[imagesource: Vinay Gogula]

One of the unfortunate byproducts of scouring the news daily is constantly learning of new ways in which heinous crimes are pulled off.

Every so often, though, there’s a crime that really manages to stand out, which is the case with Uthra Kumar.

Her husband, Suraj, has now been handed a double life sentence after investigators pieced together the clues to determine that he used a spectacled cobra (also known as an Indian cobra) as a murder weapon.

Last April, Suraj bought the snake from a snake catcher in the southern state of Kerala. Just shy of two weeks later, he carried the cobra in a bag to his in-laws’ house, where Uthra was recovering from a separate bite from a Russell’s viper.

The BBC reports:

Then on the night of 6 May, investigators say, while Uthra was still recuperating, she accepted a glass of fruit juice from Suraj which was laced with sedatives. When the mixture had put her under, Suraj brought out the container with the cobra, overturned it, and dropped the five-foot-long snake on his sleeping wife.

But rather than attack her, the snake slithered away. Suraj picked it up and flung it on Uthra, but again it slithered off.

Suraj tried a third time – he held the reptile by its trademark hood and pressed its head near Uthra’s left arm. The agitated cobra, using the fangs at the front of the mouth, bit her twice. Then it slinked off to a shelf in the room and stayed there all night.

That should serve as a reminder that snakes will only ever strike as a last resort, and would much rather flee from potential danger.

After the cobra had struck, Suraj washed out the glass, destroyed a stick he had used to handle the snake, and wiped his phone of any evidence that could potentially be used against him.

An autopsy found two pairs of puncture wounds, as well as sedatives unrelated to a snake bite in Uthra’s system.

Suraj was arrested in May, and a trial that attracted national media attention started a few months later.

More than 90 people, including herpetologists and doctors, testified. The prosecution built its case using Suraj’s call records, internet history, a dead cobra exhumed from the back garden, a stash of sedatives in the family car and evidence that he bought not one but two snakes. Investigators said that Suraj [centre, below, with Uthra on our right] had also purchased the Russell’s viper which had bitten Uthra months before she died.

Image: Supplied to the BBC

Suresh, the snake catcher, turned on Suraj and confessed to selling him both snakes. A herpetologist told the court that it was highly unlikely a cobra would have entered the couple’s bedroom through a raised window. The crime scene was even recreated, using a live cobra, a snake handler and a dummy of the victim on a bed.

Herpetologist Mavish Kumar, who was involved with that recreation, stated that when the cobra was dropped on the dummy body, it would always flee to the darkest corner of the room rather than strike.

When investigators took a look at his internet search history, it revealed multiple searches for videos about venomous snakes, including one featuring a Russell’s viper.

Suraj regularly told friends that his wife had dreams that led her to believe she was “destined to die of snakebite”.

After the guilty verdict was handed down, public prosecutor Mohanraj Gopalakrishnan said the case was a “milestone in police investigations in India, when prosecutors could decisively prove that an animal was used as a weapon of murder”.

[source:bbc]