Bhubaneswar: A 13-year-old girl from the Gajapati district of Odisha allegedly conspired with two male friends – several years her senior – to murder her mother and then passed it off as a natural death.
There is more to the story.
The woman the teen murdered was not her biological mother. The kind-hearted woman and her husband had picked her up from the roadside in Bhubaneswar when she was barely three-months old. The two had then raised her as their daughter.
The woman who was allegedly smothered to death has been identified as Rajalaxmi Kar (54). She lived with her husband in Bhubaneswar till recently. After they found the abandoned child on the roadside nearly 13 years ago, the childless couple adopted her and started bringing her up as their own daughter.
Rajalaxmi’s husband passed away a year after the child was adopted and she moved to Paralakhemundi in the Gajapati district so the girl could study at the Kendriya Vidyalaya there.
According to the police, trouble started after the girl befriended Ganesh Rath, a temple priest and Dinesh Sahu. Rajalaxmi was against her relationship with these two men and objected strongly.
According to the police, the girl also stole some gold ornaments belonging to her mother and handed them over to Rath who pawned them for Rs 2.4 lakh. This indicates that the girl was after Rajalaxmi’s property.
“On April 29, the three smothered Rajalaxmi with pillows when she was sleeping at home. The girl then went around the neighborhood telling people that her mother had died of a sudden heart attack. The trio then took the body to Puri and got it cremated. It was only after Rajlaxmi’s relatives lodged complaints that we launched an investigation,” Jatindra Kumar Panda, SP, Gajapati, told the media.
While carrying out the probe, the police came across three mobile phones with incriminating messages, two pillows used to smother Rajalaxmi to death and 30 grams of stolen gold.
All three were taken into custody. While the minor was produced before a juvenile court and sent to a home, Rath and Sahu are in police custody.
