Original subtitles

What they needed were Pallavi's golden earrings

and her "A1" anklets.

There was an airbag in the room. We looked inside it.

The airbag was full of women's clothes.

Bras, underwear, petticoats.

It was a shock for everyone

because they find piles and piles of women's undergarments.

Seeing that they become very anxious.

When we asked why these were in his possession,

Umesh Reddy's batch mates told us that he wore them to bed.

"He is a twisted sort of man."

This psychopathic behavior, his attempt on Geeta,

the storing of clothes in his room...

It all gave me the feeling that he was notorious

and that he did do these crimes.

It is my personal feeling.

But we found nothing belonging to Pallavi there.

In our investigation, we limited our search to just his room.

We didn't go to his village.

We should've gone to his village.

If we had gone there, we would've discovered a lot more.

But we didn't go there.

Umesh Reddy was born as BA Umesh in May 1973 at Basappana Malige.

It is near Chitradurga.

Basappana Malige used to be called "Kashipura."

The people here were mostly farmers and daily wagers.

In those days,

Umesh Reddy's family and the people of the village

lived in poverty.

Umesh Reddy's family was like any other.

In the beginning, they had about 20 to 30 acres of land.

Despite owning land, they could only harvest one or two yields a year

due to water scarcity.

Their house and yard were situated on 80-100 square feet of land.

Today, their house is in ruins.

His mother was always very friendly.

She was very social.

On a free afternoon, she would go mingle with other women.

She was very loving.

Umesh Reddy's father had a foul temper.

He was verbally abusive.

He would pick a fight with anyone who spoke to him.

And he would incite fights between others.

Because of his father's drinking habit,

there were instances of physical abuse as well.

Umesh Reddy had three brothers and one sister.

We've only seen his eldest and youngest brothers.

We've never seen the second eldest.

People say his second eldest brother passed away in a road accident.

But no one knows how or where he died.

His sister lives away with her family.

There isn't much contact between her and them.

But his brothers live and work on their farm even today.

We have to think twice before speaking to them.

Nobody goes near their house.

When someone does, they are confronted violently.

Wary of their neurotic state of mind,

people have chosen to avoid them completely.

Simply talking about them means courting trouble.

He didn't have many friends in our village.

And he didn't mingle with anyone much.

Umesh Reddy and my elder brothers were classmates.

According to them, Umesh stole pencils,

pens, girls' pens, and books in school.

It's not like he used the stolen books to study and do well.

He just wanted to toy with people.

And enjoy watching them look for their things.

They say, he used to steal with such intentions.

Most fathers hope for their children to have good jobs.

To bring them honor.

But Umesh's father just wanted to live each day at a time.

If his son ever erred, he never punished him.

He would instead support him.

Umesh Reddy would steal millets, peanuts.

He'd steal goats tied outside people's homes

at night and sell them.

In those days, a goat would cost 500-800 rupees.

Which is about 8,000-10,000 rupees today.

The villagers would have sleepless nights

over losing something as cheap as even 50 rupees.

They would even have to starve at times.

Because the families were living in absolute poverty.

Out of despair, Umesh Reddy was eventually branded a thief.

By the time people started looking for Umesh,

he had left the village.

He had been missing since.

About ten years later we heard that he'd joined the Chitradurga Police.

To join the police department,

and then to do a crime so heinous while still in training.

In a way, it was shocking that a person in uniformed service

would do such a thing.

Really shocking.

In that raid,

the police didn't find any of Pallavi's jewelry.

In Geeta's case, the CID instructed the town police

to lodge a case under the section of "outraging the modesty."

But back then, it was very easy to secure bail

in an "outraging the modesty" case.

"I didn't have any such intentions," is all one had to say.

Within two or three days, Umesh Reddy made bail and walked free.

Earlier, he did things discreetly

because of his inhibitions from being a policeman.

After being released, he absconds from Chitradurga.

He resurfaces in Bangalore.

Here, there was no one to question him.

Bangalore is the capital of Karnataka

and also its largest city.

The neighborhood bonding was very thick till the late 90s.

Back then, it was very difficult for a stranger to move around unnoticed.

By 1996, various companies, software and hardware,

worked out several permutations and combinations

and figured that there were low-wage and skilled workers available here.

California had the first Silicon Valley. Then came the UK.

Now India is cashing in on a massive IT boom

based around Bangalore.

Scores of western companies are taking advantage

of skilled workers and low wages

making it the fastest-growing city in the country.

Looking at the potential and the amount of money coming in,

the construction industry boomed exponentially.

That was the time when blue-collar workers

started pouring in to work at construction sites here and there.

With them, came some criminals as well.

That's where exactly the crime graph itself started changing.

Because nobody knew anybody. Everybody started becoming strangers.

At that time, hell broke loose.

My name is VPM Swamy.

I am a retired Deputy Superintendent of Police

in the Karnataka State Police.

During 96-97, I was a police sub-inspector

and also an inspector at the Mico Layout police station.

On 24th June 1997, I was at the police station

and I got a call from a village called Hulimavu

which is about 5-6 kilometers from the Mico Layout police station.

"A thief broke into a lady's home."

"We have captured him. Please come soon."

So on reaching the spot, the villagers had gathered around him

and he was tied to an electric pole with a rope.

He was also pleading innocence saying,

"People have beaten me but I have done nothing."

And he was also begging, "Sir, I don't know anything, I'm not from here."

"I'm from Andhra," or something like that.

He was trying to speak in Telugu.

I also understand a little bit of Telugu, being a Bangalorean.

The victim was a woman, a lady.

She had resisted him and screamed.

People nearby came to her aid and captured him.

Since she didn't lose anything

she did not come forward to lodge a formal complaint.

Back at the police station, we interrogated him about his identity.

He pretended to be very innocent.

He initially said his name is Rajulu.

Then I told him,

"Tell me your real name. It appears you are lying."

Then he said his name is Ramesh, and then Ragulu.

Though he said that he doesn't speak Kannada

and only speaks Telugu

I could make out that he could understand and speak Kannada.

After we toughened the interrogation, he disclosed his accommodation.

He said his house is nearby and he led us there.

The house was isolated.

It was about 12 feet by 12 feet.

It was all haphazard. Disorganized.

Things were lying around everywhere, all spread out.

In the room, we found a lot of valuables, gold and silver items.

Surprisingly, we also found a lot of undergarments belonging to women.

There were two quintal-sized bags that were filled with undergarments.

The police were confused.

Because they hardly found any men's clothes.

I asked him if he was married or was living with any woman.

He told us that he was alone.

When asked why he had so many of them, he told us

that he stole clothes that had been put out to dry.

What do you do with them after?

He didn't answer at first but later revealed reluctantly

that he wore them at night and masturbated in them.

That's when I got the feeling

that he might be involved in sexual crimes.

The police thought there was something wrong with this person.

But they did not know it is "fetishism."

Fetishistic behavior is getting aroused...

by inanimate objects.

In this particular case,

that object is female undergarments.

Our first intention was to uncover all the cases in which he was involved.

After much interrogation, he confessed to more cases.

Amongst these, was the Veena's case.

Veena had mentioned just one thing.

That instead of just leaving with his loot,

the intruder stripped her naked

and also stole other things from the house.

As per the police, to protect Veena's honor, they registered the crime

as a burglary that occurred when Veena wasn't even home.

She pleaded with us to keep it off the record to avoid humiliation.

Basis that we registered the case under section 380 i.e. "House Theft."

Veena in her complaint reported that some silver items had been stolen.

Since we recovered some silver items from his house,

we thought it was connected to Veena's case.

After identifying Veena's jewelry,

they questioned him about the remaining articles.

That's when he confessed that he stole them from the Peenya area.

A Peenya police officer by the name of Nyamegowda

and a victim named Ms. Sandhya came to see Ramesh.

Sandhya's things were also recovered from the seizure.

She identified them as hers.

She identified Ramesh as the person who had committed the offense.

My name is Basavalingappa Nanjappa Nyamegowda.

I was an Inspector at Peenya Police Station in Bangalore.

On 14th June 1997, in the afternoon at around 1:30 p.m.

when Sandhya was home,

a man knocked on the door, on the pretext of asking for an address.

As soon as she opened the door,

he grabbed her by her neck and dragged her inside.

He strangled her with a bicycle chain

dragged her into a room, stripped her naked,

and committed this deed.

After that, he tightened the bicycle chain until she became unconscious.

When she identified him, Sandhya was petrified and stayed far away from him.

She started to shiver.

I think she was about to faint on seeing this fellow in our custody.

According to my assessment,

he might have assaulted all his victims sexually.

The trauma from the sexual assault caused greater fear.

Being robbed or tied or being shown a knife

didn't matter as much as the sexual assault.

I entrusted the person to my colleague

and they were asked to take him with handcuffs and a leading chain

to the places where he confessed to having committed other offenses.

After you cross Mico Layout, Bannerghatta Road starts.

Unlike today, there were very few houses then.

On the way, he started complaining that he was feeling unwell.

All while chit-chatting with the police.

Midway, he sought permission to answer nature's call.

They stopped the jeep near a eucalyptus grove to take a leak.

Wrapping the leading chain around his hands, they allowed him to go.

For someone who was just saying how very unwell he was,

he simply took off with the chain.

The policemen didn't even know how to react.

They tried to chase him but he was not to be traced.

Immediately, we launched a massive manhunt.

That very night, we physically combed the eucalyptus grove and areas around it

with our station staff and the local staff from there.

But we couldn't trace him.

Therefore, we failed in our attempts to recapture him.

Having allowed him to escape and then not being able to trace him

was a massive failure on our part.

About a week after Ramesh alias Rajulu had escaped from our custody,

we got a pamphlet circulated from the Chitradurga Police Station

with his photograph.

And we also came to know that his real name was Umesh Reddy.

Only after we got that pamphlet, did we find out

that this Umesh Reddy is involved in a rape and murder case pertaining

to the Chitradurga Town Police Station.

That's when I discovered his notoriety.

I was unaware until then. I was shocked.

By the time they had realized that Rajulu and Umesh Reddy were the same person,

it had been six months since he'd left Chitradurga on bail.

In these six months,

the Divya, Geeta, and Pallavi investigations

were all taking their own course.

Around the Republic Day, when Geeta revealed what had happened to her,

my crime constable came to me with that information.

"Such and such crime has taken place."

"And it might be done by the same person."

So we, too, started showing some interest in him.

Pallavi, Geeta, and Divya,

all three cases had taken place in a span of two months.

The method of attacking these women was the same.

If you ask me how, he approaches from behind...

On approaching, he immediately shuts the mouths of the women.

He gags them, beats them up and terrorizes them.

There are similarities in all three cases.

And I had a feeling that all three crimes were done single-handedly.

Umesh's hometown was close by.

Just about 2 to 3 kilometers away.

We tracked his movements, his relatives,

where his farmland was, who he contacts here.

When we inquired,

we discovered that there had been some movement on that side.

After escaping, he would roam around the vicinity of his village.

He would go home at night and eat his mother's cooking.

And he'd then sleep in their front yard itself.

After escaping from Bangalore, he must've felt confident

that since he hardly ever lived in Basappana Malige,

nobody would go looking for him there.

7th July 1997.

When I was on the night rounds, I instructed the night patrol officer...

to visit Basappana Malige and to pick him up if they found him.

There was a yard in front of his house.

They went there to search.

If they found him sleeping there, I asked them to wake him and pick him up.

Pick him up and bring him to me.

We questioned him about the Divya case.

We questioned him about his movements.

Where he was these many days.

"Why did you escape from the police?"

"Where were you after you escaped?"

"What else have you done?"

"We have information that you were at the crime scene that day."

This was our line of questioning.

No matter what we did, he never confessed to anything.

When people speak of Umesh Reddy they say he's a hard nut to crack.

But the police have their own methods.

Bruises from police torture never show.

Without being hit even once, many criminals tremble

at just the mention of the "aeroplane" technique.

Why complicate matters by thrashing them?

When they need them to just talk, they adopt such methods instead.

Finally in the end,

succumbing to our questioning,

he admitted that it was all his doing.

November 1996.

I was waiting at a bus stop to travel to my village

when I saw a woman get off a bus.

I followed her.

I grabbed that woman from behind.

"I desire you and want to do it with you once," I said.

She hit me. So I hit her back.

Stripped her and attempted to sexually assault her.

She resisted a lot.

So I ripped her jewelry

and disappeared into some bushes nearby.

In the first week of December 1996,

I attacked a girl on Turuvanur Road.

"You're very smart, aren't you? You think you can run?"

When the girl screamed, an old man showed up with a stone in hand.

Leaving the girl there, I ran from the scene.

Two days later, I returned to Turuvanur Road to look for girls.

That's when I saw a girl with a basket walking towards me.

I grabbed her.

Dragging her into the bushes, I pushed her to the ground,

gagged her with my left hand when she screamed, stripped her,

and sexually assaulted her.

After removing her jewelry,

I carried her and laid her down in an under-construction house nearby.

When I checked, she wasn't breathing.

I realized she was dead.

The following night, when I returned to the under-construction house

her body was still there.

Lugging her corpse, I placed it back where I had assaulted her.

The police can't file a case against him, based on a mere confession.

As evidence, they would first need to recover the stolen items.

They questioned him about the jewelry he'd stolen from two of his victims.

Where he'd kept them. Or who he'd sold them to.

Umesh said he had buried them near his house.

There was a pot behind the house.

Setting the pot aside, he started digging with a wooden stick.

One and a half feet under the ground in a plastic bag,

we found some jewelry, kept hidden.

When we examined it closely,

we found a watch, necklaces,

earrings, and...

two anklets with "A1" engravings.

Pallavi had a younger sister

and their parents had got matching anklets made for both of them.

They brought the other pair and matched it with the ones we found.

Besides that, we found a watch, golden studs, earrings, and anklets.

These belonged to Divya.

We summoned her and she, too, came in for identification.

She confirmed that Umesh was the man who had attacked her.

After they identified their property,

we arrested Umesh

and produced him before the CID police.

While they were returning from Basappana Malige

after this recovery,

an incident takes place.

What Umesh did here is...

while they were bringing him back in a jeep,

he suddenly shits on the foot of the constable holding him.

He must've hoped to escape

when the constable is startled and loosens his grip.

But the constable doesn't fall for it that easy.

So his plan is foiled.

At that point,

they realized that he had forsaken any need for respect or dignity.

"Gallantry by local police."

"In the backdrop of the Pallavi Murder-Rape case,

Umesh Reddy was arrested based on his voluntary confession."

What is really unfortunate, is that during the Chitradurga lockdown

held in light of Pallavi's rape and murder,

Umesh Reddy was one among the cops policing the protestors.

When our protectors turn into our devourers,

who then do we trust?

There is a saying.

"We put up a fence around our fields to protect it.

But what if the fence itself starts grazing on the crops?"

She was a girl from our very town.

Someone who was like a daughter to all

and a student from a simple family.

A minor girl of just 17.

Opposing those who had brought this upon such a girl,

we, the public, had requested that no local lawyer

should take up Umesh's defense.

Every single person should be given an opportunity to safeguard his rights.

Constitutional protection must be provided irrespective of who they are.

He must be given an opportunity to defend himself.

Umesh Reddy met me in court one day

and insisted that I handle his case.

Upon his request, I filed a mandate to represent Umesh Reddy,

took the brief of his case and studied it.

As per my knowledge,

any statement given by the accused before the police authority

is not admissible evidence.

The police may have created whatever statement they need

to complement their case.

Because they couldn't find the real culprit,

to close the case,

they framed Umesh Reddy with ill intent.

Because he is very innocent and naive, they have framed him in all the cases.

Everything else is far from the truth.

And he was framed in some cases by the media as well

based on misinformation.

Apart from that, Umesh Reddy has not murdered,

has not raped, and has not stolen any jewelry of any kind.

Ever since the FIR was filed in the Pallavi case a year ago,

the investigating officers had changed several times.

First, it was Ajjappa.

Then there was Halageri.

When it came to the CID, at first it was Rajappa.

Who dropped the lead because he couldn't find

any evidence against Umesh Reddy.

The next investigating officers were Panduranga Rao and Durgaiah.

They completely opened up the case.

When they couldn't find any new leads,

they went back to that anonymous letter.

It seems as if they had already made up their minds

about who the culprits could be.

According to the CID, when in their custody,

Umesh Reddy recorded a different, new statement.

In that statement, for the first time, he revealed

that some of his friends were involved in Pallavi's rape and murder.

"I wasn't alone. There were five others with me."

He gave the story a new twist.

6th December.

As I was leaving the Chitradurga Sports Meet,

I saw a car parked on Turuvanur Road.

In it were my friends Anil, the son of an engineer

Sudhir, the nephew of a doctor

along with some other friends of Anil, Venky, Rakesh, Avinash, and Manoj.

Rakesh forced me to get into the car and we drove off.

It was about seven in the evening and it was quite dark.

Just then we saw a girl walking towards us.

Rakesh hatched a plan to kidnap her.

When I told them I wanted to leave, they bullied me into staying.

When she screamed, the others held her hands and legs tightly,

gagged her, and put her in the car.

When I refused to join in, they told me

that I'm the sole witness to the kidnapping.

Before driving away with the girl,

they threatened to finish me and my family.

Terrified, I slipped and fell down on the road

sustaining an injury near my left eye.

I returned to the sports meet around 7:45 p.m.

That's when a friend noticed my injury and asked what happened.

There was a wound above his eye.

We asked him what happened.

But I didn't tell him what happened. Instead, I told them...

...as he was moving tables, one of them slipped and hit him.

Before filing the charges, Durgaiah had told me this one time

that based on Umesh's new statement,

the CID was now charging six people.

Importantly, what happens here is

alleging that they are Umesh's associates

the CID starts arresting all of them one by one.

Now, was Pallavi's rape and murder

a gang rape, or did Umesh Reddy do it alone?

There were a couple of doubts in everyone's minds.

I'm 100% sure that he's not someone

who would ever commit a crime with an accomplice.

Their ages don't match.

They're not from the same neighborhood.

He was recruited as a constable.

While they were students in college.

There could've been no connection between Umesh and the co-accused.

Psychopaths commonly never have partners.

Back then, when we saw the young girl up close...

She was in such a state that one could bear to look at it.

When you talk of the assault, it wasn't something done by one or two people.

Because an act so monstrous could not have been done by just one or two people.

We concluded that this crime had been committed

by a group of people, acting together.

Let me be very clear here.

Is it possible for a doctor to tell by examining the victim

whether a single person has sexually assaulted

or a group of people, one after the other?

I don't think it's possible by physical examination.

Of course, we can take swabs from the genital organs

and send them to the forensic science laboratory.

We can find different DNAs.

But those days and in that place,

the availability of these things is very unlikely.

Could not have been possible.

People say that such damage couldn't have been done by just one person.

But when I saw Umesh, and touched him, I knew he could do anything by himself.

I've seen him during the interrogations.

His body was like a rock.

We could feel that it's like metal.

He's a beast. He's like an animal.

I realized that day that this man needs no assistance.

Considering these points,

it would be wrong to conclude that this was a gang rape.

When there are multiple suspects in one case,

the police try to turn one of the accused into an approver.

In policing, the approver system is such that

whoever confesses the details of the crime is made an approver

in exchange for a reduced sentence.

In this case, they did just that and pulled Sudhir aside.

Finding him to be the weakest among them,

the police may have promised him protection

in exchange for a confession statement.

6th December 1996.

We saw a girl carrying a basket of flour, walking down Turuvanur Road.

Stopping the car, Rakesh started walking towards the girl with Venky and Umesh.

They grabbed the girl and stuffed her into the backseat of the car.

While resisting she managed to kick Umesh

and he fell out of the car.

Leaving Umesh behind, the rest of us drove away

to a place near the highway.

They dragged the girl into what looked like a crematorium.

I only watched from a distance.

Just then Venky said that the girl was dead.

Everyone went quiet.

Rakesh and Avinash brought a gunny bag to the spot.

Later they stuffed the body in the boot of the car.

They dropped me back at Turuvanur Road

and said that they'd dispose the corpse themselves.

I went home and slept.

Many a time, the approver might've spoken the truth.

But here, there are several loose ends.

Umesh Reddy is a psychopath and a rapist.

And he was also involved in some other crimes, before that.

Why will he miss the opportunity to "enjoy" her?

If they did have a car, why would they stow the body in the boot,

park the car somewhere,

and return to the crime scene that morning to place the body?

They could've disposed it somewhere far away.

Where was the car parked until then?

Where had they hidden her corpse between the nights of 6th and 7th?

They could've disposed of it right there.

If they had transportation, they could've dumped the body

in one of the many ditches in Chitradurga's hills.

It would've decomposed in four days

and discovered only after dogs and foxes had fed on it.

The press deliberately blamed the children of the wealthy.

It is impossible.

I will challenge it, even today.

Because police officers shouldn't get tied down by one theory

and stick to the same story just to fool people.

So there were a lot of loose ends in the entire investigation.

But the CID decided to go ahead with that kind of investigation itself.

"A heinous crime by the children of the elite out in the open."

"Five men responsible for Pallavi's rape and murder

were taken into judicial custody."

"They are finally caught."

Even after Umesh had been caught,

there were doubts that maybe more were involved.

And when they eventually did catch more suspects

and produced them before the court,

thousands of people gathered around the entire court premises.

The public's demand that day was

the courts needn't punish them.

"Hand them over to us instead. And we'll do the punishing."

"We'll ensure that no other girl child falls prey to such circumstances."

Such were the cries, loud enough to reach the clouds.

Feeling that it would be dangerous to house the accused

in the Chitradurga district jail

owing to its poor security,

it was decided to move them immediately to Bellary Jail instead.

"We can call for them when required," they decided.

Bellary is a high-security prison

because hardcore criminals are lodged there.

Before any transfer of custody, the accused is subjected

to a mandatory medical check-up.

After 7 p.m., once the mob had thinned,

the accused were being transferred from the hospital to a police van.

Here all of a sudden, a surprising development took place.

For a supposed fracture at his ankle,

Umesh Reddy's foot was in a cast of plaster of paris.

When questioned, he told them that he had sustained the fracture

while being made to wear a leading chain.

All prisoner transfers must happen during the daytime.

But in this case, by the time the 150 km transfer began,

it was already around 7 p.m.

The escort only had five constables, and some among them were trainees.

It was already late by the time they'd left.

Moreover, the escort vehicle was also very old

and wouldn't go faster than 30-40 km per hour.

By the time they reached Bellary Jail, it was midnight.

Upon reaching, when they notify the jail authorities

that they've brought the prisoners,

they're informed that the superintendent

will have to be awoken to start the procedures

which can only happen in the morning now.

Meanwhile, while they were all discussing,

Umesh Reddy says he needs to pee.

There was an older constable with him, who also happened to be diabetic.

The constable needed to pee as well, and so offered to go with Umesh.

The two leave to go pee nearby in the dark.

Being a diabetic, the constable peed slowly.

Umesh, on the other hand, finished quickly and...

It never occurred to anyone that one could run normally

even with a cast on one's foot.

But by then he had made a second successful escape from the police.

After Umesh Reddy's escape in July '97,

there is a huge gap in his story.

After being on the run for several months,

he finally returns to Bangalore in February 1998.

And once again, he came back to the Peenya area.

And that would mark the beginning of his end.