They were missing for months, yet nobody took notice. Till, Mohammed
Sajid, a burglar nabbed by the Shahinayatgunj police, mentioned a
break-in he had committed some months ago.
Jayaprada, a
56-year-old woman, and her two daughters lived in a two-storey house in
Kundanbagh. Neighbours said they last saw the three sometime in June.
Thereafter, they simply vanished. Truth is, all three had died. The
police on Saturday recovered their badly decomposed bodies from their
house. A bottle of black liquid — presumably poison — was recovered from
the room where the bodies were found.
The front door of the house was locked from inside, but a side entrance was not padlocked.
A heap of newspapers from June 21 lay strewn on the verandah near the front gate.
"As poisoning was the apparent cause of death and the temperature was
not particularly high, the putrefication took longer than normal. The
neighbours never got the smell of rotting flesh," an investigating
officer said. The bodies have been sent for autopsy and the liquid is
being analysed at a lab.
The rooms had been ransacked and clothes
were piled next to the bodies. The almirahs were open and cheque books
and documents were dumped on the floor. "It is possible a burglar had
entered the house. He saw the three dead women on the bed. He didn't
alert the police and came back repeatedly to take away the loot," he
said.
Shocked neighbours said the inhabitants of the house were
"queer" people. "They would light candles at midnight and walk around
the house. The mother would weild an axe and scare away people. They
even hung bottles filled with blood on their verandah," one of them
said.
"Some students of a nearby college had filed a complaint
against this family some two years ago," assistant commissioner of
police P Rama Rao said. It is probable that the strange ways of the
Jayaprada family kept area residents from making inquiries about their
whereabouts. Jayaprada was a native of West Godavari district and was a
divorcee.
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