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Kerala Police Arrest Jolly Joseph in Husband's Cyanide Death as Six Family Deaths Come Under Scrutiny

The 47-year-old was accused of poisoning Roy Thomas in 2011. Investigators were examining five more deaths in the same Koodathayi family between 2002 and 2016.

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Illustration: a tile-roofed house among coconut palms after rain, a white jeep on a red earth path and onlookers seen from behind. Not the actual house or the arrest.

Police in Kerala's Kozhikode district arrested Jolly Joseph on Saturday, October 5, 2019, at the family home in the village of Koodathayi, on a charge of killing her first husband, Roy Thomas, eight years earlier by lacing his food with cyanide. She was 47. By then, investigators said, Roy's death had become one of six in the same extended family between 2002 and 2016, and one woman had been present at every one of them.

Roy Thomas was 40 when he collapsed in a locked bathroom at the house on the night of September 9, 2011. Neighbors had a carpenter break open the door, and he died on the way to a hospital in Kozhikode city. The autopsy found cyanide, but the police inquiry of the day closed as a suicide and never established where the poison had come from. Relatives were told he had taken his own life. People in the village were told his heart had failed.

The case came back because of his brother. Rojo Thomas, who lives in the United States, used Right to Information requests in 2018 to obtain the autopsy report and the family's property records, and in 2019 he asked the Kozhikode Rural police to investigate. Superintendent K.G. Simon said that when officers went back through the file and saw the cyanide finding, they asked a court for permission to reopen it. Within two months a Crime Branch team had found the other deaths.

The first was Roy's mother, Annamma Thomas, 57, a retired primary-school teacher well known in Koodathayi, who collapsed at home in August 2002. His father, Tom Thomas, a clerk in the state education department, died suddenly in 2008. Annamma's brother, Mathew Manjadiyil, who had kept pressing for an inquiry into Roy's death, died in February 2014. Two more came from the family of Tom's nephew, Shaju Zacharias: his two-year-old daughter, Alphine, and his wife, Cily, whose name is also reported as Sili. ThePrint placed the girl's death in May 2014, while another report gave it as 2016. Cily collapsed in the waiting room of a dental clinic in January 2016. A year later, Jolly Joseph married Shaju.

Two men were arrested with her, M.S. Mathew, 44, and Prajikumar, 48, accused of getting her the cyanide. Police told reporters she had confessed, though accounts differed on whether that covered all six deaths or five of them. Officers also said she had spent some 14 years telling people she taught at the National Institute of Technology in Kozhikode; the institute said she had never worked there.

The older deaths were far harder to prove. After police applied to two parish churches, in Koodathayi and Kodenchery, the relatives' remains were exhumed, and the Press Trust of India reported that apart from Roy, forensic tests had not yet found cyanide in any of them. Kerala's police chief, Loknath Behera, called the case very challenging, citing the lack of evidence and of eyewitnesses. On October 11 she was charged with the five other deaths. The lawyer who took her defense said police were feeding stories to the press and predicted that most of the charges would not stand. None of the accusations had yet been tested in court.

Sources