An insurance scam in Germany in which the perpetrator faked his death and his nominee received the money served as inspiration for Sukumara Kurup.
The different images of Sukumara Kurup available with police.
Sreekumar Kuttappan still remembers that night at the busy TB Hospital Junction at Karuvatta in Kerala’s Alappuzha district four decades ago — on 21 January, 1984.
Film representative KJ Chacko looked impatient as he paced up and down as midnight approached. Sreekumar was watching the young man from a nearby eatery.
Chacko wanted to catch a bus to Alappuzha Town, where his pregnant wife Santhamma was waiting to celebrate their first wedding anniversary the next day. Sreekumar tried to convince Chacko to stay overnight with him since public transport was not available at 11.30 pm.
The film representative, however, was adamant. He decided to seek a lift in any of the passing private vehicles,
KJ Chacko. (Supplied)
Chacko was in Karuvatta to convince Sreekumar’s father Kuttappan Nair, who owned the Hari Cinema Talkies, to continue the screening of the Malayalam movie Keni (The Trap).
It was his job to deliver movie reels to different theatres and persuade owners to screen them for a long time.
Then, a degree student at SD College in Alappuzha, Sreekumar visited the house of Chacko on the outskirts of Alappuzha Town two days after their last meeting.
His father had told him that Chacko had been missing for the past two days.
The same day, Chacko’s brother reached Sreekumar’s house enquiring about his missing brother.
Unknown to all, Chacko had boarded an Ambassador car and fallen into a trap of one Sukumara Kurup, then 40, who wanted to fake his death to claim an insurance amount of ₹8 lakh.
Sunday, 21 January, marked the 40th anniversary of the murder of Chacko by Kurup, one of the most wanted criminals in Kerala.
When contacted, Santhamma told South First that she would never pardon Kurup and his associates, who must be nabbed and punished under any circumstances.
“The investigation agencies might have been fed up and wound up the probe, but my son and I pray to God every day for the arrest and trial of the fugitive. He crippled our lives all these years,” said Santhamma, who was working as a last-grade servant.
The unfinished house of Kurup.
Her son Jithin Chacko is now 40 years old and has never seen his father. He said the family was very eager to see the culprit get nabbed and punished.
“Kurup is still getting star value, and filmmakers dub him a hero. Nobody was ready to listen to us and share our pain. I am fed up with investigators and the general public who forced me and my mother to recall the unfortunate incident every January,” Jithin said.
Over the years, the murder and the vanishing act combined have made Kurup, then a Gulf returnee, an enigma.
After Sreekumar left on that fateful night, Chacko waited alone for any vehicle to take him home. After midnight, a black Ambassador pulled over and offered him a lift.
The car, bearing the registration number KLQ 7831, had driven past him twice that night — but he had not noticed it.
Three men were in the car: Sukumara Kurup’s loyal driver Ponnappan, his co-brother Bhaskara Pillai, and Chinnakkal Shahu, an attendee in Kurup’s company in Abu Dhabi. The trio had agreed to assist Kurup, allegedly for a cut of the insurance money.
Chacko sat on the rear seat flanked by Pillai and Shahu. Kurup tailed them in another car, with the registration number KLY 5959.
According to police records, Kurup was inspired by an insurance fraud committed in Germany in which the perpetrator had faked his death and his nominee collected the money.
Just before Kurup left Abu Dhabi for Kerala, he had taken an insurance policy worth 3,01,616 dirhams (roughly ₹30 lakh at that time) — a sizeable amount in the 1980s. His wife, a nurse, and two kids were still in the emirate.
Kurup’s initial plan was to steal a body resembling his size from a mortuary. When that plan fell through, the four planned to steal a dead body from one of the local graves. The murder was Plan C.
They started scouting for someone with the physique of Kurup. It was then that they spotted Chacko outside the tea shop at Karuvatta seeking a lift. While taking the film representative in the car, they made sure that both Chacko and Kurup were of the same height.
Instead of heading towards Alappuzha, the car took a detour to Pallana. Chacko was told one of them had to meet a relative. Meanwhile, Pillai and Shahu force-fed Chacko — a teetotaler — poison-laced liquor and choked him to death.
Then, they drove to Pillai’s house Smitha Bhavan in Cheriyanadu. There, they stripped Chacko’s body of its clothes, wedding ring, and watch, dressed him in Kurup’s outfit, and charred his face. They then loaded the body into the boot of the KLY 5959 car.
The two cars then headed to nearby Kollakadavu, a scenic village on the banks of the Achenkovil river. The site chosen for the “accident” was a paddy field bordering the river, now known as Chacko paadam (Chacko field).
At the site, the body was transferred to the driver’s seat of the KLQ 7831 car and doused in 10 litres of petrol. The car was then pushed down into the field and set ablaze.
While dousing the car with petrol, the gang spilled some fuel, which burnt Pillai’s arms. The four then jumped into an adjacent field to douse the flames and fled.
In the confusion, they left behind a pair of gloves and a rubber sandal. This marked the second part of the story of Kerala’s long-wanted fugitive.
Early on 22 January, 1984, the Mavelikkara police received a call regarding a car on fire. Circle Inspector M Haridas and his team reached the scene around 5 am. They had no clue that they were visiting a crime scene that would haunt them for the rest of their lives.
“The car was completely burnt, and there was a charred body behind the wheel. Residents told us that the car belonged to an NRI named Sukumara Kurup,” Haridas said.
His team found the gloves, a matchbox, and a petrol can at the location. The gloves had burn marks and a few hairs stuck to them.
They also found footprints leaving the scene. A case file — 22/84 — was opened in the Mavelikkara Police Station.
Chacko’s wife and son
“I smelled something fishy right from the beginning,” Haridas said. “The policemen who were sent to inform Kurup’s family about the death came back and told me about the passive reaction from relatives.”
Intrigued, he sent two police officers to Pillai’s house. Kurup used to stay at Pillai’s house every time he returned from the Gulf — partly due to the matrilineal system and partly due to his family’s disapproval of his marriage with a girl from a poor background.
They found Pillai’s wife cooking chicken curry — something unthinkable in a traditional Hindu household in Kerala immediately after the death of a relative.
What Haridas did next proved to be the turning point. While requesting a post-mortem examination, he wrote against the name of the deceased: “A man said to be Sukumara Kurup.” This aroused the curiosity of police surgeon DB Umadathan, who conducted the examination.
His inquest confirmed that the dead man was murdered and set on fire because there were no traces of charcoal or ash in his respiratory tract. The presence of liquor and ethyl alcohol in the digestive tract added to the mystery.
Also, no ring or watch was recovered from the body during the post-mortem examination — unusual for a wealthy NRI like Kurup.
Haridas then called Pillai to the Mavelikkara Police Station for an inquiry. Pillai told Haridas that Kurup had many enemies in the Gulf and that one of them might have killed him.
During his visit to the police station, Pillai was dressed in a full-sleeved shirt — unusual in Kerala in the 1980s.
Curious, Haridas asked Pillai to roll up his sleeves, which he did reluctantly. There were burns — not more than 24 hours old — on his elbow. On further examination, the police found burn marks on his right leg. His eyebrows, too, had been singed.
Cornered, Pillai “confessed” that he had killed Kurup for not keeping the promise of finding him a job in the Gulf.
Haridas did not buy the story. He went straight to Pillai’s home to gather more information. That was when he found that Kurup had two cars; and KLY 5959 was brand new.
Haridas wondered why Kurup had driven the old car on the night of the fire. He then spotted some burnt hair on the porch. Kurup’s missing driver, Ponnappan, added to the mystery.
On 23 January, Haridas got a call from Kurup’s distant relative. The caller informed the officer that the corpse was not that of Sukumara Kurup and that he had gotten this information from driver Ponnappan.
Ponnappan apparently told him that while driving Kurup, he had hit a stranger accidentally and that they burned his body.
Ponnappan allegedly added that he had dropped Kurup in Aluva (more than 70km from Alappuzha).
“I believed the first part of the story. But the second part did not add up,” Haridas said. The investigating officers returned their focus to the man in hand — Pillai.
Upon further grilling, Pillai revealed that Kurup was running out of money to fund a palatial house he was building in Alappuzha.
He said he first shared his plan with the other three over drinks. He added that Ponnappan, initially reluctant, was forced to join them. The four had met at Kalpakavadi Restaurant in Alappuzha on 21 January to finalise their plans.
Pillai also described in detail how they found the victim and how he was murdered. But he had no idea who the victim was.
Police teams were dispatched to find Shahu, Ponnappan, and Kurup. Haridas’ team went to Trivandrum International Airport and sifted through thousands of embarkation cards for Shahu’s details. They found that Kurup had filled in Shahu’s card as the latter was illiterate.
Report of the incident in a Malayalam newspaper 40 years ago.
Mavelikkara Circle Inspector (CI) KJ Devasia captured Shahu from Chavakkad, a coastal area in Thrissur district. He was packing his bags to leave for the Gulf via Kochi. Ponnappan, too, was arrested soon.
However, Kurup escaped. “He had a narrow escape,” said Jayaprakash, then the CI of Kayamkulam. “The owner of the (Alankar) lodge (in Aluva) identified Kurup when we showed him the photograph and said that he had just left.”
Kurup had had a 72-hour headstart — an advantage that helped him cock a snook at the cops for 40 years.
On 27 January, Haridas had a chance meeting with Sreekumar, who had come to lodge a missing-person complaint for Chacko.
“When Chacko did not return to the theatre for the next few days, I got worried and went to his house,” Sreekumar said.
“Chacko’s family had not felt anything unusual, as Chacko used to travel extensively as part of his job and used to stay away for days. But I knew that Chacko was heading home that night and asked them to register a complaint with the police,” he added.
The body found in the field had been buried by then.
On 1 February, the body was exhumed for a second post-mortem examination. Using a technique called superimposition (one of the first cases in the country to use this), it was confirmed that the body belonged to Chacko.
That day, the “Sukumara Kurup murder case” was officially renamed the “Chacko murder case”.
The charge sheet named Pillai and Ponnappan as the first and second accused of murder, criminal conspiracy, and destruction of evidence. Shahu, initially charged as one of the accused, turned approver.
The Sessions Court found Pillai and Ponnappan guilty and sentenced them to life in prison. The police believed that the wives of Kurup and Pillai were part of the plan, so they were named the third and fourth accused.
Since the police were still chasing Kurup, he was not named in the charge sheet!
Kurup was a quintessential Gulf returnee of the 1980s. He loved to splurge, creating goodwill among relatives and neighbours. He hailed from an illustrious family in Alappuzha, with strong political connections on both the maternal and paternal sides (which allegedly gave him an advantage in the initial days of the investigation).
Kurup had a dubious past not known to many: He had faked his death once before. He had a short stint with the Indian Army Medical Corps after his pre-degree course (equivalent to Class 12).
But he deserted and bribed the official who was assigned to track him down to write a report that Gopalakrishna Pillai (his official name then) had died. Later, he took a passport under the name of Sukumara Kurup and left for the Gulf.
“To fake one’s death is not an easy task,” Alexander Jacob, retired director general of police (prisons), said. “That he managed to keep this incident a secret shows his shrewdness.”
Kurup fell in love with Sarasamma during his army days in Pune. She was a trainee nurse there. The couple got married in a temple in Matunga in Mumbai without the knowledge or permission of Kurup’s family.
Soon after the marriage, he left the Army and went to the Gulf. He took Sarasamma with him, and she found a job there as a nurse.
Sarasamma’s family came out of poverty after her marriage — a fact that made Pillai loyal to him.
From Aluva, Kurup first went to Chennai, then Bhutan, and later to the Andamans. From there, he went to Bhopal. The police did reach all these spots, only to find that he had given them the slip.
“Four (undercover) policemen stayed in the neighbourhood of Kurup’s house for eight years,” said George Joseph, a retired superintendent of police. “But it did not yield any result.”
Joseph said the police used to get thousands of telegrams daily from different parts of the country, reporting the “sightings” of Kurup. “The case caught the fancy of every common man so much so that they started using Kurup’s name even to settle scores with neighbours,” he said.
Kurup visited his house sometime in February 1984, a month after the murder. But he outwitted the police once again. It created a huge uproar across the state and forced the government to appoint a Special Investigation Team (SIT).
Retired superintendent of police Harris Xavier, who was part of the SIT, said he believed that Kurup would have been caught if it had not been for some political help. “He had connections with higher-ups, and it did help him escape,” he said.
Following tip-offs, the police looked for him all over the country. But all they got in so many years were just testimonies of his sightings. In 1990, Kurup was declared an “absconder”.
The Chacko murder case is one in which the Kerala government has sanctioned the maximum travel allowance, thanks to the investigation that extended to all the states in the country and abroad, including Las Vegas.
As many as 100 people have been arrested at different times as suspects. Even Interpol arrested a few suspects. But all were freed.
Chacko’s son Jithin, who has never seen his father, is still livid about the whole case. “I will not forgive Kurup,” he said. Asked whether he was hopeful that Kurup would be caught, Jithin said the history of the case did not make him optimistic.
“My father could not hold me even once. My mother has not recovered from the shock yet. The greed of a single man has destroyed many families. I want him arrested,” he said.
Amid all these shattered beings, Kurup’s bungalow, for which he killed Chacko and destroyed many more lives, stands abandoned like a guilty witness.
There was a set of Malayalam films based on the murder, and the latest among them was Dulquer Salmaan-starrer Kurup.
“People say Kurup is no more. But I believe he is leading a luxurious life abroad,” Santhamma said.
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