Woman held for killing husband in Moodbidri

Moodbidri police recently solved a year-old murder case of a man, wherein it turned out that his wife killed him and daughter helped in destroying the evidence.

Chandravati, the wife of Ashok, a herpetologist from Moodbidri, filed a complaint with police 15 months ago, saying that her husband had gone to Bangalore with a person she did not know and did not return. Mangalore police commissioner Seemanth Kumar Singh said the police did their best to trace out Ashok, but did not succeed.

When the police exhausted all avenues, they decided to interrogate his wife.

Intense questioning led her to confess that she had killed him on the night of December 7, 2010.

Singh said Chandravati killed her husband by crushing his head with a grinding stone. She disposed of the body by burning it in a toilet pit and scattered the ash around coconut trees near her house. Their daughter Ashwini helped her destroy the evidence by disposing of the bones. The police have recovered some bones and sent them to Bangalore for DNA analysis to give conclusive evidence of the crime. Singh said this was a serious case.

For more than 20 years, Ashok took up odd jobs in and around Mangalore and Moodbidri for a living, but most of the times he was into catching snakes that strayed into houses, offices and farmhouses in and around Mangalore.

Even renowned herpetologist Romulus Whitaker took his help when setting up a captive breeding centre for king cobra at Pilikula Nisarga Dhama.