When the Chittoor police nabbed Kondappagari Madhukar Reddy on January 30 from his hideout on the outskirts of Madanapalle, they did not interrogate him. “What was there to interrogate? We thought our job was done by recapturing the man who had escaped from jail,” said a policemen.
On the morning of January 31, as the police showed him his arrest warrant, Reddy said, “I will tell you everything.” But he didn’t.
Trail of death
After escaping in 2011, Reddy said, he fled from Kadapa to Hyderabad where his parents eked out a living as labourers. Shunned by his family, he got a lowly job in a hotel. The same year, he claimed to have killed a woman at Kasu Brahmananda Reddy National Park in Hyderabad for money. The local police in Hyderabad are verifying the details. In 2013, he assaulted a government employee in Jadcherla in Telangana. From there, he travelled to Kadiri in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh where he allegedly murdered a housewife, fenced her gold earrings, used her debit card to withdraw ₹3,400, and a few days later fled to Bengaluru.
At this point Reddy stopped talking to the police. But the mention of Bengaluru was enough for them to realise that there could well be more to his story. On November 19, 2013, around 7.10 a.m., a woman, Jyothi Uday, a bank manager, had been brutally attacked by an unidentified man armed with a machete at an ATM in Bengaluru. Caught on CCTV, the horrific crime made headlines across the country.
When Reddy clammed up, the police immediately alerted their seniors, they started interrogating him. Over two days (January 31 to February 2), Madhukar Reddy confessed to a series of unsolved murders. Yes, he was the 2013 ATM attacker. He went on to murder a woman in Piler, Chittor, in 2015. He then murdered a sex worker in Hyderabad.
For a year and a half, between 2014 and 2016, he roamed around in Kerala where he reportedly got his head tonsured to escape detection, before returning to Andhra Pradesh and settling down in Madanapalle for “health reasons”.
“He decided on a life of petty crime as he claimed he could no longer run fast, and that even a small walk tired him,” said a police officer from Chittoor.
‘Q’ is for quarry
Investigators are still piecing together the criminal jigsaw of his adult life: Four alleged murders, and two known assaults. It was not the murders though, but the attack on Jyothi Uday captured on CCTV that garnered notoriety.
The footage shows a man with a bag slung around his shoulders slip into the kiosk, pulling down the shutters behind him. When Ms. Uday confronts him, he pulls out a pistol and a machete from his bag. He attacks her head and face with the machete, wipes the blade clean, puts the weapon back into his bag, and leaves.
Grim voyeur
A Class X drop out, 38-year-old Reddy belongs to a “peculiar breed of criminals”, one who prefers to remain in the vicinity of the crime scene and revel in the fallout. “He told us that he would even mingle with the curious public when they gathered at the spot,” said a police officer .
After leaving Ms. Uday lying in a pool of blood at the ATM, he waited in the vicinity for a few hours. Even as the Bengaluru police, headed by the then Commissioner Raghavendra Auradkar, scrambled to put together a team to hunt him down, Reddy went to a local saloon that had a TV set and watched news channels repeatedly flash the footage of the attack. He realised that Ms. Uday had survived.
Across the city, pressure was mounting as citizens started calling the control room to report sightings of Reddy. Teams analysed over 50 lakh calls from tower locations in Bengaluru, and rounded up suspects and habitual offenders for leads. But Reddy was not a local.
He reportedly arrived in Bengaluru with no money on November 12, 2013 a few days after killing the housewife in Anantpur and spent the night in Cubbon Park. The next morning, he started looking for a victim and homed in on Ms. Uday. “Our search for him was dubbed as the second biggest operation to be launched by the Bengaluru city police after the hunt for forest brigand Veerappan,” said a senior Bengaluru official.
Under the tenure of then Bengaluru police commissioner Raghavendra Auradkar, around 600 personnel in 15 teams combed Karnataka and neighbouring States. A cash reward of ₹5 lakh, later increased to ₹10 lakh, was announced. Over 10,000 pamphlets with Reddy’s face were printed and distributed.
In the intervening years, the baton for the post of Bengaluru Police Commissioner changed hands three times. “At times it became so embarrassing that we started avoiding the media whenever they would ask us about the progress made,” said a senior police officer, adding that the total expenditure by the city police on the manhunt is estimated at around ₹2.5 crore.
It was an exercise in futility and on November 8, 2016, the Bengaluru police officially closed the case. Less than 90 days later, Madhukar Reddy was in the custody of the Chittoor police. A team from Bengaluru that went to Chittoor on February 4 has matched his fingerprints to the crime scene in the ATM kiosk and are waiting for their turn to have him in custody.
Chance capture
Madhukar’s capture, however, was not the result of an efficient investigation, but the exact opposite. His face was clearly seen in the ATM attack, yet not a single policeman identified him even though he was an escaped convict. The Bengaluru police claim that his fingerprints lifted from the ATM kiosk did not throw up a match in the database. If all that he has confessed is true, then he was able to continue his murder spree unchecked.
“His last photograph taken a few hours before his escape in 2011, remained with the personnel of Kadapa jail, and no one bothered to check it again. We say human memory is short. This is the perfect example,” said a police official from Chittoor.
