Kollam: A court here has sentenced a music teacher to life imprisonment for murdering a beautician after the latter demanded having a baby out of their extramarital relationship.

The First-class Judicial Magistrate court awarded Prashant Nambiar (35), another 14 years of severe imprisonment under various accounts after convicting him of murdering Suchitra Pillai (42), daughter of Sivadas, a native of Mukhathala in Kollam district. However, the court ordered that the sentences would run concurrently. It also slapped a fine of Rs 2.5 lakh on the convict.

Prashant is a native of Vadakara, in Kozhikode district.

The shocking incident happened in March 2020. Prashant Nambiar, who is married and the father of a child, was a music teacher at a private school in Palakkad. The victim Suchitra Pillai, a divorcee, was a distant relative of his wife and belonged to a rich family.

Prashant established a close tie with the victim, mainly through the phone, and even obtained Rs 2.56 lakh from her. However, the latter insisted on having a child through artificial insemination, saying she wanted to be an unwed mother. This antagonized the accused, who feared that the same would bring their illicit relationship to the open and affect his married life. He decided to eliminate her somehow.

Chilling details of the murder recalled at trial

Chilling details of a cold-blooded homicide and cover-up were unspooled in the courtroom here during the trial in the sensational Suchitra Pillai murder case.

To eliminate Suchitra, he rented a house at Sreeram Nagar at Manali, Palakkad. The house was located on an isolated, abandoned property in a sparsely populated area. He then lured Suchitra to the house in a car from Kalluthazham Junction in Kollam on March 17, 2020, and killed her three days later.

After smashing the victim’s head on the floor, the accused pressed both his knees forcefully against the woman’s chest. He strangulated her using the code wire of an emergency light and covered the body with a bed sheet.

As part of destroying the evidence and misleading the investigators, the mobile phone of Suchitra Pillai was taken to Thrissur, and he switched it off at a location near Mannuthy police station. This was planned to create an impression that Suchithra had been in Thrissur when she went missing.

The phone and its SIM cards were dismantled into different pieces and abandoned at various locations alongside the Thrissur-Palakkad Highway. He then returned to the crime scene with a shovel and, after extracting the gold ornaments from the body, he cut off her legs from the knees.

The corpse was later taken to the backyard of the house and placed in a huge pit dug there. Before burying it, attempts were also made to burn the body using petrol. To make sure that its remains were not identified by some random animals, rock pieces and cement blocks were placed on the burial site, before covering it with soil.

Soon afterward, he cleaned and washed the room where the murder took place and burned the materials, including the victim’s dress, vanity bag, spectacles, code wire used to chock her, and the cloth pieces used for cleaning the room, etc. The cosmetic materials used by the victim were thrown into a canal near Thottupalam Junction in Palakkad, while the machete and knife used for cutting the body into pieces were abandoned in a swamp. The shovel that had been used for digging the pit, meanwhile, was hidden inside the thick undergrowth on the property itself.