The Elderly Woman Who Used Cyanide Water to Murder Other Women

At one glance, she looked like a woman who would visit the Hindu temple in Kaggalipur frequently. She would mingle with younger women and share her wisdom to help them with their distress.

She was like a motherly figure to several.

However, little did the innocent women visiting the temple knew that their motherly figure was hiding her true intentions behind a mask, waiting to prey on them. 

Before the Murders

K D Kempamma was a resident of Kaggalipura, a small village located near the capital city of Banglore in Karnataka. 

Little is known about her past, except that she was married to a man who worked as a tailor. 

Things did not work in her financial business and as a result, her husband abandoned her in 1998. 

According to sources, she worked as a domestic helper afterward where she was caught stealing several times. 

The First Spree of Murders

In 1999, Kempamma started frequently visiting the nearby temple. In the guise of a concerned, older woman, she would seek out younger women who would appear distressed. 

The woman would see her as a maternal figure and would quickly confide about their troubles. After all, she had come to the temple to pray for the divine help for her troubles and would be more than happy to share. 

Seeing her age and experience, they would feel safer. 

By providing them with an ear, Kempamma would collect all the information about their worries. The usual tension ranged from illness to conceiving a male child. 

To every issue, she would guarantee a holy solution - a special 'puja' (prayer) that she was an expert at. 

She would ask the lady to come to a nearby place, wearing her expensive jewelry as a part of the ritual. 

Towards the end of the ceremony, she would give them a glass of water laced with cyanide as a pious token. 

After the victim's death, she would take away all the gold and diamond from the bodies and sell them in the market. Her first victim was a 30 years old Mamatha Rajan. 

Her murders continued till 2000 when she tried to rob a house where she went for the puja. The victim found out the truth and ran away to her family, screaming. 

Unfortunately, Kempamma was only given a short sentence of six months and released soon after. 

The Murders Continued

She again started killing using her usual modus operandi in 2007. 

Using the cyanide water, she killed about 5 women in a period of 3 months. According to reports, there are several missing person reports that were filled at that time and could have victims of Kempamma as well. 

After several murders and robbing dead bodies of gold and riches, she was arrested for the second time in 2008, after the police got a tip about her whereabouts. At the time of arrest, she had the victim's jewelry in her possession. 

She confessed to all the murders. She got access to her poison from jewelry shops, where it was used to clean gold jewelry. Her inspiration to use cyanide as a murder tool came from popular movies. 

The media house gave her the nickname of "Cyanide Mallika". 

Sentence 

She became the first woman to be given the death penalty in the state of Karnataka. However, later on, it was converted into life imprisonment because of circumstantial evidence. 

She is still serving her sentence in jail. 

Final Thoughts 

When I first came across the case, I was intrigued by the fact that the perpetrator was a 45 years old woman. Due to the lack of female serial killers, her case remained stuck in my mind. 

My natural instinct was to look at her childhood in order to find any possible trauma and abuse that led her on the path of murder and deception. However, I could barely find any information about it. 

Even in her trial, the police stated that the main motive for the murders was robbery, and she had no psychopathic tendencies.

The gender, age, and the lack of psychopathy make the case unique in all means.