The alibi was perfect, so was the anonymity. The two former army men who were wanted in the Anchal triple murder case for 19 years had plotted the grisly act with precision. The main suspect, Divil Kumar, was away on duty at Pathankot military station on the day of the murder.

The involvement of a second person was dubious, given the veil of anonymity around him, save for a fake name. At a time when CCTV visuals or call data records barely figured in a police investigation, they backed themselves to get away, and they did, for nearly two decades.

When CBI eventually held them from Puducherry, where they resided, with new identities, on Friday, Shanavas A, SP, Intelligence, Kerala Police rang up Santhamma, mother of Ranjini, who was stabbed to death along with her twins, who were 17 days old.

Santhamma was at a temple when the call came. She broke down over the phone. "She said she prayed for this all these years; she had gone through so much pain, having to witness the horrible death of her daughter and babies and then living with the fact that they were never arrested," said Shanavas, then the Anchal CI who initially investigated the case.

Years later, during a meeting of intelligence officials, Shanavas broached the Anchal murder case. He had cracked it long back, but the accused Divil and Rajesh slipped away.

Nothing could be more agonising for an investigating official to identify the accused but not to be able to bring them to law. Shanavas had closely seen what Santhamma went through during those days.

A random call to Anchal police station about the bodies of a mother and kids being found in a rented house at Aeram would take Shanavas and his team on a long, frustrating hunt for two men.

For a moment, it seemed like an open and shut case. Divil was in a relationship with Ranjini. A complaint against him over the paternity of babies was filed at the state women's commission. This prompted him to kill Ranjini and the babies.

There was a suspect and a motive. Things got knotty from then on. On the day of the murder, February 10, 2006, police confirmed that Divil, who was serving in the Army, was on duty at Pathankot.

This led cops to look for other suspects. They had found an RC book from the crime scene. It didn't look like the document would help much. The police, however, identified the owner of the RC book, who told the cops that he had given his two-wheeler to a shop for resale at Sreekaryam in Thiruvananthapuram.

The staff told the police that the bike was sold to two men; one had a fair complexion, and another had a beard. Divil's identity was confirmed, but the police were in the dark about the second person. Information gathered from Santhamma and residents revealed that a man named Anil Kumar got friendly with Santhamma and Ranjini at SAT hospital.

He would visit them frequently at their rented house at Aeram. But police would soon realise that Anil Kumar was a fake name. A family who was staying on rent near Ranjini's house told police that they heard a two-wheeler starting and vrooming away on the day of the murder. It was now clear who did the murder.

Frequent visits to the second-hand two-wheeler shop did not produce any lead. "We didn't lose heart. We kept going to that shop and talking to them. The breakthrough came when one of the staff remembered an incident.

"Rajesh had turned up at the shop to pick him up to repair a puncture. On the way, he stopped at an ATM near a mosque on Ulloor-Kesavadasapuram road. That was our first breakthrough," recollected Shanavas.

A cop sat with the bank manager and pored over thousands of transactions. Rajesh's ATM transaction was linked to a bank account in Pathankot. This established the association between Rajesh and Divil. Both of them were employed in the Indian Army at Pathankot.

The police dug deeper using the core banking system and tracked their ATM transactions. They were on the move as money was being withdrawn from Pathankot, Nashik and Delhi. The last transaction was recorded in Nagpur. The first image of Rajesh was sourced from Pathankot via fax. The cops tailed them, but every time they got close, the duo kept slipping away.

"The closest we could get to them was at Nashik, but when we reached there, they had left the place a day ago. We couldn't use flights then, so we travelled by train. It was so frustrating. We knew where they were, but we could never get to them," said Shanavas. The police had then contacted the Army officials to apprise them of the crime.

It was also arranged that Divil would be brought to Kerala, accompanied by an Army official who was coming home on leave. When they reached Delhi, Divil escaped. The police later sent a report to the Army regarding the crime, and both Rajesh and Divil were declared deserters as they never turned up for duty.

The police had made sure that samples of babies were collected for DNA profiling at the time of post-mortem. The cops obtained a favourable court order to do DNA profiling of babies at the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology, Thiruvananthapuram. This is expected to be crucial with the arrest of Divil.

Once his DNA matches the profile of the babies, his motive for murder could be proven beyond doubt. The cops associated with the probe recounted how they took pains to store the DNA samples until a court order was obtained.

"When you know that who did the crime, but you can't catch them, it keeps haunting you. I was so relieved when they were caught. Our technical intelligence wing did commendable work tracking them down," said Shanavas. One thing that always puzzled the cops was the friendship between Rajesh and Divil and the extreme lengths to which Rajesh went to help Divil.

"When Divil escaped from Delhi, Rajesh was on leave in Kerala. Both of them never reported for duty after that," a police official said. Rajesh and Divil had assumed new identities in Puthucherry and were employed as interior designers.