Today, we dive deep into one of India's most disturbing criminal cases - the story of Mohan Kumar, better known as "Cyanide Mohan."
A seemingly respectable schoolteacher who transformed into a calculating serial killer, targeting vulnerable women in Karnataka between 2004-2009.
This isn't just another true crime story. It's a chilling examination of how social prejudices and systemic failures enabled a predator to claim 20 victims before finally being caught.
From his troubled childhood in a poor Dalit family to his calculated methodology of exploiting India's marriage customs, we uncover how Mohan Kumar weaponized society's biases against his victims.
Through exclusive interviews with investigating officers, family members, and witnesses, we piece together the dark journey of a man who lived a double life - a respected teacher and family man by day, a methodical killer by night.
Learn how he was finally caught through a combination of circumstantial evidence, phone records, and a single witness who escaped his deadly scheme.
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Content Warning: This video contains discussions of death and sensitive social issues.
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Transcript
Welcome to Blood Trails. A podcast that features World’s Worst Crimes. My name is Chase Austin - Bestselling author of Sam Wick and Axel Monk Thriller series.
And this is the story of India's most methodical serial killer, who turned social prejudices into weapons.
Known as "Cyanide Mohan," he murdered 20 women between 2004-2009.
Here's how a schoolteacher became one of Karnataka's most notorious killers
Picture this: It's 2009, and things are incredibly tense in Karnataka's Dakshina Kannada district. This place had become a hotbed for religious tensions. The streets of Bantwal, this small village about 30 kilometers from Mangaluru, had turned into a battleground between local groups and radical Islamic organizations like the PFI. Things were so bad that police officers would pray not to be posted there.
Then on June 17th, something happened that would blow the lid off an even darker story.
Anitha Mulya, a 22-year-old who made beedis (cheap hand-rolled cigarettes) for a living, vanished from her village of Barimar. Her family and neighbors spent two desperate days searching everywhere for her. In the charged atmosphere of the time, someone floated the idea of "love jihad" - this controversial theory that Muslim men were deliberately seducing Hindu women to convert them. Local right-wing groups jumped on this immediately, turning it into a massive issue. They practically laid siege to the police station, demanding action.
The situation was getting out of hand. The Bantwal police had to act fast, so they put together a special team led by Circle Inspector Nanjunde Gowda and Assistant Superintendent Chandragupta. But here's the tragic twist - while they were frantically searching for her, Anitha was already dead. Her body had been found in a women's bathroom at Hassan's bus station, 160 kilometers away, just a day after she disappeared. She was found with foam around her mouth.
Right around when they discovered her body, a short, mustached man in his forties quietly slipped away. While people gathered around Anitha's body, this man hurried back to the lodge where he and Anitha had stayed the night before. He quickly packed his things in a plastic bag, grabbed Anitha's gold jewelry, checked out, and caught a bus out of town.
This man was Mohan Kumar, and his story would shock everyone. A former primary school teacher from Dakshina Kannada, he would turn out to be Karnataka's most notorious serial killer. When police finally caught up with him on October 21st, 2009, in a village near Mangaluru, he confessed to something horrifying - he had killed Anitha and at least 19 other women between 2004 and 2009, all using cyanide.
It's the kind of story that makes you wonder: how does a seemingly ordinary school teacher transform into such a ruthless killer?
The Making of a Monster: The Cyanide Killer
The road to Kanyana tells a story of its own. Branching off from the bustling Mangaluru-Kasaragod highway near Ullal, it meanders through a landscape frozen in time - a dusty ribbon cutting through the Kalanjimale reserved forest, past humble thatched homes where life moves to the ancient rhythms of farming. The road plays a curious game of hopscotch with state borders, briefly flirting with Kerala's Malayalam signboards before returning to Karnataka's embrace.
It was here, in this forgotten corner of India, that Mohan Kumar's story began. On April 6, 1963, to Maielappa Mogera and Tukru, a child was born into a Scheduled Caste family of day laborers. They named him Mohan Kumar Vikkant, and like many children born into poverty in rural India, his future seemed predetermined - a life of hard work, struggle, and perhaps, if fortune favored him, a chance at a better life than his parents had - But no one knew that this child would grow up to become one of India's most notorious serial killers.
The irony of his origins isn't lost on those who knew him - a boy from the lowest rung of society's ladder who would later exploit those very social hierarchies to hunt his victims.
"The Kumar children were different," recalls Rama, a relative, her eyes distant with memories. "In those days, education wasn't a priority here. Children were lazy, dropping out of school was common. But those four?" She shakes her head in wonder. "They were bright stars in our community."
The family's fortunes took a modest turn upward in the 1970s when they received a concrete tile-roofed house through a government scheme for backward sections. It stands today, weather-beaten and haunted by history, where Kumar's brother Ramesh still lives. But beneath this narrative of gradual progress lay a wound that would never fully heal.
"I was 14 when my father left," Ramesh recalls. "We were small kids... we never asked our mother why." Then, with significance that would only become clear decades later, he adds, "But Mohan... Mohan was deeply attached to our mother."
But where many families might have crumbled under such abandonment, the Vikkants drew closer. His mother, especially, poured all her love and hope into her children, particularly Mohan. This fierce maternal devotion would later reveal its darker side when, years later, she would threaten to take her own life if authorities dared to imprison her son for his crimes.
Against the odds, Mohan managed to carve out what appeared to be a respectable life. He became a teacher, a position that carried significant respect in rural India. For 23 years, he stood before classrooms full of children, teaching them about life and learning, all while harboring dark urges that would eventually consume him. To his colleagues, he was the model of propriety - he didn't drink, didn't smoke, and was known for his thoughtful, gentle demeanor.
His personal life seemed to follow the typical pattern of a middle-class Indian man, though with a few notable detours. He married three times - his first marriage ended in divorce, a scandal in conservative rural India of the 1980s. His second wife Manjula lived in Kasaragod, while his third wife Sridevi made her home in Deralakatte. Each bore him two children, and neither knew of the other's existence. They believed they were married to a respectable government officer whose frequent "work trips" took him away from home.
But beneath this carefully constructed facade of normalcy, a darkness was growing. Perhaps it started with small deceptions - he had already defrauded women at the schools where he worked and taken out loans under false names from banks. But somewhere along the line, these relatively minor crimes weren't enough anymore. In 2003, at the age of 40, Mohan Kumar embarked on a journey that would earn him the moniker "Cyanide Mohan."
Abdurrahman, now the panchayat vice-president, remembers a different Mohan - an athletic boy passionate about kabaddi and cricket. "His parents worked on our family farm for years, so I knew him well," he says, the weight of hindsight heavy in his voice. "He was a clean guy, average in studies but dedicated to his physical fitness." He pauses, struggling with the disconnect between the boy he knew and the monster who would emerge. "How do you reconcile these two versions of the same person?"
A Perfect Trap: How Society's Prejudices Became a Killer's Weapon
In the conservative heartland of rural Karnataka, where tradition weighs heavy and poverty weighs heavier, Mohan Kumar found his perfect hunting ground - the bus stands and public places of Karnataka's towns, where he would watch and wait for his prey. He understood something crucial about his victims - something that made them particularly vulnerable to his schemes. These weren't just women; they were women caught in the cruel intersection of poverty, age, and caste.
He had a type - unmarried women from poor families, women who had crossed the traditional age of marriage and were desperate for a chance at happiness. To Anitha Mulya, he was Sudhakar Kulal. To Sunanda Poojary, he became Shashidhar Poojary. To Kaveri, he introduced himself as Sudhakar Acharya. Each name was carefully chosen to match his victim's caste - a crucial detail in India's socially stratified society.
His methodology was as precise as it was cruel. Posing as a government officer, he would strike up conversations with these women, offering them not just marriage but a escape from the stigma of being unmarried in their late twenties or thirties. He would propose eloping - a romantic adventure that would end in a temple wedding. The clincher? Unlike traditional Indian grooms, he would explicitly refuse any dowry, making him seem like a dream come true to families struggling to marry off their daughters.
"You have to understand the social dynamics at play here," explained a senior police officer, his voice heavy with the weight of hindsight. "When a seemingly successful government officer shows interest in a woman who's crossed the 'marriageable age,' it's like throwing a lifeline to a drowning person. And when he says he doesn't want dowry?" The officer shook his head. "In our communities, where families break their backs trying to gather enough money to marry off their daughters, that's not just an offer - it's a miracle."
The bitter irony was that the very social structures meant to protect these women - family oversight, community vigilance - became the perfect cover for their murders. When daughters disappeared, families initially panicked, but then came the reassuring phone calls. Their girls were happy, married, living comfortable lives. In a society where daughters are expected to leave their maternal homes after marriage, what seemed more natural than silence?
But the dream would always end the same way. A bus journey to a distant city - Mysuru, Bengaluru, Hassan, or Madikeri. A night in a lodge near the bus stand, where he would register under false names. The next morning, en route to their supposed wedding, he would stop at the bus stand's ladies' toilet, offering them what he claimed was a contraceptive pill. In reality, it was cyanide, obtained by posing as a jeweler to local goldsmiths who used the powder to polish jewelry.
As his victims lay dying in those anonymous bathroom stalls, Mohan Kumar would calmly walk back to the lodge, collect their jewelry, and disappear.
Sometimes, in a final twist of cruelty, he would call their families days later, assuring them their daughters were happy and well, living comfortable lives with their new husband.
But the true horror lay in how the system failed these women, not once, but twice. First by making them vulnerable, then by failing to justice their deaths. In police stations across Karnataka, their bodies were reduced to paperwork - UDR (Unidentified Death Report) cases, filed and forgotten. The bureaucratic machinery moved with glacial indifference: bodies found in bus station bathrooms were quickly cremated, cursory photos published in local papers that never reached the victims' families hundreds of kilometers away.
A damning police document later revealed the extent of this systemic failure. "The delay in conducting post-mortems meant crucial evidence was lost," it stated clinically. "Poisonous substances, including cyanide, had degraded beyond detection." But behind this bureaucratic language lay a chilling truth - every procedural delay, every oversight, every shortcut taken gave Mohan Kumar more time, more victims, more confidence.
And his body count told the story of his growing boldness: one lonely death in 2004 became three in 2005, then four in 2006. The numbers dipped slightly - three in 2007, two in 2008 - before reaching a horrifying crescendo with nine murders in 2009. Each successful kill made him more arrogant, more certain of his invincibility.
Between murders, Kumar lived a life of bizarre domesticity. Like a macabre pendulum, he swung between his two unsuspecting wives - Manjula in Kasaragod and Sridevi in Deralakatte. Each had borne him two children, each believed she was married to a respectable government officer, and each was unknowingly living off the pawned jewelry of dead women.
By the time he was caught in 2009, twenty women had fallen victim to his elaborate scheme.
The Hunt for a Phantom
In the sweltering summer of 2009, Bantwal town in Karnataka was a powder keg of communal tensions. The disappearance of Anitha Mulya, a 22-year-old beedi roller, had ignited a firestorm that would inadvertently expose one of India's most methodical serial killers. Right-wing groups, quick to label any missing girl case as 'love jihad,' had taken to the streets, their protests growing louder with each passing day.
Circle Inspector Nanjunde Gowda sat in his dimly lit office, surrounded by stacks of papers and the constant whirr of an aging ceiling fan. The pressure was mounting. What had started as a routine missing person's case was threatening to spiral into a communal riot. With the right-wing mobs breathing down their necks, Gowda and his team began what seemed like a standard investigation - combing through Anitha's phone records.
"We were looking for anything unusual," Gowda recalls, now retired and reflecting on those crucial days. "Any pattern, any anomaly that might tell us where this girl had gone." Among the maze of numbers and timestamps, one particular number caught their attention - belonging to a Madikeri resident named Sridhar.
When police arrived at Sridhar's modest home, expecting perhaps another dead end, they stumbled upon something far more sinister. The number, they learned, had belonged to his sister Kaveri - another missing woman. "That's when we knew we were dealing with something bigger," says Gowda, his voice heavy with the weight of memory. "Much bigger than we had initially thought."
Like pulling a loose thread on a sweater, each lead unraveled to reveal another missing woman. Kaveri's call records led them to Vinutha in Puttur, then to Pushpa in Kasaragod. A pattern was emerging, but it was unlike anything the police had seen before. The investigation team's first theory was human trafficking - it seemed the most logical explanation for multiple missing women.
"But something didn't add up," Gowda explains, leaning forward in his chair. "In trafficking cases, there's usually a money trail, ransom demands, some sign of the victims being alive. Here, there was just... silence. Complete silence."
The breakthrough came from an unexpected direction - the IMEI numbers of the phones used with the missing women's SIM cards. For twenty crucial minutes, one such phone had been active in Deralakatte, a quiet village on the outskirts of Mangaluru. It was like finding a footprint in the sand - the first tangible trace of their phantom killer.
The phone belonged to a man who, almost casually, mentioned giving it to his nephew - a teacher named Mohan Kumar. It was the first time their prime suspect had a name, but they needed more. They needed a witness, someone who could place him with one of the victims.
Enter Sumithra, a local tailor whose testimony would prove crucial. She had seen Anitha with a man at the bus stand, heading to Hassan. But what she revealed next sent chills down the investigators' spines - she recognized him as the same "plantation supervisor" who had proposed marriage to her in 2005. She had unknowingly escaped the fate that would befall so many others.
The Fall of Cyanide Mohan: "The Mask Slips"
Armed with Sumithra's testimony, the police set their trap with surgical precision. Using her SIM card, they lured Kumar to the local bus stand. The man they arrested seemed unremarkable - a middle-aged schoolteacher with a thick mustache and an air of respectability. But the raid on his third wife's home would reveal the true horror of his crimes.
"None of us were prepared for what we found," remembers Sanjeev Purusha, one of the investigating officers. Inside the house, they discovered large quantities of cyanide powder, counterfeit government seals, and a trail of receipts from gold financing firms. Each piece of evidence told a part of the story - how a seemingly ordinary teacher had transformed into a calculating killer.
But perhaps the most damning evidence came in the form of visiting cards - dozens of them, each bearing Kumar's photograph but with different names. Every card was a different identity, a different trap set for unsuspecting women. "It was like looking at a catalog of death," Purusha says, shaking his head. "Each card represented a potential victim."
The investigation revealed a pattern so methodical it was terrifying. Kumar had turned Karnataka's social prejudices into weapons. He targeted unmarried women from poor families, women who had crossed the traditional age of marriage and were desperate for a chance at happiness. He would approach them as a government officer, refuse dowry - an offer almost too good to be true in rural India - and then lead them to their deaths.
But it was in the courtroom that Mohan Kumar's true personality emerged. In a move that perfectly encapsulated his narcissism, he chose to represent himself. Picture this: a serial killer, surrounded by law books, meticulously cross-examining witnesses and taking notes.
"He's very thorough," admits Jayaram Shetty, the public prosecutor who faced off against him. "Quite intelligent, actually. The way he presents his cases, you can almost forget who he is. But then during cross-examination, his mask slips. His lack of formal legal training shows through, and you catch glimpses of the predator beneath."
On October 12, 2017, as Justices Ravi Malimath and John Michael Cunha delivered their verdict, they painted a chilling portrait of Kumar's methodology. The judgment noted how he used "fictitious names" to entice "gullible womenfolk and unmarried girls," promising them jobs or marriage before "administering deadly poison and robbing their valuables."
Today, Mohan Kumar sits in his prison cell, still surrounded by law books. He spends his days poring over legal texts, searching for loopholes that might set him free. But the evidence that brought him down remains irrefutable - a trail of broken lives, grieving families, and those visiting cards that tell the story of a predator who turned identity itself into a weapon.
The Aftermath
The transformation of Mohan Kumar from a reserved village boy to Karnataka's most infamous serial killer left a trail of broken lives - not just of his victims, but of those closest to him. His journey into darkness began innocuously enough. Despite lacking a teaching diploma, he secured a position as a primary school teacher in 1984, benefiting from Dalit reservation policies. The Shiradi Primary School became his first posting, but his career was marked by long suspensions due to irregular attendance and mysterious "misdeeds" - early warning signs that went unheeded.
His personal life was equally turbulent. His first marriage to Mary ended in divorce when he refused to convert to Christianity. Then came Manjula in 1992, a marriage arranged by his family within their community. Her account of their life together reveals the early shadows of the monster he would become.
"He was always nice to me," Manjula says over the phone, her voice tinged with the peculiar pain of someone forced to re-evaluate every memory. "In the early years, he was quiet - coming home from school, eating, sleeping. We never went out together, never shared the simple joys other couples did. I remember accompanying him just once, during a school trip."
The details she shares paint a picture of emotional detachment that seems chilling in retrospect. "He never even bought chocolates for the kids," she recalls. "He would give advice about their studies but never involved himself in their lives. I raised them alone while he was supposedly 'working hard' at his transferred posts." Her voice breaks slightly as she adds, "Later, I learned from the papers that he was out there hunting women."
Today, his third wife Sridevi works at a finance firm in Mangaluru, struggling to raise her children while carrying the burden of their father's infamy. She declined to speak about her ex-husband, but her silence speaks volumes about the trauma that still echoes through their lives.
"There was never any reason to suspect," recalled Putta, Sridevi's brother, his voice tinged with lingering disbelief. "He was so... normal. Just casual conversations over dinner, regular visits home, routine work trips." He paused, the weight of retrospect heavy in his words. "We even visited him in jail at first, you know? But now... now we're just trying to forget. How do you process something like this? How do you explain to the world that the man who sat at your dinner table, who helped raise your sister's children, was... this?"
When news of Kumar's arrest broke, it hit Kanyana like a thunderbolt. Local Kannada TV channels descended on the quiet village, followed by police officials and journalists hungry for details about the serial killer who had emerged from their midst. The tiny village, used to being ignored by the outside world, suddenly found itself in an unwanted spotlight.
"We were stunned. We couldn't believe it," Abdurrahman says, still struggling with the reality years later.
In Kumar's family home, the walls tell their own story of rejection and shame. Covered in dirt and soot, they're adorned with family photographs - but none of Mohan. When asked about this conspicuous absence, his brother Ramesh's response is sharp with finality: "There's no need. I burned them and threw them away."
Ramesh, who has never visited his brother in prison, offers a simple but profound observation about Mohan's descent into evil: "I think if he had good friends, he wouldn't have turned out this way. When you sit alone, you can get all sorts of terrible ideas in your head."
It's a chillingly simple explanation for the transformation of a quiet, reserved boy into a calculating killer - the danger of isolation, the power of dark thoughts left to fester in solitude. But perhaps the true horror lies in its very simplicity, in the suggestion that the distance between normalcy and monstrosity might be shorter than we'd like to believe.
Today, Kanyana carries its dark legacy with reluctant acceptance. The village that produced one of India's most notorious killers continues its ancient rhythms of farming and daily life, but beneath the surface runs an undercurrent of unspoken questions about how well we can ever really know our neighbors, our friends, our family - and ourselves.
And that's the story that has the whole India shocked beyond belief.
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