Hyderabad Police Arrest Maina Ramulu, Accused of Killing Two More Women After His Release
Police said Ramulu, 45, already linked to 16 murders of women, killed Kavala Venkatamma and an unidentified woman in December 2020.
Published
Kavala Venkatamma went missing on December 30, 2020. On New Year's Day her husband, Kavala Anathaiah, walked into the Jubilee Hills police station in Hyderabad and reported her gone. Four days later her body was found beside a railway track near Ankushapur village, inside the limits of the Ghatkesar police station. On Tuesday, January 26, 2021, Hyderabad Police Commissioner Anjani Kumar announced that the man accused of killing her was in custody, and that police knew him well: Maina Ramulu, 45, who they said had already been involved in 16 murders of women.
The search had been run by the Commissioner's Task Force, North Zone, working with the Rachakonda police. Venkatamma was a laborer, and the trail began at a toddy shop in Yousufguda, where, police said, CCTV footage showed her climbing into an auto-rickshaw with Ramulu. According to police, he took her to an isolated spot at Ankushapur, drank with her, killed her with a boulder and left with her valuables. Her face had been burned with her own clothes. Investigators identified her through a cell phone recovered with the body.
The inquiry turned up a second death. Police said that on December 10, Ramulu picked up a woman aged between 35 and 40 at a toddy compound in Bala Nagar, took her to an isolated area near Japtha Singyapally village in Siddipet district, strangled her with her saree and fled with her silver jewelry. She had not been identified. One case fell under the Mulugu police station in the Siddipet commissionerate and the other under Ghatkesar in Rachakonda, and Ramulu was handed over to the station house officer at Ghatkesar for further investigation.
Ramulu, a resident of Borabanda who came from Sanga Reddy district, was described as a laborer and a stone cutter. Police said he went after women he met near toddy compounds, offered them money for sex, plied them with alcohol, and then strangled them or struck them with a boulder before robbing them. The commissioner traced it to his marriage at 21, when, police said, his wife eloped with another man. "Since then he bore a grudge against women and committed serial killings of women," Kumar said.
His record, as police laid it out, ran to 21 cases: 16 murders committed for gain between 2003 and 2019, four property cases and one escape from custody. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in a 2009 murder case. While serving that sentence, he escaped with five other prisoners from the Erragadda mental hospital on December 12, 2011, and police said he killed five more women before he was re-arrested in 2013. The commissioner said he had not changed after his release and had gone on to kill two more.
What was established in January 2021. The two December 2020 killings were police accusations at the time of the arrest; Ramulu had not been tried for them. Accounts of how he came to be free differ: one report said he was released on bail from the High Court in 2018, another that he was freed after appealing his life sentence to the High Court. The husband's name appears as both Anathaiah and Ananthaiah.
Sources
- Serial killer accused of killing 18 women arrested by Hyderabad police, The News Minute (IANS)
- Notorious serial killer Maina Ramulu arrested by Hyderabad cops, NewsMeter