A temple priest Sai Krishna, a married father of two children fell in love with a girl and got involved in an extramarital affair with Apsara. She was a devout follower of a temple. The priest suspect, who works in Venkateshwara colony, falls for the girl. After many advances and special favours the girl gets lured. Here starts the love story, the girl was unaware of the priest’s marital status. They used to spend maximum time in the temple and after the temple doors closed they used to go out on dates. The romance was at peak, a few years the relation continued but later on Apsara had been pressuring him to marry her.
He was in trouble because he never thought Apsara would ever propose to him. Slowly there was discomfort in relation, the priest was interested in only physical relations but he was not inserted in taking any responsibility as he already had a family. Somehow Apsara came to know about his marital status and that made the priest restless. According to Sai Krishna’s confession he planned to kill Apsara.
The accused priest killed Apsara in Shamshabad and then packed her body in a plastic cover before transporting it to Saroornagar. He threw the body into a manhole behind the MRO Office, close to the temple where he served as the priest. He killed Apsara and dumped her body in the drainage. For a few days he remained silent and he was not much interactive.
Since June 4, Apsara did not attend phone calls and her phone was switched off from 11.30am on June 5. The incident came to light after Sai Krishna himself filed a missing complaint, claiming that he had dropped the victim, Kuruganti Apsara, at the Shamshabad bus stand as she was planning to travel to Bhadrachalam. He further stated that she had not been responding to any calls since then and had been missing since May 3. In his complaint, the man claimed the woman in question was his niece.
While lodging a complaint many of the details shared by the complainant, who according to him was the last person to meet her, was not matching with the technical evidence gathered by the police, finally police picked up Krishna and grilled him on the suspicion of foul play. However, as the investigation progressed, the police grew suspicious of Sai Krishna’s account after CCTVs and other technical data were searched. Subsequently, during questioning, Sai Krishna confessed to the crime, revealing that he had killed Apsara.
After sustained interrogation, Krishna finally opened up by confessing that he killed Apsara. When asked about her dead body, he disclosed that Apsara’s body was dumped in a manhole at municipal office premises, which is on the rear side of the temple where he works as a priest. The RGIA police, by informing the local revenue authorities, continued the process of recovering the dead body.
The priest confessed that the victim was in an extramarital relationship with him and she was forcing him to get married. He also said that in the past she had an abortion and she was hassled by that. Now that she is again putting pressure on him to marry, to get rid of her, he killed her.
On June 3, Apsara left her residence informing her mother that she is going to Coimbatore by taking a bus. It was the accused who picked her up from her residence in Venkateshwara colony. The accused is known to her family members as a friend of Apsara, who also belongs to the same caste. The accused took her to Narkuda village in Shamshabad rural limits, where he killed Apsara with a stone. She smashed her head and then body. It is an isolated place, which is familiar to him since he used to visit this area as part of his professional work. From there he shifted her dead body into his car and packed it in a bag and brought her back to Saroornagar and took her dead body to the municipal office, where it was dumped in a manhole. He also used mud to cover her body. He spent hours disposing of her body thinking that he would never be caught. But his own FIR clutched him in the crime he committed. In the past there have been several such cases, men lure a girl for lust, start living together, and when love and lust fades they end up killing their partners.
In most of these murders the lovers have broken all the barriers; they went out and out to be with each other, refuting everyone around. Female becomes vulnerable in such relations because her search for stability somewhere brings burden on men. Men want relationships but no responsibility. A man killing their female partners has gone from something that occurred behind closed doors with little public discussion, to the focus of national headlines and high-level policy attention. How many men killing women can we understand through a purely gendered lens? In other words, how much does looking at this problem through a lens of patriarchal control and toxic masculinity actually explain the problem?
