K P Jayanandan was born in 1968 at Poyya, a village of backwaters and shrimp farms in Thrissur district, Kerala. He left school after class eight and worked all his life as an estuary fisherman, skilled with the Chinese fishing nets used on those waters. When he was arrested he was thirty-eight, in debt, and living in a modest house with his wife, two daughters at school, and his elderly parents.
The killings the police attribute to him were done in the course of burglary. He entered rural houses at night, in places without street lighting, and attacked people who were asleep. Most were elderly. The press called him the ripper for the violence of it: in the case he was first condemned for, he killed Devaki, also called Baby, fifty-one, with a blow to the head as she slept at Puthanvelikkara around one in the morning on October 2, 2006, then cut off her left arm to take the six gold bangles on it, and attacked her husband. Kerosene was used at some scenes to burn away traces.
He was arrested on November 23, 2006. Police say he confessed to five unsolved murders committed between 2003 and 2006, two of them double killings. Almost everything told about him in public since rests on those confessions.
He was accused of seven murders across about thirty-five robberies in the Thrissur and Ernakulam border country, and is linked altogether to some twenty-three cases. He was sentenced to death twice, once in 2007 for the Puthanvelikkara murder and once for the killing of an elderly woman named Elikutty. The Kerala High Court commuted both in 2016 to imprisonment for life without parole. He is serving three life sentences at the high-security central jail at Viyyur.
He was acquitted in three of the murder cases for want of evidence. Reporting in Kerala has noted that the acquittals drew a fraction of the attention his arrest did, that the validity of the confessions has been contested with allegations of coercion, and that in several cases no blood was found on the weapons and clothing recovered. Those are the terms in which the case is now argued locally, and they are not settled.
He has tried repeatedly to get out of prison and twice succeeded. An attempt at Viyyur in 2007 failed. He escaped from Kannur in 2010 and was retaken at Ooty. In June 2013 he sawed through a cell door at the high-security central jail in Thiruvananthapuram with a hacksaw and got out with his cellmate, a burglar called Ooppa Prakash who had only months left to serve; the pair camped two days in scrub near Veli railway station. He was back in custody on September 9, 2013.
In 2021 the police said he was also responsible for a double murder seventeen years old. In March 2023 the Kerala High Court granted him fifteen days of parole to attend his daughter's wedding at a temple in Thrissur, under police guard, the judge observing that the presence of the father of the bride at such a function is most appropriate.
The figures in this case do not reconcile, and the entry keeps them apart. Seven murders are what he was accused of; some reporting says eight. Five cases were tried, three ended in acquittal, and two death sentences became life terms. He is serving three.