Lady Killers

AT FIRST, I wrote about people who were doing awful things because if they didn’t, someone else would. They posted fake news, joined lynch mobs, and organised riots. None of them was accused of any crime; in fact, many benefitted from their actions. A college dropout got funds to start a business; an insurance salesman was appointed to a government office; and a hopelessly unmatched person received a marriage proposal. These people told me they were operating in a culture where a sure shot way to climb up the ladder is to bring it down on those you didn’t want to see getting ahead of you.

I graduated to writing about people whose crimes were taken more seriously. They featured in FIRs, appeared at trials, and slept on cold floors inside cramped jails. In back-to-back newspaper articles, I described the lives of scamsters, stalkers, rapists and murderers. Then came paedophiles and serial killers. The crime scenes gave me nightmares, but I carried on with these stories because of the access they gave me to worlds I couldn’t otherwise enter. Every crime I covered was a quick study in the fault lines that keep India on edge. People killed each other over caste and religion; also, parking space and ration cards. Each of them had a unique method or motivation, but one thing was common: all of them were men.

Where were the women? Far fewer women are found committing crimes. As of December 31st, 2019, a total of 4,78,600 prisoners, including undertrials, detenues (in custody) and convicts, were confined in various jails across the country, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau. The number of female inmates came to 19,913.

When they do, it’s usually attributed to their circumstances, ranging from love to dowry. “We can’t imagine that they did it, you know, on purpose,” writes Tori Telfer in her 2017 book, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History. We may forgive a woman for robbing a bank under a man’s influence but going as far as to kill someone is not seen as feminine.

Real women who kill aren’t written about or glorified in film and television—for a reason. Tefler argues that “women are seen as solely capable of reactive homicide-murder done in self-defense, a burst of passion, an imbalance of hormones, a wave of hysteria — and not instrumental homicide, which can be plotted, calculated, and performed in cold blood.”

If a culprit does appear out of nowhere, what we want to know is not why or how she did it. Telfer puts it plainly: “First, we’ll probably check to see if she’s hot or not.”

A witness box is where I first saw Priya Seth. She was standing before a sessions court in Jaipur to defend herself against a murder charge. Her kurta was pink, her dupatta yellow and her slippers multi-coloured. She wore a scowl unless she was silently greeting members of her family in the crowd. When she did that, I noticed she had a nice smile.

By 2018, when she was arrested, 27-year-old Seth had been running a successful con game in the city for several years. She promised beautiful escorts to rich businessmen over WhatsApp, set up encounters in luxury hotels, met them in the lounge to collect the money, and told them to go up to their rooms and wait. Then she drove away with the cash, turned off her phone, and lay low until her next catch. If any of them filed a police case, she got out using bail and a bribe. This was decent money, but she wanted to go to Bombay and up her game, and that needed wads of cash.

Prowling Tinder one day, she saw a young man from Delhi, a millionaire party boy visiting Jaipur and looking for fun. She swiped right on Vivan Kohli. After they met a few times in local cafes, she invited him over to her house to spend the evening. There, she waited with two male friends to ambush him and extort his family for a fat sum of money. After they had Kohli tied to a chair and his ID card out of his wallet, they realised he had been lying all along. He wasn’t Vivan Kohli. Worse, he was neither rich nor from Delhi. Dushyant Sharma was a city boy from a middle-class family. He had an office job, a small salary, and a wife at home. Furious, Seth called up his father and told him to wire transfer his life savings if he wanted to see him alive again. The old man broke a fixed deposit and sent over ₹ 3,00,000 rupees. But by that time, Seth and her friends had allegedly killed Sharma, chopped up his body, and stuffed it in a suitcase. Before driving off to throw it away, they stopped at an ATM where Seth got out and withdrew ₹ 25,000, the maximum amount she could withdraw in a day. They were arrested the next day.

The three of them hired separate lawyers and threw the blame at one another. Seth, however, became the face of the killing—a female criminal of the kind that hits the news cycle once or twice in a generation. A lady killer who was as beautiful as she was clever. Everyone I met in Jaipur had a theory about her. A local journalist also covering the case told me her actions had a simple explanation: no woman born so beautiful would be content with a regular life. Her lawyer also believed she wasn’t cut out for simple living. He believed she was too smart for that. “That girl, she can make a fool out of any man,” he said, summing up her deceptive talents as “an art.” When you have a mind like that, he said, money chases you and not you, it. And when money landed in her bag, she knew what to do with it. “Clothes, cosmetics, five-star meals, business-class flights…”

Over the course of a long trial, I heard more details of her lifestyle than her crimes. When the investigating officer raided her house, he was struck by the bottles of mineral water and the packets of Marlboro. “The water alone must have cost ₹ 300-400 a day. Four days into the jail, she complained of an upset stomach and asked for bottled water,” he said. She also demanded cigarettes, according to reports in the local newspapers. A lawyer for the prosecution asked if it didn’t signal the end of all things good and moral. “She should be requesting a portrait of Lord Ram so she can confess her sins,” he said while we waited outside the courtroom one day. “Next thing you know she would be asking permission to wear jeans and top inside the jail,” he added for effect.

Every morning, the newspapers carried graphics adding up the monthly cost of her lifestyle, including watches, perfumes, and food deliveries. By evening, the prices of her reported luxuries multiplied. A report in the Dainik Bhaskar put the price of a pair of her sandals at ₹ 35,000. Later that day, an aunt of Dushyant told me she had it from reliable sources that they were worth ₹ 80,000. They even had a term for her condition: money craze.

These stories amused as well as annoyed me. In years of writing about men accused of horrible crimes, I rarely saw them being condemned for living it up. There was a clear sense of awe in the reports describing their cars, bungalows, and foreign travel. No matter where it led them, ambition was an admirable quality in men. Three kinds of men attract attention, Seth’s lawyer explained to me once. “The first are those who drive Jaguar and wear velvet suits (with cash coming out of their pockets), gold chain, and gold rings on all their fingers. The second are those who drink expensive alcohol. And the third are those who are surrounded by beautiful women.” He said he had benefited from these laws of attraction himself. His legal career was built on defending disreputable women in cases involving the sex trade. Many of them happen to be beautiful, which earns him a great deal of envy around the court, he claimed.

His family didn’t know about the nature of his work. His wife was a simple homemaker and his two daughters worked as dentist and banker. He felt he had to protect them from the sordid world of his clients. “I have to keep my family and business separated. As they say, drink, but don’t drive.” Separating good girls from bad ones is constant work in the world of crime. In the course of reporting Seth’s trial, I was repeatedly asked to clarify and confirm my own character, by cops, lawyers, jailers and the families of the accused and the victim. The questions were sharp: Was I married? Did my parents know my whereabouts? How much money did I make? Was it more or less than what my husband made? Those who were satisfied with my answers became protective. A fellow lawyer once chided Seth’s defendant for telling me dirty details of his clients. A member of Dushyant’s family told me my good character showed I must have always listened to my parents.

Those who suspected I fell on the bad side tried their luck. A police officer kept inviting me to have dinner with him, and a public prosecutor offered to book a hotel for my next visit. I kept saying no. Men outnumber women not only among criminals but also on the side of the law, and female reporters have a hard time, to put it mildly. Once, while writing the profile of a gangster in Haryana, a female colleague and I sought permission to interview him in jail. The jailer asked my co-reporter who happened to be single (therefore a bad girl) if she had boyfriends. We could meet the gangster, he texted her later, but only after she met him alone on a date.
Often, the same men had strong views on how women’s crimes don’t hurt the victims alone but also the wider humanity. The police officer insisting on dinner used to say it was his moral duty to ensure Seth was punished because her crimes threatened Jaipur’s image as the visual embodiment of Indian culture. “People come from all over the world to see our culture. We have to preserve it,” he said. The public prosecutor offering free stay singled out Seth’s case because she didn’t kill for love or honour. “It’s not a crime to do it for a man but she did it for money.”

Jolly Joseph, too, did it for money if you asked anyone in Koodathayi. In October 2019, 47-year-old Jolly was arrested from her family bungalow in coastal Kerala. She was charged with killing her ex-husband, Roy Thomas, eight years earlier by poisoning his food with potassium cyanide. The police also dug out the mortal remains of six other members of her husband’s family. She was suspected of poisoning five of them to death. When I met KG Simon, head of the Special Investigation Team (SIT), at his office, he said Jolly had confessed to five of the six murder charges including Thomas’. Simon argued she eyed the “family property and money”. On the day of her arrest, he said she kept murmuring “no one can take away the house from me.” It wasn’t clear how she managed to kill six relatives between 2002 and 2016, a 14-year-period, in a village community without attracting much suspicion. Simon called her “a brilliant criminal”.

The first person to die was Jolly’s mother-in-law, 57-year-old Annamma Thomas, in 2002. She collapsed in her bedroom in the family bungalow after taking a few sips from a bowl of mutton soup served by Jolly. She took over the family’s finances and the care of her father-in-law, Tom Thomas, who went on to make a fixed deposit in her name and appoint her as his nominee in a life insurance policy. Six years after his wife’s death, Tom died from no apparent illness. He had just eaten a plate of mashed Tapioca. Afterward, Jolly put out a will from him in which he had passed on the family property to Roy, cutting off his other two children. “It had no witness signatures and no official stamp,” Roy’s sister, Renji Thomas, told me after Jolly’s arrest. The husband squandered the money in business ventures, drank more and more, and fought with Jolly. The couple was finally left with only the family bungalow. In 2011, Roy, 40, died an hour after having a dinner of rice and chickpeas curry. He threw up the meal and foamed at the mouth before being taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. His autopsy report pointed to cyanide poisoning. Jolly told the close relatives it had to be suicide.

A new will appeared from the late Tom Thomas, this one signing over the family property to his daughter-in-law. It was signed by witnesses and stamped by the state revenue department. Several years later, Roy’s two siblings discovered Jolly had bribed and manipulated the local authorities. “We figured out she had produced fake documents at every level—village, taluk, panchayat—to have the ownership changed,” Renji told me. But in 2011, no one challenged her directly. Not until more people died—in 2014, a 68-year-old brother of Annamma Thomas who had been insisting on a police investigation of Roy’s death and in 2016 the 44-year-old wife of a nephew of Tom Thomas. Jolly had seen them before their deaths. She married the dead woman’s husband, Shaju Zacharias, a year later. In 2019, Roy’s brother, Rojo, filed an appeal to the district police asking for an investigation into his death.

Within hours of her arrest, Jolly Joseph became a household name in Kerala. They called her the “cyanide killer”. Her “money-craze” was all over the headlines. Family members spoke of her love of a good life: she ate meat daily, wore fashionable clothes, bought expensive cosmetics. Neighbours said she would have done anything to keep up her lifestyle. The people in her village had never really related to her, but if earlier they thought of her as “extrovert” and “charismatic”, now she was, simply, a bad woman. Her church said she rarely attended service. The mothers at her children’s school called her a snob. Her second husband told me she had “trapped” him.

Like Priya, Jolly was also a gifted con-artist. For a decade until her arrest, she posed as a teacher at the prestigious National Institute of Technology (NIT-C) in Kozhikode. Every morning, she dressed formally, wore an official ID badge, and drove an ambassador car to the city. No one smelt her bluff until the police approached the institute. Fooling people is a powerful skill; no society admires it in a woman. Kozhikode was as aghast by Jolly’s deception as Jaipur was by Priya’s. On October 11th, 2019, when Jolly was produced at the Kozhikode district court, a crowd had been waiting for a sight. They booed and heckled, and some even rushed forward to deliver mob justice before they were restrained.

The fact is wives have been poisoning their husbands to death since the existence of marriage and poison. At 48, Nannie Doss was almost the same age as Jolly Joseph when she was arrested in 1954 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for eliminating her husband with arsenic. Doss confessed to killing him. Later in police custody, she told the cops, giggling, that she had more on her conscience to clear. Sam Doss wasn’t the first husband she had poisoned to death. There had been four before him. Their graves were dug, and arsenic discovered in each of their bodies. Some of them were served it in their morning coffee, some in special treats such as stewed prunes. As to why she killed five husbands in a row, she gave simple reasons. The first was mean, the second abusive, the third a drunk, the fourth a philanderer, and the fifth a boring prude. He didn’t let her dance.

Profiled as “The Giggling Grandma” in Tefler’s book on famous lady killers, Nannie was “Oklahoma’s biggest news story of 1954, and she knew it.” In custody and on camera, the plump, grandmotherly woman wore curled hair, cat-eyeglasses, lipstick and a double string of pearls. She flirted with the police and smiled at the press. A celebrity in 1950s ’ America, Nannie disrupted the popular idea of women’s domestic life. Tefler writes, “She was the twisted parody of the housewife, a woman seemingly obsessed with marriage, and uh, cooking, but a woman who used her feminine charms to catch and kill men instead of catching and keeping them.” After a long-winded trial during which she was examined for insanity, sent to a mental asylum, and then found to be sane, Nannie pleaded guilty and got life in prison.

Jolly’s case was doomed long before it went to trial. No local lawyer agreed to represent her. One from Mumbai took it on while being wary of the media trial. In August 2020, the Kerala High Court granted her a bail in view of the fact that the case against her relied on extra judicial confessions, but hearing an appeal against it in 2021, the Supreme Court revoked the order.

Around the same time this year, the Rajasthan High Court denied bail to Priya Seth. Appeals to seek her release have been rejected multiple times before. I followed the trial for as long as the court seemed interested in conducting it. For more than a year now, no witness has been asked to appear in the case either in person or remotely. Seth remains in Jaipur’s women’s jail, waiting. The last update I received about her was from her jailer. She told me the prisoner had placed a request for a book: the Hanuman Chalisa.

crimeIndian societyJolly JosephKeralaPriya Sethwomen killer