved. The High Court upheld the death penalty in another case. Reported tallies of the overall outcome differ: in 2020 one national paper counted death sentences in five cases, two of which had been commuted, while a 2023 report counted three death sentences and said five cases did not end in conviction, and a December 2025 report counted six death sentences and 14 life terms. All agree that no death sentence has been carried out.

Where things stand

No new verdicts or appeal rulings in the case were found in reporting from 2024 to 2026, and Kumar remains in prison. The case continues to shape popular culture: the 2023 web series Dahaad was widely seen as loosely inspired by it, although its makers did not confirm this, and the Malayalam film Kalamkaval, starring Mammootty and released in December 2025, revived public interest in Kerala and Karnataka.

Why it matters

The case exposed how deaths of women far from home could go unconnected for years, and how social pressure around marriage left women from poorer families vulnerable to a man who simply promised a wedding. It also became an early Indian example of solving a serial case through call detail records and handset identity numbers rather than witness accounts, showing police across the region the value of digital records in linking missing-person cases. On sentencing, the High Court's use of life imprisonment until death, without remission, illustrated a sentencing option Indian courts use as an alternative to execution: a life term that is not shortened by remission.