K P Jayanandan is a burglar from the Thrissur district of Kerala, in southern India, whom the Kerala press has called "Ripper" Jayanandan since the mid-2000s. Police accused him of a run of killings during night-time burglaries of rural homes along the border between Thrissur and Ernakulam districts. The courts reached narrower findings than the police did. He was convicted in two murder cases and acquitted in three, according to Open magazine in 2013 and Kerala Kaumudi in 2024. A Kerala High Court order of March 2023 records that he is serving three sentences of life imprisonment, one of which began as a death sentence. He has also been convicted twice of escaping from prison.
In December 2021 police in Kochi recorded his arrest in a further case, the killing of an elderly woman and her relative at Ponekkara, near Edappally, in May 2004. Police said he had confessed after a fellow prisoner reported what he had been told and secretly recorded their conversations. That case has not reached a reported verdict, and in it he is an accused, not a convicted man.
Jayanandan comes from Poyya, in Thrissur district, Kerala Kaumudi reported in 2024; reports in 2010 and 2013 described him as from Mala, a town in the same district. Kerala Kaumudi wrote that he had studied only to the eighth grade. Arab News reported in 2010 that he spoke several languages. His date of birth was not reported; Open gave his age as 45 in October 2013.
He is married. In 2023 a daughter of his who is a lawyer argued for him in the High Court, and a daughter of his was married in Thrissur that year. Little else is known about his life before his first arrest.
The police case against Jayanandan grew into a long list. In October 2013 Open magazine wrote that he was accused of six murders and 27 burglary cases, that he had been convicted in two murder cases and acquitted in three, and that trial in the sixth had not begun. A Kerala Kaumudi report on his 2021 arrest described him as accused in seven murder cases and 14 theft cases. A Press Trust of India report printed by Onmanorama in December 2021 said police credited him with eight deaths in six cases between 2003 and 2008, and that eight of the 15 burglary cases registered against him had ended in conviction. In 2023 Kerala Kaumudi put the total at 24 cases, among them double murders at Mala, Perinjanam and Puthenvelikkara. In 2024 the same paper described him as linked to 23 cases, five of them murders, of which he was acquitted in three and convicted in two.
The figures do not agree, and they mix cases that ended in acquittal with cases that ended in conviction and cases that were never tried. They are the police and press tallies, not court findings.
Police described a consistent pattern. Most of the offenses were in the border areas of Thrissur and Ernakulam districts, Open reported. Police told the magazine that most of his targets were women and that he chose homes where only women lived and watched them for some days first. Kerala Kaumudi wrote in 2023 that he attacked women to steal their ornaments. The 2010 Arab News report said all of the killings attributed to him took place during burglary attempts in which many other people were badly hurt.
In 2024 Kerala Kaumudi published an account built on the recollections of K M Antony, a police officer who had questioned him. It reported that investigators had struggled because little evidence was left at the scenes, and that his crimes drew wide attention only after the seventh death attributed to him. Asked by the officer whether he felt any remorse, he answered, according to the paper: "I live for my wife and children. Apart from that, I don't think about who else should live or die."
The Kerala High Court set out his sentences in an order of March 17, 2023, on a parole petition filed by his wife. Quoting a statement from the superintendent of the High Security Prison at Viyyur, the court listed three cases. In one he had been sentenced to death, and the sentence was "modified in appeal to imprisonment for life without remission for 20 years." In the other two he was sentenced to imprisonment for life. "Thus, petitioner's husband is serving three sentences of life imprisonment," the court wrote. The order does not name the victims in those cases.
A Press Trust of India report on the same order, printed by Udayavani, said the High Court had commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment in one of the murder cases in 2016. Arab News reported in June 2010 that a trial court had sentenced him to death and that the High Court had reduced the sentence to life imprisonment. Other reports disagree about which case carried the death sentence and which court reduced it. A Kerala Kaumudi report from December 2021 placed it in the Mala double murder case and said the High Court commuted it. In 2024 the same paper said the death sentence was for a killing in Ernakulam district and that the Supreme Court commuted it. The 2023 High Court order says only that the sentence was modified on appeal.
Why two murder convictions produced three life sentences has never been explained. The court order lists the three sessions cases without saying what offense each one covered.
Jayanandan was acquitted in three murder cases, according to Open in 2013 and Kerala Kaumudi in 2024. Those acquittals stand. The deaths in those cases are not his in law, and the reports that list the double murders at Mala and Perinjanam among the cases against him do not say which ended in conviction and which in acquittal.
Arab News wrote in 2010 that he had been convicted in seven murder cases. That figure conflicts with every later report and with the 2023 court record.
He made repeated attempts to escape. Open reported that he tried to escape from Viyyur Central Prison in 2007 and failed. Arab News wrote in 2010 that he had been moved from Thrissur to Kannur after an earlier escape attempt that involved a tunnel.
In June 2010 he escaped from Kannur Central Prison, Kerala Kaumudi reported; Open's 2013 account dated the Kannur escape to 2009. Arab News reported on June 17, 2010, that he had been arrested in Tamil Nadu two days after escaping from a high-security Kerala prison. He had lost weight to fit through a narrow window, the paper said, and four months before the escape he had written to his wife asking her to prepare for a "possible release" and to settle in Tamil Nadu. An accomplice, named by police as Riyaz, was still at large; Jayanandan told police that Riyaz had left him in Coimbatore. Police traced Jayanandan to a friend's house in Wellington, about 15 kilometers from Ooty, after he called his wife on a mobile phone. The escape brought a conviction and a sentence of two years' rigorous imprisonment from the Judicial First Class Magistrate's Court in Kannur, according to the 2023 High Court order.
He was later held at the Poojappura Central Prison in Thiruvananthapuram, and on the night of June 11, 2013, he escaped again, Open reported. He went with a fellow prisoner. Onmanorama, citing former prison officials in 2025, named the other man as Rajesh; Kerala Kaumudi named him as Prakash, known as "Ooppa" Prakash. Former officials told Onmanorama that the two men worked on one bar of their cell for nearly two months, mostly at night, hiding the cut marks with soap paste. A retired official said Jayanandan had "put together the blades abandoned on the premises and shaped a hacksaw tool to cut through the bar." He used clothes from the prison hospital block as a rope to get down the walls. Kerala Kaumudi reported that the two men tied mundus together and used stakes from banana plants inside the prison grounds.
The other prisoner was caught within a week, Onmanorama reported. Jayanandan stayed free for about three months. According to Open, police arrested him on September 9, 2013, at Nellayi in Thrissur district, on his way to a house he had marked for burglary, and found eight kinds of weapons on him. Onmanorama, writing in 2025, said he had been living under a false identity at a prawn farm in Thrissur. K E Baiju, who led the manhunt, told the paper: "We acted on a tip-off and nabbed him when he came out of his hiding place to have breakfast at a shop."
Police told Open that he had committed four burglaries while he was out. Alexander Jacob, then Additional Director General of Police in charge of prisons, told the magazine: "We assume that he would have committed another burglary and possibly a murder on that day." Ajitha Begum, the Thrissur rural police superintendent, said he had told investigators he took part in cultural programs at the Sahitya Akademi in Thrissur while on the run. Police sources suspected that six officials at Poojappura had helped him escape for bribes, and a senior prison official said investigators had nearly settled on the role of two of them. The outcome of that inquiry was not reported.
The escape brought a further conviction, with six months' simple imprisonment, from the Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate's Court in Thiruvananthapuram, the High Court recorded in 2023. After the escapes, according to Kerala Kaumudi, the central prison wall was raised to 22 feet and topped with an electric fence. In July 2025, after a prisoner named Govindachamy broke out of a Kerala prison by cutting through iron bars, Onmanorama reported that he had copied Jayanandan's method.
On May 30, 2004, an elderly woman and her male relative were killed in their home at Ponekkara, in the Edappally area of Kochi, and the house was ransacked. Kerala Kaumudi named them as V Nanikutty Ammal, 73, and T V Narayana Iyer, known as Rajan, 60, and described them as siblings; the Press Trust of India gave her age as 74. They had been beaten to death, and Kerala Kaumudi said 40 sovereigns of gold were taken; another Kerala Kaumudi report put the haul at 44 sovereigns of gold and 15 grams of silver. The case went unsolved for 17 years.
Police said they had suspected Jayanandan because of the way the crime was carried out but had no evidence. According to the Press Trust of India, the case was cracked after he made what officers called a self-revelation to a fellow prisoner at the central prison in Thiruvananthapuram in 2020. Kerala Kaumudi reported that the matter came to light after a letter reached the district judge, who ordered an investigation. The Crime Branch then watched him with the help of the fellow prisoner, a former soldier, who secretly recorded their conversations and gave a confidential statement before a magistrate. The paper said Jayanandan had spoken about the killings while celebrating a court order that commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment.
At a press meeting in December 2021, Additional Director General of Police S Sreejith said Jayanandan had confessed during interrogation and that witnesses had seen him in the area on the day of the killings. His arrest in the case was recorded that month, while he was already in prison; Kerala Kaumudi gave the date as December 24. The Press Trust of India reported that DNA profiling might be explored. According to Kerala Kaumudi, police said he had been selling tender coconuts in the neighborhood, and he was taken to the house for evidence collection.
No verdict in the Ponekkara case has been reported. Nothing in it has been tested at trial, and he is presumed innocent of those two deaths.
The wedding leave of March 2023 was his first release on parole in 17 years in prison, Kerala Kaumudi reported; the paper wrote that parole had been refused before because he was considered very dangerous.
In March 2023 his wife asked the High Court for 15 days' parole so that he could attend their daughter's wedding. A daughter who is an advocate argued the petition. The public prosecutor opposed any release, pointing to a prison rule that emergency leave requires a favorable police report. Justice Bechu Kurian Thomas found that his conduct in prison "has not been above board" and noted, "Twice he had escaped from prison." He wrote that "He is regarded as a person attempting to escape at every given chance." But he also held that a prisoner keeps his basic rights. "Conviction for a crime does not reduce that person into a non-human," the judge wrote, and "basic human rights cannot be crippled." Attending a daughter's wedding, he held, was part of the liberty protected by Article 21 of the Constitution, though not an absolute right.
The court allowed two days of escorted release instead of 15. On March 21, 2023, Jayanandan was permitted to visit his home from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on March 22 to attend the wedding at the Vadakkumnathan Temple in Thrissur during the same hours, returning to prison each evening. Police in plain clothes were to escort him and not to interfere with the ceremonies unless circumstances required it, and his wife and one daughter had to give an undertaking to the Sessions Court in Thrissur that he would return.
He wrote a book in prison. In December 2023 the High Court granted him two more days of escorted parole, on December 22 and 23, so that he could attend its launch at the Ernakulam Press Club in Kochi, Asianet News reported. The petition was again filed by his wife through their daughter.
Several points in the record are contested or unsettled.
The Ponekkara double murder is an accusation. Police said he confessed and that a fellow prisoner recorded him; no court has ruled on that evidence.
The totals of murders attributed to him vary from report to report, from five murder cases to eight deaths in six cases. Those are police counts. The courts convicted him in two murder cases and acquitted him in three.
Which case carried his death sentence, and which court reduced it, is reported in different ways: the High Court in 2016 according to the Press Trust of India, the High Court according to Arab News in 2010, and the Supreme Court according to Kerala Kaumudi in 2024. The High Court's 2023 order says only that the death sentence in one of the three cases was modified on appeal.
The details of his escapes also differ. The Kannur escape is dated to 2009 by Open and to June 2010 by Arab News and Kerala Kaumudi. His companion in 2013 is named Rajesh by Onmanorama and Prakash by Kerala Kaumudi. His recapture is placed at Nellayi on September 9, 2013, by Open and at a prawn farm about two months after the escape by Onmanorama.
In March 2023 Jayanandan was held as convict No. 167 at the High Security Prison at Viyyur, in Thrissur, the High Court recorded. Kerala Kaumudi reported in October 2024 that he remained in jail.
May 30, 2004: An elderly woman and her relative are killed at Ponekkara, Edappally, Kochi; the case goes unsolved for 17 years.
2007: He tries and fails to escape from Viyyur Central Prison (Open).
June 2010: He escapes from Kannur Central Prison and is caught in Tamil Nadu, near Ooty (Arab News; Kerala Kaumudi).
June 11, 2013: He escapes from Poojappura Central Prison, Thiruvananthapuram, with a fellow prisoner (Open).
September 9, 2013: Arrested at Nellayi, Thrissur district (Open).
2016: The High Court commutes his death sentence to life imprisonment in one murder case (PTI).
2020: He speaks about the Ponekkara killings to a fellow prisoner in Thiruvananthapuram, police say.
December 2021: His arrest in the Ponekkara case is recorded; police say he confessed.
March 17, 2023: The High Court grants escorted leave for his daughter's wedding on March 22, 2023.
December 22 and 23, 2023: Escorted parole to attend the launch of a book he wrote in prison.
October 2024: Reported in jail (Kerala Kaumudi).