A Taste for Death

Nearly 20 months after Open reported the case of this serial-killer, the law caught up with M Nagendra Reddy.

A nation-wide alert has been sounded for a UK-returned software programmer. He recently escaped from a Belgaum hospital where he was admitted after slashing his wrist in prison. He is wanted for at least three murders, one of which was committed in the UK. He was nabbed in India for a murder in Bangalore. He escaped. He was caught in Hyderabad and was on trial, when he knifed a police constable to death and managed to escape again. Police say Nagendra Reddy is a psychopath and could kill at will. The Scotland Yard had already flashed an Interpol alert for the 30-year-old Hyderabadi after he left the UK where he allegedly killed his friend after a dispute in 2004. Bangalore police say he takes away his victim’s head and thumbs probably to prevent them from being identified.

Former Bangalore city deputy commissioner of police, Sharath Chandra, says, “He is a very calm and collected criminal who goes about his business with clinical precision.’’ Chandra and his team arrested Reddy in Bangalore days after a room boy found a headless body in a lodge. The victim’s thumbs were also cut off and there was blood all over the floor.

Early in the morning on 10 January 2005, a bleary-eyed Nagendra Reddy and his accomplice Madan Mohan Raj got off an inter-state bus and walked into Mahalaxmi Deluxe Lodge in the heart of Bangalore, and asked for a room. The sleepy front-desk man asked them to sign the register and pay Rs 500 as advance. They paid, registered themselves as students Vishnu and Raj from Andhra Pradesh and occupied room number 204. They slept till noon. Around 9 pm they were joined by another youngster, presumably a student, and all three went out for a drink. They came back around 11.30 pm, with more bottles. Early next morning, a room boy saw blood flowing from under the door of room 204. He alerted the lodge manager, who asked another room boy to peep in from an adjacent room. The boy saw a headless body. The manager called the police.

“For even the hardened policemen of the jurisdictional Upparpet police, the sight was shocking. Here was a body without a head and the thumbs of both hands were cut off. It was macabre. The victim’s shirt was missing but his trousers and shoes were still on. The trouser pockets were empty. A quick search in the room confirmed that the missing body parts were not hidden in the room. Someone carried a human head away from the second floor of the lodge, into the crowded road below in the busiest part of Bangalore,” says Chandra.

None of the lodge staff could say whether the body belonged to one of the two young men who had booked the room or the guest whom they had barely noticed. Sniffer dogs that were pressed into service lost the scent a few hundred yards from the lodge entrance. A preliminary investigation revealed that the two youths who had rented the room had given fake names and addresses.

As news of the murder spread, police fanned out with sparse details. Two days later, a policeman noticed a missing person’s complaint lodged at a city police station. Based on details given in the complaint, he called the complainant and asked him to identify the headless body lying at the hospital morgue. Rajesh Artham’s father, who had arrived from Hyderabad after his son went missing, identified the Satyam techie’s body based on the corpse’s trousers. “Someone who had known Rajesh had called him to the lodge, laced his drinks and murdered him. But why kill him in a gruesome manner was the question we could not answer even after we questioned all his friends and colleagues in Satyam’s Bangalore office. All of them said he never told them that he was meeting anyone that night. So it was not clear why he went to the lodge,” says Chandra.

The body of the 26-year-old was handed over to the family for funeral in Hyderabad. Days after the funeral, a family member told the police that one of Rajesh Artham’s friends, Nagendra Reddy, who was present at the funeral, was acting very strangely. He refused to see the body or get anywhere close to it. Even though he knew many people at the funeral, he was aloof. He was present at post-funeral ceremonies, too, but lingered outside Artham’s house and refused to enter.

Police sent a team to Hyderabad and traced Reddy to his house. The short and well-built Reddy answered all their questions calmly—rather, too calmly. By then there was information that someone had been using Artham’s credit cards in Vijayawada, Pune and New Delhi. The cops noticed that Reddy had acquired brand new accessories. They took him in for questioning. He was a tough nut to crack. But, after three days in custody, Reddy finally cracked under sustained interrogation. What he revealed was shocking.

After a two-and-a-half-year stint in the UK, Reddy, a diploma holder from a Hyderabad institute who also knew computer programming, was looking for a job in the city. He was the outgoing type. At a resort in the city’s outskirts, on the new year’s eve of 2005, Artham had passed some comments about a girl that Reddy had taken a liking for. The girl was also related to Reddy. Artham passed some more lewd comments.

A few days later, Artham was transferred to Satyam’s Bangalore office. Reddy kept in touch with him and promised to meet him in Bangalore soon. He did. Artham came to the lodge to have a nice time with Reddy and one Madan Mohan Raj. When Artham went to the toilet, Reddy added sleeping tablets to his drink. After Artham slumped in his chair, Reddy got to work. He shifted a semi-conscious Artham to the floor, pulled out a long kitchen knife and slit his neck. “He separated the victim’s head and body with surgical precision that surprised even the forensic experts who examined the body,” says Chandra.

Reddy then removed the victim’s shirt, wrapped the head in it and packed it in his kit bag. Meanwhile, his accomplice emptied the contents of Artham’s pockets and handed them to Reddy who was busy cutting off the thumbs to make the identification impossible. After a meticulous examination of the room for any clues that may lead back to them, the two walked out of the lodge. It was past midnight. Madan Mohan Raj, who was eventually nabbed, went his way as Reddy walked 3 km to Idgah Maidan on the Mysore Road and buried Artham’s head. “He walked back to the inter-state bus stand and took the first bus to Vijayawada the next morning,’’ Chandra says.

Later in Vijayawada, he attended Artham’s funeral. After Reddy’s confession, the police patted themselves on the back for a job well done. The accused was in jail. A few weeks later, the UK High Commission wrote a letter to the police top brass asking if they could furnish Reddy’s details as a similar person with the same name was wanted by Scotland Yard, whose officers had already put out an Interpol red corner notice for him.

According to the High Commission’s letter, one Nagendra Reddy, a computer programmer from Hyderabad, was wanted in the UK for murder of his friend, Radha Krishna Chipuru. Reddy allegedly killed Chipuru over a monetary dispute in the UK in 2004. There too, he had killed Chipuru with a kitchen knife, decapitated his head and tried to burn it. The thumbs on the victim’s hands were missing. When police here quizzed Reddy, he denied that he was the same person and claimed he had never been to the UK. But the cops were certain that he was involved in the UK murder, too. They planned to interrogate him again. That’s when Reddy escaped.

Reddy had gone to the UK in February 2002 after he got a job offer as web master in BIPS Info Tech, Wembley, London. Within a few months, he met Chipuru and made friends with him. Soon, the friendship blossomed and both decided to do a side business while keeping their regular jobs. Each invested £2,500. Things turned sour between them after Chipuru apparently misused the money. Reddy decided to kill him. Scotland Yard alleges that Reddy paid two Indian-origin men, Akram, a taxi-driver and another Nain, £5,000 to get rid of his friend. In October 2004, they lured Chipuru to a house in Hounslow, a London suburb, and stabbed him to death. They packed his body in a blanket, drove it in the taxi and disposed of it.

In August 2006, when Reddy heard that cops from the UK were coming for him, he hatched a plan to escape. He slashed his wrist. Jail officials in Bangalore’s sprawling Parappana Agrahara Central Prison on the city’s outskirts took him to the prison’s hospital for first aid. From there, he was taken to Victoria Hospital in the city centre as he also complained of severe backache. When he was recouping at the hospital’s prison ward, police say, they unshackled him as he wanted to go to the toilet (there are allegations that Reddy’s friends had bribed the policemen). The story gets hazy here, but the point is that Reddy did not return from the toilet. He vanished.

Reddy managed to get to Hindupur in Andhra Pradesh. There he hired a taxi to Hyderabad. No one knows how he got money for it, but on the way he convinced the driver to spend a few hours in a wayside lodge as he was feeling extremely sleepy. The driver accompanied him to the room for “a small drink” as he later said in his complaint. As soon as the driver fell asleep, Reddy made off with the car. Reddy and two accomplices used the car for a few days for their personal work. When they ran short of money, they decided to sell the car, and struck a deal with a businessman in Dharmavaram. When they realised that he was carrying the Rs 60,000 that they had asked for in cash, they robbed him and drove off in the car. But Andhra police soon nabbed them.

While his accomplices, Chintala Srishailam and B Srihari were held in Hyderabad jail, Reddy was taken to Bangalore. In Parappana Agrahara, the prison where he was lodged, officials say Reddy wrote an anonymous letter to the state Human Rights Commission, alleging several instances of corruption in the jail that led to a surprise inspection by the Commission. After the Commission’s visit, jail officials decided to transfer Reddy to the Belgaum Central Jail as he had become a headache for them. This was achieved in March 2009.

On 7 May, Reddy slashed both his wrists. Jail officials took him to a nearby hospital. On 10 May, as he was recuperating with a heavy bandage on both his arms, he had a tiff with constable Chandrakant Kamble, the lone duty sentry guarding the ward door. It is not clear how Reddy managed to have a knife in his possession. He stabbed Kamble with it and escaped from the hospital. Kamble died a few hours later.

A family member of Artham, who did not wish to be quoted, said his family is now terrified.
“Reddy has a good network of friends who will do anything for him as he is known to be generous.” Enquiries in Hyderabad revealed that Reddy’s family had shifted back to their native Mahabubnagar after his previous escape and arrest in 2007. Western Karnataka’s Inspector-General of Police R Auradkar says that two days after Reddy’s second escape, the police traced Kamble’s mobile to a beach in Goa. The phone was in use. A large police team descended on a slightly built person conversing on the phone. He turned out to be a waiter at one of the beach shacks. Reddy had sold him the mobile.

A man hunt is still on.

murderNagendra ReddypsychopathScotland Yard