On the last day of 2007, Bengaluru police announced that they had arrested a 45-year-old woman named Mallika and that she had confessed to poisoning women she had befriended at temples around the city. The police commissioner, N. Achuta Rao, said the arrest explained five deaths of middle-aged women on the city's outskirts over the previous two months, along with one other murder. Her full name was reported as K. D. Kempamma. The newspapers named her "Cyanide Mallika," and the name stuck.
Karnataka courts went on to convict her of murder in more than one case. She received a death sentence for the killing of a woman named Muniyamma and another, in 2012, for the killing of Nagaveni, the last of the women police linked to her. One of those death sentences was later reduced to life imprisonment, and in 2017 the Karnataka High Court set aside a death sentence in one of her cases and ordered a fresh hearing. She has been described across the Indian press as the country's first woman convicted as a serial killer.
Kempamma came from Kaggalipura, a village on the outskirts of Bengaluru, according to Gulf News and News Karnataka. Her age is given differently from report to report. The Tribune put her at 45 at the time of her arrest; News Karnataka, writing in 2026, gave 43; and Asianet News, in a 2019 profile, gave her year of birth as 1970. Her date of birth was not reported.
She married a tailor. News Karnataka reported that he worked at NIMHANS, the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences in Bengaluru. The Tribune, quoting police in 2008, said she had a husband, two daughters and a son; Asianet News wrote of three children.
The turning point in every account is money. In 1998 she started a chit fund, a small rotating savings scheme of the kind common in South India, and it failed. The Tribune reported that she had been living apart from her family since that loss. Gulf News and Asianet News reported that her husband left her and that she was put out of the family home. Asianet News said she then took work in other people's houses and later as an assistant to a goldsmith, and that she lost one household job after she was accused of stealing.
Police told reporters in January 2008 that, by her own account, she committed her first killing in 1999. India TV, in a 2013 profile, dated it to October 19, 1999, and described the victim as a woman of 30 on the outskirts of Bangalore. Asianet News and News Karnataka named her as Mamatha Rajan, 30, and placed her death at Hoskote, a town east of the city.
That death was not connected to Kempamma until after her 2007 arrest. News Karnataka reported that, of the deaths she later admitted, three had been recorded as mysterious deaths and two as unnatural deaths, and that the West division's deputy commissioner of police, K. V. Sharat Chandra, had earlier deaths re-examined with medical experts after she confessed.
Between the first killing and the series of 2007, Kempamma was arrested once. Gulf News reported that in 2000 she was caught trying to steal from a house where she had been invited to perform a ritual; the woman of the house screamed and her family came to help. News Karnataka placed the arrest in 2001, by the Bidadi police, and said she served six months and was released. According to News Karnataka, the case was not looked into further, and officers later acknowledged that this had let her go on.
UNI, the news agency, reported in January 2008 that police said she had told them her second killing came about five years after the first. That account does not match the reports that place the other attributed deaths in the autumn of 2007, and police at the time said they believed she was holding back.
The killings for which Kempamma is best known came in a short span at the end of 2007. The Tribune, quoting the police commissioner, reported that the deaths took place in and around Doddaballapur, about 30 kilometers from Bengaluru, and at Sathnur, Karatagere and Maddur. Three of the women were widows.
Six women are named in news reports as those killed.
Mamatha Rajan was 30. Her death at Hoskote in October 1999 is the earliest attributed to Kempamma.
Elizabeth was praying for a granddaughter who had gone missing, according to Asianet News. Her age was not reported.
Yashodamma was 60, according to Asianet News, which said she hoped for a cure for her asthma.
Muniyamma was 60, according to Gulf News. Asianet News recalled her love of singing devotional songs. Her murder was the subject of one of Kempamma's death sentences.
Pillamma came from the Maddur area of Mandya district. News Karnataka gave her age as 50. Kempamma was later sentenced to life imprisonment for her murder.
Nagaveni was the last. Oneindia reported in 2012 that she was 35 and lived in the Yelahanka area of north Bengaluru, and that she had been deeply unhappy at not having a child; Gulf News and Asianet News gave her age as 30. The police commissioner said in 2008 that she was killed on December 18, 2007, at Doddaballapur. Her murder brought Kempamma's second death sentence.
Kempamma was caught through the jewelry. Achuta Rao told reporters that a goldsmith became suspicious when she tried to sell him ornaments taken from the women, in the Kalasipalya area of central Bengaluru, and called the police. Gold ornaments and mobile phones belonging to the victims were recovered from her. News Karnataka reported that the Kalasipalya police arrested her on December 31, 2007, after a tip-off about a woman selling jewelry and phones at a bus stand. India TV gave the same date. Gulf News reported that she gave her name as Jayamma when she was arrested.
The commissioner said she acted alone. "We are yet to trace any accomplice of the killer woman," he said, adding that she was being questioned about other crimes. The Bangalore newspaper DNA later reported that police had traced her through the phone records of one of the women.
On January 2, 2008, UNI reported that Kempamma was under arrest on charges of murdering six women and that police suspected she had killed three more people. According to the police, she had told them she had planned to kill three others. Three complaints about missing relatives had come in, and the deputy commissioner, Sharat Chandra, said police had yet to establish whether they were connected to her. "We have to ascertain whether these missing cases were handiwork of Mallika or not," he said. Police appealed to anyone who had met her, or who might have been approached by her, to come forward. They also planned a narco-analysis test, a drug-assisted interview then in use by Indian investigators, to learn more.
Gulf News later reported that five missing-person cases were linked to her in the months after her arrest, and that police connected one further death to her, bringing the number to seven. The outcome of those inquiries was not reported.
Each death was charged and tried as a separate murder case, in the courts of the districts where the women died. Which verdict belonged to which case is not always clear.
DNA reported that a court in Tumakuru (Tumkur) sentenced her to death after examining 33 witnesses in one of the cases, and that she was the first woman in Karnataka to receive the death penalty. DNA described her then as 43 and said she had killed eight women in and around Bangalore between 1999 and 2007; the victim in that case was not named. Asianet Newsable later dated her first death sentence to March 2009. Gulf News reported that she received two death sentences in separate trials, one for the murder of Muniyamma and one for the murder of Nagaveni.
The Nagaveni case was heard after a charge sheet filed by the Kalasipalya police. Oneindia reported on March 31, 2012, that Kempamma had been sentenced to death for Nagaveni's murder and that it was her second death sentence.
Gulf News reported in 2019 that her second death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment because the evidence in that case was only circumstantial. The date of that ruling and the court that made it have not been made public. Asianet News, also in 2019, said a higher court had reduced the sentence in the Nagaveni case to life.
News Karnataka reported in 2026 that she had been sentenced to life imprisonment and a fine of 5,000 rupees for the murder of Pillamma in the Maddur area, and that fast-track courts had given her death sentences in several other cases, citing the motive of gain. The dates of those judgments have not been made public.
Reports differ on how many murders she was convicted of in the end. India TV wrote in 2013 that she was convicted of six murders. Daijiworld and Udayavani, in February 2017, described her as convicted for the murders of six women and convicted in several cases. Asianet News wrote in 2019 that she was convicted of killing six people over about eight years. The six cases have never been listed one by one in public.
Death sentences in India must be confirmed by a High Court before they can be carried out, and one of Kempamma's came before a division bench of the Karnataka High Court, Justices Ravi Malimath and John Michael Cunha, in 2017. The Deccan Herald reported on September 15, 2017, that the bench found flaws in the way the case had been handled: the doctor who carried out the postmortem examination on the victim had not been cross-examined at trial. The judges set aside the trial court's order and sent the case back to the trial court. At the time, the paper said, Kempamma was under sentence of death and held at Parappana Agrahara Central Prison in Bengaluru.
Asianet Newsable, relaying a report in the Kannada newspaper Kannada Prabha, gave more detail. The case concerned the killing and robbery of a woman it named as Nagalakshmi K of Doddaballapura. The death sentence had been passed by the Bengaluru Rural district and sessions court. The High Court heard both the reference for confirmation of the death sentence and Kempamma's own appeal, and ordered that the doctor who performed the autopsy be called for examination and the retrial completed by January 31, 2018. The outcome of the retrial has not been reported. Whether this was the Nagaveni case under another spelling, or a separate one, is unclear.
By 2017 Kempamma was held at Parappana Agrahara Central Prison in Bengaluru. She came back into the news in February 2017, when V. K. Sasikala, the AIADMK leader and longtime aide of the former Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalithaa, was jailed in a disproportionate-assets case and lodged in the cell next to hers.
Reports of their time as neighbors conflicted. Daijiworld reported on February 22, 2017, that some considered Kempamma's presence a threat to Sasikala's life, while other reports, citing unnamed sources, described the two as friendly, with Kempamma bringing Sasikala her meals so that she would not have to wait in line. Udayavani carried the same two versions. Kempamma, both reported, was a Jayalalithaa admirer. Earlier that week she was moved, without notice, to Hindalga Central Prison in Belagavi, in the north of the state, which News Karnataka described as holding prisoners under sentence of death. Asianet Newsable reported that Sasikala's lawyers had cited the arrangement in seeking her transfer to a prison in Chennai, and that Kempamma had been moved to another cell.
The Deccan Herald later reported that Kempamma, then 52, had been brought back from Belagavi to Bengaluru for treatment and held for about three months, and that prison authorities then returned her to Hindalga once she had recovered. Her custody since then has not been reported.
Kempamma's case has been held up in the Indian press as a rare one. Gulf News wrote in 2019 that she was widely reported to be the first woman convicted as a serial killer in India, and DNA reported that she was the first woman in Karnataka sentenced to death. Open magazine, writing in October 2019 about the poisoning deaths in the Koodathayi case in Kerala, listed her with Renuka Shinde and Seema Gavit among the few women in Indian criminal history known to have killed repeatedly. Asianet News compared the two cases the same month, as the Kerala inquiry was under way.
Several parts of the case remain unsettled.
The number of victims. Police said in January 2008 that she had been arrested for the murders of six women and that they suspected three more killings. DNA wrote of eight women; Gulf News of seven, counting a death linked to her after her arrest. The six-woman figure is the one most reports give for her convictions, though none lists the cases.
The Renuka allegation. Asianet News reported in 2019 that Kempamma was also accused of killing a woman named Renuka, the sister of a woman she had once worked with as a cook. Renuka's husband, who had been working abroad, reported her missing when he came home, and her sister went to the police. No charge or verdict in that case was reported.
The arrest year. The Tribune's report, datelined December 31, 2007, and later reports in India TV and News Karnataka place the arrest at the end of 2007. Gulf News, Asianet News, Daijiworld and Udayavani give 2008.
The sentences. Which of her death sentences was reduced, and when, has not been made public; nor has the result of the 2017 retrial.
1998: Her chit fund fails and she leaves her family, according to police.
October 19, 1999: Mamatha Rajan, 30, dies at Hoskote; the first killing police attributed to her.
2000 or 2001: Arrested at Bidadi over an attempted theft; serves six months.
October to December 2007: Deaths of women around Bengaluru that police later attributed to her.
December 18, 2007: Nagaveni is killed at Doddaballapur.
December 31, 2007: Arrested by the Kalasipalya police in Bengaluru.
January 2, 2008: Police say she is held on charges of murdering six women and appeal for information.
March 2009: First death sentence, as later reported by Asianet Newsable.
March 2012: Death sentence for the murder of Nagaveni, her second.
February 2017: Moved from Parappana Agrahara Central Prison to Hindalga Central Prison, Belagavi.
September 2017: The Karnataka High Court sets aside a death sentence and sends the case back for retrial (Deccan Herald, September 15, 2017).