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September 24, 2023 10:30 pm | Updated September 25, 2023 04:04 pm IST
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A crucial breakthrough:A 13-year-old boy, employed at Devaki’s house, identified the trunk that contained the body parts as belonging to Devaki’s husband P. Prabhakara Menon in the year 1952. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStockphoto
The headless body of a man, aged around 35, was found in a trunk in a carriage of the Indo-Ceylon Express (also called Boat Mail) on August 29, 1952, after passengers complained of a foul smell emanating from underneath their seats. The guard of the train informed the Manamadurai station master, who alerted the police, and the carriage was detached. When the trunk, which was stashed under the seats, was opened, a body was found with both hands and the right leg severed. Mystery surrounded the identity of the person. At 4 p.m. on September 1, a person saw something bobbing up and down in the sea off Royapuram, nearly 500 kilometres away from Manamadurai. It was the severed head of a man. It was decomposed and beyond recognition. The Hindu had reported both incidents.
Three days later, the police confirmed that the head and body parts belonged to Alavandar, a Chennai businessman, who was reported missing. They went to his shop and found out that Alavandar had been missing for a while. On information that he was last seen accompanying a young woman, named Devaki, to her house, they headed there. A 13-year-old boy employed at Devaki’s house identified the trunk that contained the body parts as belonging to Devaki’s husband P. Prabhakara Menon, who was employed in an insurance company in Madras. The couple resided at 62, Cemetery Road, Royapuram. That was when the needle of suspicion pointed to the couple, who had by then disappeared from their house.
Divisional Detective Inspector M.A. Jabbar and his team arrested Prabhakara Menon, 25, on September 10 in Bombay and Devaki, 21, two days later in the same city. Their interrogation revealed the motive, plan and execution of the crime.
The circumstances of the crime were all part of a pot-boiler. The manner in which the case unravelled, the personality of the accused couple, their relationship with each other and with the deceased, the manner in which the body was found had caught the fancy of people, and many followed the case closely for months.
Alavandar was born on May 12, 1910. He was a graduate and was first employed as a sub-divisional officer in the military at Avadi. After leaving the military, he started his trade in cheap fountain pens and plastics on the verandah of Gem and Company. A lot of young men and women came to him to buy pens, and he himself was a swashbuckling debonair. In fact, Justice A.S.P. Aiyer, who delivered the judgment in the case, recorded, “He seems to have been a kind of Don Juan.” People also read from the magazines of the time that a few years earlier, he was diagnosed with a venereal disease.
Alavandar’s relationship with Devaki, the eldest daughter of a retired railway official, started when she was not yet married to Menon, and was just 21. When they met, she was doing social work, besides taking Hindi tuitions. In October 1951, Alavandar took her to a hotel room and had a physical relationship with her. Later, Devaki learnt that Alavandar was married and had children and that he had been in relationship with many others.
After snapping her ties to him, she married Menon, who was employed with Premier Insurance Company, in June 1952. The couple moved to the house on Cemetery Road, Royapuram. However, Alavandar had never stopped trying to seduce Devaki; he threatened her that he would reveal their relationship unless she agreed to his proposal. He asked her whether she would be free at night. Unable to bear his torture, she disclosed everything to her husband. The prosecution said she had invited him to her house with a plan on August 28. She opened the door and let him in around noon. Alavander was under the influence of opium and attempted to seduce her. By then, Menon came in and wanted to know whether Alavandar knew Devaki was a married woman. His entry shocked Alavandar, but he replied that he, indeed, knew that Devaki was married, according to court records.
Menon was livid and tied Alavandar to a chair. As Alavandar kicked him, Menon fell. Further incensed, he attacked him with a meat cutter on the head and stabbed him with a kitchen knife in the chest, causing a fatal wound. Then, he severed Alavandar’s head and put it in a bag. He hailed a rickshaw and took the bag to the seashore at Royapuram and tossed the bag into the sea. Returning home, he stuffed the body in a trunk, covered it with a cloth, and took it in a rickshaw to Egmore Railway Station. With the help of the rickshaw-puller, he stashed the box underneath the seats in one of the carriages of the Boat Mail. Devaki admitted that she wiped the blood stains on the floor with a wet cloth. She helped her husband pack the trunk with her sari. She also knew that her husband was taking the trunk away in a rickshaw. After her husband left, she locked up the house and went to Bombay. Her husband later joined her in that city, the prosecution alleged in the court.
The trial went for seven days before Justice A.S.P.Aiyer, who presided over the first Criminal Sessions of the Madras High Court. The prosecution examined 50 witnesses. B.T. Sundararajan appeared for the defence and State Prosecutor S. Govind Swaminathan for the prosecution. In March 1953, Menon was sentenced to seven years of rigorous imprisonment and Devaki to three years of rigorous imprisonment under Section 304(1) (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of the Indian Penal Code. On completion of their terms, the couple moved to Kerala.
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