Elizabeth was fifty-two, from Satanur, and she was praying for a granddaughter who had gone missing. At a temple she met a woman who seemed more devout than anyone around her and who said she could help. The woman brought her to the Kabalamma temple and gave her holy water to drink. It was laced with potassium cyanide. When Elizabeth was dead, the woman took her jewelry and left. It was October 10, 2007, and she was the first of five women killed that way around Bangalore in the next ten weeks.
The woman was K. D. Kempamma, whom the press named Cyanide Mallika. Accounts of her age differ; she has been given a birth year of 1965 and a birth in the 1970s. She came from a poor family in Kaggalipura, on the outskirts of the city, had little schooling, and married a tailor, with whom she had three children. She started a chit fund, a small informal savings scheme, near her home, and when it failed her husband left her and she was put out on the street. She took work as a domestic helper and began stealing gold and valuables from the houses where she worked. Later she worked for a goldsmith, and it was there that she learned about cyanide: how little of it was needed to kill, and that it left no mark on the body.
Her first known killing came on October 19, 1999, at Hoskote. Mamatha Rajan, thirty, was killed while praying at a temple. The method there was the method throughout. Kempamma watched the women who came to temples near Bangalore, chose the ones who looked troubled, listened to their problems, and offered a special puja that would solve them. She would arrange it at a temple outside the city and tell the woman to come dressed in her best clothes and her jewelry. They would check into a dharamshala, a pilgrims' rest house, and by morning the woman would be dead and her gold, money and phone gone. By some accounts she held her victims' noses while they drank.
In 2000 or 2001, accounts differ, she was hired to perform a ritual in a house near Bidadi and tried to rob it. The woman of the house screamed, her family came, and Kempamma was arrested. She served six months and was released.
The 2007 killings came fast. Yashodhamma, sixty, was killed at Siddaganga Math in Kyathasandra after Kempamma promised her a cure for her asthma. Muniyamma, sixty, of Yelahanka, loved to sing devotional songs and was killed at the Yediyur Siddalingeshwara temple. Pillamma, sixty, of Vaidyanathapura near Maddur, was drawn in with talk of building an arch for the Hebbal temple. The last was Nagaveni, a woman from Hebbal, whom Kempamma picked up at the Ghati Subramanya temple in Tumkur district and killed on December 18. Kempamma had bought the cyanide for two hundred rupees from a gold-polishing shop on Old Kasai Road in Medarpet, a quantity police said was enough to kill two thousand people. Relatives of three missing women came to the Kalasipalya police station and named her as the person each had last been seen with. Police arrested her as she was trying to get rid of the victims' jewelry, and she confessed. Most accounts date the arrest to December 31, 2007; one Deccan Herald report gives January 8, 2008.
The investigating officer, S. K. Umesh, described a woman who hung around temples cheating devotees. She was the prime accused in nine murder cases across the Bangalore city and rural police districts, and six deaths were charged against her. The death sentence she received on April 1, 2012, for the murder of Nagaveni, was her second conviction in three years. On August 2, 2012, the Karnataka High Court reduced it to life imprisonment. She has been held at Hindalga prison in Belagavi.
She is often described as India's first convicted female serial killer, a label that rests on wide reporting rather than any official record. Her case is also regularly confused with that of Mohan Kumar, a Karnataka man convicted separately of killing twenty women with cyanide during the same years. The two cases are unconnected.