A little before midnight on May 20 eight years ago, Army officer K G Sridevi Amma — in Thiruvananthapuram at that time — had received a frantic call from her unemployed husband, threatening to kill their two sons and commit suicide if she did not return home to Delhi by the next available flight.

Major Sridevi had gone to Thiruvananthapuram after she heard of her mother’s death, leaving behind husband N Muralidharan Nair and sons Vishnu, 5, and Varun, 3, at their flat in Kirbi Place.

On May 22, when Sridevi rushed back to Delhi, she found to her horror that Nair had carried out his threat — he had murdered Vishnu, grievously burnt and stabbed Varun and also partly burnt the house during his attempts at setting himself on fire with the gas cylinder. Eight years after the Army officer’s loss, a Division Bench of the High Court, led by Justice Pradeep Nandrajog, termed Nair’s crime as “bizarre” - caused by a mind fixated with the idea of killing his children and committing suicide.

A Sessions Court had in 2007 had condemned Nair to life imprisonment, which he was contesting before the higher Bench, stating there was no clinching evidence against this conviction. In its verdict later, the Division Bench upheld the earlier judgment, and reconfirmed Nair’s life term.

Nair described himself and his children as “dying” in his personal diary, written in English on a page dated January 8, 1998. Interestingly, that entry almost three years before the fatal night was considered during trial as a “suicide note” and a confession of his “anguish”.

... contd.