The unexplained death of Sharmila, a young software engineer from Ramamurthy Nagar, the area of Bengaluru, in January had put the city’s tech corridor into shock. What at first seemed to be a suspicious death has, on closer examination, devolved into a cold-blooded murder. The police, who had spent long efforts investigating the case, as well as "drilling" suspects, caught a neighbour, then 18, Karnal Kurai, who has confessed to the awful crime.
A Premeditated Strike
Kurai’s “twisted mindset” came up during questioning. He confessed to stalking Sharmila for days before the crime. Police reports indicate that the suspect did “recce” (surveillance) on Sharmila’s flat four to five times, finding her schedule, preparing room for the best entry into the flat to slip inside. Kurai had crept into the apartment on the fateful day January 16. He waited for just this moment, ambushed Sharmila from behind, then resorted to violence: pulling her down with violent force.
A Violent Struggle and a Gruesome Act
The inquiry describes a savage fight. No matter how much Sharmila pleaded and gave the accused a ferocious resistance, the accused refused to submit. Sharmila’s head fell on the sofa in the mix, and it appears to have caused a massive bleeding. Undeterred by her injury, the defendant attempted to sexually assault her.
As Sharmila kept resisting, the suspect allegedly strangled her with both hands until she stopped breathing. In the most extreme of depravity, Kurai confessed to police that, still after she had died, he had tried to violate the body. He confessed to wiping bloodstains out of her own clothes and then attempted to clean up after himself in an effort to destroy evidence.
The Trail of Evidence
Kurai set the victim in clothes fresh from her wardrobe and arranged her body to appear dead by natural causes. He also experimented taking a little tissue paper fire and putting it over her original top on the bed and imagining there would also be an instant fire from all that old evidence on there. The fatal mistake killed him.
Leaving her blood-slicked pants on a tree by the adjacent house when he had to, in his scramble to escape which he did not dispose of well but had become a trail of blood. He fled with her mobile phone, which left digital breadcrumbs to the authorities.
Karnal Kurai is charged with murder, house-trespass and attempted sexual assault with Ramamurthy Nagar police. The assault depicts as shocking a picture of the urban safety of city life, where the predator was no stranger but was the neighbor from several feet away. The arrest has brought some measure of justice to family members of the Mangaluru-based engineer, though the utter savagery of the crime has scarred the town for life.
