Mohan Kumar Vivekanand was born in Karnataka in 1963 and worked for more than twenty years as a physical education teacher in government primary schools in Dakshina Kannada, in the coastal south of the state. His public prosecutor put his teaching career at 1980 to 2003. He was married twice, and neither wife knew of the other until he was arrested. Along with the killings he has been linked to loan frauds and forgery. The Indian press calls him Cyanide Mohan.
The method was the same every time, and its repetition is the case. He approached young unmarried women at bus stands and in queues, most of them poor, most in their twenties or early thirties, many from families who could not raise a dowry and for whom an unmarried daughter of that age was a standing anxiety. He gave a false name and a respectable job: Shashidhar Poojary, Sudhakar Acharya of the forest department, Sudhakar of an insurance firm, Sridhar, Ananda, Bhaskar. He offered marriage, courted the woman by phone for weeks or months, then asked her to come away for the wedding and to bring her gold. He took her to a lodge in another district, spent the night with her, and in the morning handed her a tablet which he said would prevent pregnancy, telling her to take it in the lavatory at the bus station. It was potassium cyanide. She died in the toilet cubicle within minutes. He collected the jewellery he had persuaded her to leave in the room, sold or pledged it in the nearest town, and took a bus home.
The killings ran from 2003 to 2009 by the reckoning of the prosecution and the Karnataka High Court, and the entry has been corrected to that span. Twenty murder cases were eventually registered against him. The bodies turned up in ladies toilets at bus stands in Hassan, Madikeri, Mysuru, Bengaluru, Kushalnagar, Putur and elsewhere across five districts, and none of them was connected to any other for six years.
The reason is the most important thing in the case. A woman found dead in a public lavatory in a town where nobody knew her was registered as an unnatural death, kept as an unidentified body, and buried or otherwise disposed of without a name. The victims were rural women whose families were looking for them in their own villages and would never see a notice published in a city. Post-mortems were slow, and by the time viscera were examined the cyanide could no longer be found. Traces of cyanide were established in only one of the twenty bodies. Everything else rested on circumstantial evidence, on the gold, on the phone records and on what he said after his arrest.
The thread that unravelled it was a mobile phone. A twenty-two-year-old woman from Barimaru village in Bantwal taluk, named in the reporting variously as Anitha Barimar, Anitha Mulya and Anitha Bangera, went missing in the second half of 2009; the accounts give different dates. Her body had already been recovered from the ladies toilet at the bus stand in Hassan. In her village the disappearance was taken up as a case of what local Hindu organisations called love jihad, the village became dangerous, a police station was occupied by demonstrators, and it was that pressure, as an officer later admitted anonymously, that forced a real investigation. The Bantwal police examined her call records and traced the number she had been speaking to, which led first to an innocent man in Coorg named Sridhar, whom villagers went and beat. It then emerged that Sridhar's sister Kaveri, who worked in Kasaragod, had vanished in February 2009 and had gone with his phone, and that her body had been found at the Mysore bus stand that same month without her family being told. Mohan Kumar had been using the dead woman's phone. Several of the missing women's handsets were traced to Deralakatte near Mangaluru, and to a boy named Dhanush, who said his uncle Mohan had given them to him.
He was arrested on October 21, 2009. At his house police found Anitha's jewellery, several mobile phones and eight cyanide tablets. They also found a record he had kept of the women he had approached, with the names of those who had refused him struck out in red. His hit rate, one officer told the British press, was about two in ten. One woman survived him: Kanthi, who took what he gave her on April 13, 2009 and lived, and who became the prosecution's most important witness. In interviews after the arrest he admitted killing Anitha and at least nineteen others, and led officers around Kodagu, Mysuru and Bengaluru naming lodges and bus stands, though he could not always identify the lodge he had used.
The trials have run for more than a decade, one case at a time, mostly before the fourth and sixth additional district and sessions courts at Mangaluru, with the accused appearing by video link from Hindalga central prison in Belagavi. On December 28, 2013 he was sentenced to death for three murders, those of Anita Barimar, Lilavati Mistry and Sunanda Pujari. Conviction followed conviction after that, most of them carrying imprisonment for the remainder of his life without remission, along with terms for abduction, rape, cheating, administering poison, destroying evidence and robbery. A fourth death sentence came in October 2019 for the murder of an anganwadi worker in 2005. In June 2020 he was convicted in what the reporting described as the twentieth and last of the cases.
Counting his convictions from the press is not straightforward, because outlets number the cases inconsistently and some count cases put to trial rather than verdicts. Taken together the reporting supports twenty cases charged and twenty convictions entered by the middle of 2020, with four death sentences among them. The Karnataka High Court has treated those death sentences differently case by case: in 2017 it commuted one to imprisonment until death, it reduced another to life with a term of rigorous imprisonment, and it upheld the death sentence for the murder of Sunanda Pujari at the KSRTC bus stand in Mysuru on February 11, 2008. Figures of thirty or thirty-two victims circulate in some coverage and have no support in the charges or the judgments.
What the case is remembered for in Karnataka is not the poison but the six years. Twenty women were killed in public buildings in busy towns, and each death was filed as an unidentified body because no system connected a woman missing in one district to a body found in another, and because nobody with authority was looking for them. The families were paying off loans taken to buy the gold he walked away with.