Mallika was born in 1965 and lived in Bangalore. She approached middle-aged and elderly women at temples in the city, told them she could arrange a special puja to solve whatever was troubling them, and instructed them to come with their gold jewellery and to fast beforehand.
Between 1999 and 2007 she killed six women in this way. At the temple she gave each of them what she said was sacred water or prasad, containing potassium cyanide, and took the jewellery from the body. The deaths were spread over eight years and across different temples, and were recorded as sudden collapses.
She was arrested in 2007 and convicted. She was sentenced to death on April 1, 2012, and on August 2, 2012 the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment.
The case is usually reported alongside Mohan Kumar, the Karnataka man convicted separately of killing twenty women with cyanide in the same period on a similar approach, and the two are sometimes confused. They are unconnected.
The mechanism of the case is worth stating plainly: the victims were women who had gone to a temple to ask for help with a difficulty, and the trust involved was religious. Six deaths in eight years, each looking like a collapse in a public place, is what allowed it to continue.