A Latvian tourist goes missing on March 14. A high-profile search yielded no trace of the foreigner.
Forty days later, the missing person’s putrefied body is discovered by chance at a swampy locality near Kovalam. Its’ found that she has been drugged, raped and killed.
On Wednesday, the State police told a court here that two local youths with a criminal record of drug abuse and pederasty were responsible for the crime that shocked Kerala’s society and portrayed its hospitality industry in poor light.
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Assistant Commissioner, Fort, J. K. Dinil, the investigating officer, submitted 104 witness statements, 112 records and 81 material objects as evidence against the accused.
The European woman had been in the capital for Ayurveda treatment. She had a history of clinical depression. Early on March 14, she arrived at Grove Beach in Kovalam and aimlessly wandered off to the wooded estuary area frequented by the accused.
The accused plied her with marijuana at the remote locality before they raped and strangulated her to death. Then they strung her up with a creeper’s vine to masquerade the murder as a suicide.
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The considerable lapse of time between the murder and the discovery of the body had hobbled the investigation’s efforts to collect incriminating DNA evidence. However, forensic doctors testified that fractured cervical vertebrae pointed to death due to strangulation.
The police have relied heavily on what they described as a singularly strong strain of circumstantial evidence to sustain their case against the youth.
For one, they told the court that youth had accosted an acquaintance and offered commercial sex with a ‘white woman’ in their ‘captivity.’ They said it proved the accused had custody of the victim for some time.
Several have testified that they saw the woman venture into the youth’s favourite haunt but never saw her return.
Rotten stench
Some witnesses said the youth side-stepped questions about a rotten stench emanating from the lake-side and later attributed the smell to a dead otter. The suspects, regulars at a local reading room, pointedly refused to broach the missing tourist’s subject though it figured prominently in local newspapers. The court is scheduled to commence the trial soon.