With only T-shirt from headless torso, police unravel murder
A major part of the intervening days between the recovery of the body and the arrest of the accused was spent on tracing the identity of the deceased.
Representative image (Illustration: Saai)
CHENNAI: He was supposed to live an ascetic life. But, he shot his co-worker to death allegedly due to animosity over friendship with the same woman, chopped his body into pieces and disposed of the parts in waterbodies in and around Chennai in December last week. A day later, he did a pooja and left for Sabarimala and would have gotten away with murder, if not for meticulous investigation by the Tambaram city police.
On Saturday, Kundrathur police arrested two security guards of an IT park in Ramapuram for the murder of their co-worker.
A major part of the intervening days between the recovery of the body and the arrest of the accused was spent on tracing the identity of the deceased.
“All we had was the T-shirt from the torso we recovered. We started from there,” said inspector E Velu. On December 30, the police secured the headless and limbless torso from Chembarambakkam lake near Sirukalathur.
A headless torso’s T-shirt leads clueless police to the victim
A few metres away, the severed legs, too, were recovered. The body seemed to be that of a man in his late 30s. The Kundrathur police alerted other jurisdictions to check if they had received any “man missing” complaint matching the description of the body they recovered.
Simultaneously, police began their “T-shirt trail”. As the manufacturer is based in Bengaluru, a team was sent there. “Using the barcode in the T-shirt, we were able to narrow down the batch. About 1,000 T-shirts were made in the batch and about 680 of them were sold, “ the inspector said.
Kundrathur police took the purchase details of all the 680-odd sold T-shirts and started to pore over the list. After eliminating over 400 buyers, the police narrowed down on a purchase from a shop at a mall in Chennai. “It was a credit card transaction. After tracing the phone number linked to the account, we got our first clue,” said a senior police officer.
The T-shirt was bought by Bhoominathan (33), a security guard at an IT park in Ramapuram. And, as expected by the police, his live-in partner had reported him missing at the Nandambakkam police station.
From then on, it was only a matter of time for the police to find out Bhoominathan’s ‘slaughterer’. Using call record details and other aids, they zeroed in on the main suspect, Dilip Kumar (34), the deceased’s co-worker.
Bhoominathan and Dilip Kumar were at loggerheads over their interest in the same woman, another co-worker. Irate over this, Dilip Kumar decided to murder Bhoominathan. On the night of December 27, he shot him in the head with a gun he had procured from Bihar.
He then chopped off the head and all the limbs and packed them in a sack. With the help of another co-worker, Vicky (23), he took the sack in a two-wheeler and dumped the torso in Chembarambakkam lake and the legs nearby. He threw his head and hands in a lake near Mudichur. They were recovered last Friday.
“The gun was procured from Patna. Whether he had procured the gun for this murder or he had it for a while will be known after we take him into custody,” a senior police officer said. Police recovered two guns and more than 10 bullets from the accused.
