At about one in the morning on October 2, 2006, a burglar stood over Devaki, known as Baby, as she slept in her house at Puthenvelikkara, a village without street lights on the Ernakulam side of the border with Thrissur. He had already struck her husband, Ramakrishnan, a sixty-year-old retired soldier, twice on the head with an iron rod in another room. He beat her with the same rod, stripped her, and cut off her left hand at the wrist to take her six gold bangles. He searched the house, left the gas cylinder open and kerosene spilled through the rooms, and went away with the bangles, a gold necklace, ninety-six grams of gold in all, and 1,300 rupees from a clay piggy bank. Devaki, fifty or fifty-one by different accounts, was dead. Her husband survived with permanent brain damage. When relatives came looking for them the next day, a friend opened a window on the scene.
The killing set off a panic in the district. Neighborhood vigilance squads formed, and the pressure on the police was enormous. A woman nearby said a man had broken into her house the night before and taken an electric torch, which turned up in Devaki's house; others reported an iron rod, a large knife, a green shirt and a saffron mundu stolen, and the rod and knife were found in Devaki's well. Seven weeks later, on November 23, acting on a tip from an informant with a record of petty crime, the police arrested K P Jayanandan, a thirty-eight-year-old estuary fisherman from the village of Poyya, and announced that he had confessed to five unsolved murder cases going back to 2003, two of them double killings. The Kerala press called him Ripper Jayanandan. Almost everything said about him in public since rests on those confessions, and he retracted them as soon as he was brought before a magistrate. He has said ever since that they were beaten out of him.
He was born in 1968 in Poyya, a place of backwaters and shrimp farms in Thrissur district, about ten kilometers from Puthenvelikkara, and left school after class eight. He belonged to the Kudumbi community, a marginalized Konkani-speaking people whose ancestors fled Goa and settled in the Kerala marshlands, and he had worked on the estuary since childhood, skilled with the Chinese fishing nets used there. When he was arrested he was in debt and living in a modest house with his wife, two daughters still at school, and his elderly parents.
The police put a string of cases to him. In September 2003, in Mala police station limits, Jose, forty-five, was struck with a crowbar in his sleep and killed during a burglary that took 17,000 rupees and a video cassette player. In March 2004, again at Mala, Nabeesa, fifty-one or fifty-two, and her daughter-in-law, Fousiya, twenty-three, were bludgeoned to death and a young woman and two children badly hurt. In October 2004, at Perinjanam in Mathilakam limits, Kalapurackkal Sahadevan, sixty-four, and his wife, Nirmala, fifty-eight, were killed for 11.25 sovereigns of gold. In August 2005, at a state liquor outlet in North Paravoor, the security guard, Subhashakan, was killed with an iron rod; the police had first prosecuted other men, believing he was killed because he was a witness in a political murder. The method the police described was the same throughout: rural houses entered at night and people attacked in their sleep for gold and cash, with kerosene used at some scenes to destroy traces. Altogether he was accused of seven murders across some thirty-five robberies.
The courts kept a much smaller total. Of the five murder cases filed against him, he was acquitted in three. In April 2008 a special court acquitted him of the Mala double murder, finding no reliable evidence connecting him to it. He was acquitted of the Subhashakan killing. The Perinjanam case brought a conviction and a death sentence from the Thrissur Principal Sessions Court in June 2008; Judge B Kamal Pasha called the killings "gruesome, diabolic, revolting" and said that sparing such a man would be "a mockery of justice." In 2010 the Kerala High Court acquitted him, holding that the circumstances the prosecution relied on did not meet the test the law requires, and the Supreme Court upheld the acquittal in 2015. A 2014 police affidavit in the High Court acknowledged the acquittals.
Two convictions stand. For the robbery and murder of Elikutty in Thrissur in 2005 he was sentenced to life in 2011; it is the only case against him with forensic evidence of his presence, a single fingerprint on a broken mirror at the scene. The Puthenvelikkara killing of Devaki brought a death sentence. In December 2016 a Kerala High Court division bench headed by Justice K T Sankaran held that it was not among the rarest of rare cases and commuted it to rigorous imprisonment for the rest of his life, without remission, following the Supreme Court's ruling in the Swamy Shraddananda case.
Reporting in Kerala has pointed out that the acquittals drew a fraction of the attention his arrest did, and that in several cases no blood was found on the weapons and clothing recovered. In 2022 and 2023 the journalist Nidheesh M K, working on a fellowship from Project 39A at the National Law University, Delhi, went back over the two convictions, interviewed investigators, witnesses and his family, and reported officers boasting of planting evidence and witnesses admitting they had fabricated it; he wrote that most of the answers lay beyond a journalist's reach. He spoke to Jayanandan through a barricaded window at Viyyur jail in July 2022, with guards listening. "I didn't do any of it," Jayanandan told him. "The police framed me to solve unsolved crimes. I confessed under torture." A 2025 podcast series raised the same question. None of it has been tested in a court.
In December 2021 the police recorded his arrest in another case, seventeen years old. On May 30, 2004, in a house called Sampoorna on Kosheri Lane at Ponekkara, near Edappally in Kochi, V Nanikutty Ammal and T V Narayana Iyer, known as Rajan, had been beaten to death and robbed of their gold. The Kerala press has not agreed on the details: Kerala Kaumudi gave her age as seventy-three and his as sixty and called them sister and brother, The News Minute described them as twin siblings of seventy-four, and the reported haul ranges from forty to forty-four sovereigns. The case broke open, by the police account, because of a fellow inmate at the central jail in Thiruvananthapuram, a former soldier, to whom Jayanandan had talked about the killings in 2020, celebrating the order that had spared him the gallows. The inmate wrote to the district judge, the judge ordered an inquiry, and Crime Branch officers had the man secretly record their conversations; he also gave a confidential statement before a magistrate. Additional Director General of Police S Sreejith told reporters that the police had suspected Jayanandan on his methods but had no evidence until then, that witnesses had placed him in the area that day, and that he had confessed under interrogation. The version the police gave out was that he had been working the neighborhood as a tender-coconut seller, had meant to rob another house, and had hidden at Sampoorna when a light came on next door; that he slipped inside while Narayana Iyer was out in the yard, killed him when he went back to bed, then beat Nanikutty Ammal to death and sexually abused her; and that he left with the gold and fifteen grams of silver. Accounts differ on whether she was assaulted before or after she died. His arrest was recorded on December 24, 2021, and he was brought to the house to reconstruct the crime. That case had not gone to trial as of the most recent reporting, and nothing in it has been tested in court.
He did not stay easily in prison. An attempt at Viyyur in 2007 failed. He escaped from Kannur and was retaken at Ooty. In June 2013 he got out of the high-security block at Poojapura Central Jail in Thiruvananthapuram with his cellmate, a burglar known as Ooppa Prakash who had only months left to serve. Prison officials later said the pair had spent nearly two months chipping at the cell door before a hacksaw blade cut through the latch. They made up their cots with vessels and pillows, scaled the block wall, took bed sheets and clothes from the infirmary lines, climbed the outer wall on a ladder of wooden poles and let themselves down on a rope of knotted cloth while the cameras were out in a power failure. On September 9, 2013, police picked him up at Nellayi junction, a few kilometers from home, waiting to have his bicycle repaired.
In prison he wrote a book, Pulari Viriyum Munpe. On a petition by his wife, argued by his daughter, a lawyer, Justice P V Kunhikrishnan of the Kerala High Court granted him two days of escort parole on December 22 and 23, 2023, to attend its release at the Ernakulam Press Club, writing that the daughter's legal fight deserved appreciation and that "just like a mother, a father is also a hero to every child." He had earlier been let out under guard for a daughter's wedding in 2023, and in July 2025 he was given two days of escort parole to attend his other daughter's wedding at the Vadakkumnathan Temple in Thrissur. He is serving his sentence at the high-security central jail at Viyyur.