If I told you that a simple ink pen or what was known as a fountain pen led to a murder and a breakthrough in forensic science in India, would you believe me?

This is the historic Alavander Murder Case of 1952.

Alavandar was a man in his 40s and worked as a sub-divisional officer at Avadi near Madras (now Chennai). After leaving the army, he opened a store called Gem & Co, which sold fountain pens and saris. He enticed women by introducing a scheme where they could purchase sarees from him in installments. The brilliant salesman in Alavander made him very popular among young ladies. 

However, his business was short-lived as his wife lodged a Missing Person complaint on 29 August 1952. A subsequent investigation by the police revealed that Alavander had been last seen a day ago with a woman named Devaki Menon. 

Around the same time, passengers in a third-class compartment of the Indo-Ceylon mail train complained about a foul smell to a Travelling Ticket Examiner. Later, they found that the smell was coming from a steel trunk. Everyone was left petrified upon realising with utter horror that the steel trunk contained dismembered body with the head missing.

The post-mortem report revealed that the body belonged to a 25-year-old male. The police also came to an initial conclusion that the person might be a Muslim after noticing that he was circumcised. Later, the police shifted the body for preservation at the local burial ground. 

After a few days, police discovered a severed head on Royapuram Beach in Chennai. It had been buried in the sand but was left exposed due to the tides. The investigating officer Ramanatha Iyer shifted the head and the remaining body to Madras Medical College for forensic examination. It was up to Dr Gopalakrishnan to piece together the puzzle and unravel the mystery. Meanwhile, the severed head found on the beach became the talk of the town in the local newspapers.

Dr Gopalakrishnan was one of the standout figures in Forensic Medicine in India, and he also had expertise as a Police Surgeon in Madras for many years. His immaculate deductions led to convictions of the guilty and reprieve for the innocent.

In this case, Dr Gopalakrishna quickly identified that dismembered body and the head belonged to the same person. When the body parts were placed together, they fitted perfectly.

Fortunately, Alavandar's fingerprint records during his time in the British Indian Army also helped the investigators quickly crack the identity of the person.

His wife also identified the body and the mystery surrounding circumcision was solved as well. Alavander had undergone circumcision and consumed opium to improve his sexual prowess.

In the meantime, Ramanatha Iyer tracked down the house of this mysterious lady Devaki Menon. But a surprise awaited him. The Menons vacated the house and left Madras. Iyer immediately suspected something was amiss. He did not have to wait too long to confirm his suspicions after he found blood stains on the walls of the house. Iyer knew the Menons were involved but needed to join the dots and build a case with tangible solid proof to charge them. 

Interestingly, an auto-rickshaw driver told police that the man from the house had carried a round-shaped object in a bag and dumped it at Royapuram beach. Iyer knew it had to be the head. Now he needed to dig deep and connect Menons to the victim – Alavander.

The investigations by Iyer revealed that Alavandar belonged to the Komati Chetti community. Even though he was married and had two children, he was an Opium addict and a womaniser. The sales technique of selling sarees in installments was a trick to lure women. He also forced those women who failed to pay the entire amount to sleep with him. The majority of women did not say no to his demands out of fear he might shame them publicly for not being able to repay the amount.

Slowly, the police unravelled the mystery behind Aravinder and his activities. However, the accused Menons remained absconding, and the case slowly went cold. 

However, a servant boy who worked for the Menons' revealed that the couple had left for Bombay via Mysore. Iyer flew to Bombay, and with the help of the Bombay Police, he managed to locate the Menons and arrest them. They even found a pen that belonged to Alavander in Prabhakara’s shirt pocket! They were brought back to Madras for trial. 

That is when the real story unfolded…

Devaki met Alavander in 1951 at the pen shop. She had gone to buy a fountain pen. The suave Alavander had quickly impressed her and wooed her. Within a few days, they had gotten intimate. She quickly severed the ties after finding out that he was a womaniser. Later, she met Prabhakara Menon, and they got married.

Everything was going well until the day Devika decided to see Aravander again. Prabhakara Menon used to work in a newspaper and was looking for clients who would advertise in it. Devaki volunteered and took her husband to meet Alavander. Menon got suspicious about the proximity of Devaki and Alavander when the latter behaved overtly familiar with Devaki. 

When confronted, Devaki confessed to her husband that Alavander was her former lover. Prabhakara Menon could not digest the fact and planned to get rid of him.

So on August 28 at 11 am, Devaki visited Alavander in his shop and informed him that her husband was not home and they could have a rendezvous. After earning his trust, he allowed Alavander to follow her to her house. Many witnesses corroborated in court revealed that they had seen Alavander entering Devaki’s house. 

He tried to get intimate with Devaki soon after they reached the house. That is when Prabhakara Menon came out of the shadows, and a scuffle ensued in which Menon stabbed and killed Alavander. Using knives purchased for that very purpose, Menon chopped Alavander’s body and stuffed it into the steel trunk. Following this, he took an auto-rickshaw and disposed of the severed head on the beach before travelling to Egmore station to load the steel trunk onto the Indo-Ceylon Mail.

They decided to abscond from Madras after Mrs Alavander turned up at Devaki’s house looking for her husband. Interestingly, the Menons never tried to influence the eyewitnesses who mentioned Alavander was last seen heading to Devaki’s house!

The police piled up more evidence – Devaki’s blood-stained sari, which matched Alavander’s blood-type, blood found in the house, a blood-stained palm print on the wall, which matched Prabhakara’s palm and Alavander’s blood.

The trial was sensational. The macabre ingredients of the case had made it to the front page of every newspaper! At the Madras High Court, it was a sight to behold! To avoid losing the accused at Madras High Court, they were locked in a concealed door on the floor at the 4th Court hall. After every hearing, they were shifted back to this confinement with armed security.

A strong case for pre-meditated murder was built by the prosecution, and the defence team insisted that the murder was unintentional and occurred during the scuffle. 

After much deliberation, the jury (a system that prevailed then) found the defendants, Devaki and Prabhakar, guilty of culpable homicide. On 13 August 1953, Justice AS Panchapakesa Iyer awarded a seven-year rigorous imprisonment sentence to Prabhakar for culpable homicide and sentenced Devaki to three years in prison.

The public felt that the punishment meted out to them was very lenient. And they thought the reason for this happening was because the presiding judge ASP Iyer was from the same region of Malabar as the accused. Not realizing that the prosecution lawyer was also from the Malabar region. 

The Menons served their time in prison, and after their release, Devaki and her husband set up a tea shop in Kerala. Over the years, they prospered and turned their small tea shop into a hotel.

Noted filmmaker, lawyer, scriptwriter, columnist and film historian Madabhushi Rangadorai, better known by his pen name Randor Guy, went in to write a TV serial based on this case in Tamil. 

Randor Guy in his column in Crime Magazine revealed an interesting footnote. According to him, when Mrs Asokam Easwaran (the daughter of Justice Iyer) visited the town where the Menons lived, she saw in their prayer room a photo of her father, Mr Justice A.S.P. Iyer, along with their household gods and goddesses. 

According to Randor Guy, she also revealed that her father had described the case as a “justifiable execution of an unwanted rascal.” 

Was 7 years therefore a reward to the Menons for getting rid of the womanising Alavander? 

For what it’s worth the case was a sensational one that put all the forensic sciences to the test. 

(Anirban Bhattacharyya is the author of the true-crime bestsellers The Deadly Dozen: India’s Most Notorious Serial Killers and India’s Money Heist: The Chelembra Bank Robbery. He is the Creator, Producer of the hit TV show Savdhaan India, and the Producer of Crime Patrol.)