It was a bizarre day for the officers at Chikkamagaluru’s Ajjampura
In a video shot by an official at the police station, the man, identified as 35-year-old Satish, is seen narrating the chilling details of the murder.
“This is my wife, sir. I gave her all the love I could,” Satish begins in the video as he fishes out the head of his wife, Roopa, from a black plastic bag and holds it up.
“Put it inside!” a police officer is heard shouting. Satish puts his wife’s head back into the bag and starts confessing.
“She cheated on me. I saw her with that guy near the plantation. I killed her. But that guy (Roopa’s alleged paramour) ran away. I couldn’t kill him though,” Satish claimed.
He went on to allege that Roopa’s alleged lover Sunil, a daily-wage worker, has several criminal cases against him. “He has three to four cases against him and still she chose him. I used to be a taxi driver. I told her that I will support us. She would go off with that guy. She would say she wanted to go to the bathroom and go to meet him,” Satish is seen saying in the video.
An enraged Satish pulls up the plastic bag containing his wife’s head, holds the machete in his mouth and opens the bag once more
“Look! This is my wife. She took a loan of Rs 3 lakh to give to her lover and not me. You have seen her, have you not? How many times have we not come to the police station to sort out our fights? You know, right?” Satish questions the officers at the police station.
The police officers pacify Satish and ask him to sit down and start taking down his statement. The police then registered an FIR.
“Based on his statement, Satish suspected that his wife was cheating on him and followed her with a machete. When he saw her meet Sunil at the Nilagiri Plantation near Shivani Railway Station, he hacked at her neck,” said Circle Inspector Ramachandra Nayak, the investigating officer.
According to CI Ramachandra, Satish had allegedly decided to kill both his wife and Sunil. Sunil managed to escape when Satish attacked his wife.
“After taking down his statement and registering an FIR, we took him to the spot. He showed us where his wife’s body was. A case of murder has been registered and he has been remanded to judicial custody,” he added.
Police say that Satish and Roopa were married nine years ago and began living together since their parents had initially disapproved of their relationship. Two years ago, Satish and Roopa moved in with his parents after they reconciled.
Ajjampura police told TNM that when Satish and Roopa were married in 2011, the entire village of Shivani had ostracised the couple because both married outside their caste.
"Both of them are from different castes. Satish was from an upper caste while Roopa was from the OBC community. When they got married, the people had pushed them out of the village. They were happy for a few years until a couple of years ago," says Chikkamagaluru SP Annamalai.
The SP says that Satish and Roopa had even come to him several times to sort out their marital woes.
“For the past two years, they have been having lots of marital problems. He was always suspicious of her and kept saying that she was having an affair with many other men. We don’t know if this is true yet. We are trying to find out who this Sunil is,” Ajjampura police said.
"Last month the woman had come to me saying she had problems adjusting to her in-laws. Earlier, she had complaints of how he would not give her money for food. Generally in the Ajjampura area, whoever commits murder surrenders to the police but for someone to walk in and place a head on the sub-inspector's table was something new for us," he added.