Wife dies after snake bite, court finds husband is the murderer

An additional sessions court in Kollam found a man guilty of killing his wife by making a cobra bite her while she was asleep. CNN recently shared the background history of how toxic the marriage was, how they got married and what the demands of the in-laws after the marriage as “Uthra was someone who never saw bad in anyone”.

According to the judgment, Kumar’s parents demanded Uthra’s parents pay for household appliances, a car, furniture, renovation work, and admission fees for an MBA course for Kumar’s sister.

“Uthra was someone who never saw bad in anyone,” Vishu said. “Her learning disability meant she didn’t have the means to see that she was being used.”

Uthra’s father told the court he met all of Kumar’s demands and also paid him 8,000 rupees ($107) per month to take care of his daughter.
But Kumar grew “dissatisfied” with Uthra’s learning disability, according to the judgment.

He began to plot her death.

The prosecution submitted that Sooraj, 27, killed Uthra, 25, last year for her gold jewellery, and to marry another woman. The court found Sooraj guilty under IPC Sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder), 328 (causing hurt by poison) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) in May 2020.

Uthra spent 52 days in Pushpagiri Hospital in the Kerala town of Thiruvalla recovering from the viper bite, and when she was finally released to her parent’s care on April 22 2020, she was unable to walk.

As she lay in bed, her leg bandaged after skin grafts, Sooraj decided to strike.

On May 6, just 15 days after she had left hospital, he smuggled another snake that he had bought from snake handler Chavarukavu Suresh into her parent’s house. This time it was a cobra.

Before going to bed, Kumar gave Uthra a glass of juice laced with sedatives, according to the judgment. As she slept, Kumar threw the serpent at her, but the reptile didn’t bite, so he grabbed its head and forced its fangs deep into her left arm twice.

Despite his efforts to make it appear as an accident, a number of clues suggested the bites weren’t natural from the width of the fang marks, the position of the bites, and the impossibility that the cobra had entered the room on its own.

Police exhumed the cobra and conducted an autopsy to confirm that the same snake had bit Uthra.

The snake-handler Suresh was also arrested for allegedly supplying the snakes to Sooraj.