(CNN) -
Uthra's mother found her daughter motionless in her bed at home, her left arm stained with blood.
Her family rushed her to the local hospital in Kollam, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, but the 25-year-old was already dead.
An autopsy conducted on May 7, 2020 confirmed that she had been bitten hours earlier by the highly venomous Indian spectacled cobra, according to court documents.
In India, where snakebites aren't rare, that could have been the end.
But his family became suspicious and filed a complaint with the police.
Following a trial that made national headlines, Uthra's killer was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes the sentencing judge called "diabolical and gruesome."
The judge determined that Uthra's death was caused by the cobra, but the real killer was her husband.
And it was not the first time that he used a snake as a weapon.
Suraj Kumar and Uthra got married in 2018, but in 2019 he was plotting the murder.
A broken love story
Suraj Kumar and Uthra, who only used her first name, met through a matchmaking service and got married in March 2018.
"We wanted to find someone who would make her happy," said Uthra's brother, Vishu, who also uses only one name.
"She was a slightly different girl. She had a learning disability. We wanted a man who could take care of her."
Kumar, 27, a bank employee, did not come from an economically stable background.
His father was an autorickshaw driver and his mother a homemaker.
According to the ruling, Kumar married Uthra "in order to obtain financial gain".
When the couple married, Kumar accepted a dowry of 720 grams of gold, a Suzuki sedan and 500,000 rupees (about $ 6,700) in cash.
The first months of married life seemed "quiet" and in a year they had a child, according to the sentence.
But it didn't take long for Kumar's parents to want more.
According to the ruling, Kumar's parents demanded that Uthra's parents pay for appliances, a car, furniture, renovation works, and admission fees to an MBA course for Kumar's sister.
"Uthra was someone who never looked down on anyone," Vishu said.
"His learning disability meant that he did not have the means to see that they were using it."
Uthra's father told the court that he met all of Kumar's demands and was also paying him 8,000 rupees (US $ 107) a month to take care of his daughter.
But Kumar began to be "dissatisfied" with Uthra's learning disabilities, according to the ruling.
He then began to plot his death.
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Failed assassination attempt with a first snake
In late 2019, Kumar appeared to develop an obsession with snakes.
He spent hours on the internet, watching YouTube videos, including episodes of "Snake Master," with renowned snake expert Vava Suresh.
Suresh's YouTube channel, which has more than 270,000 subscribers, shows him quietly interacting with snakes, including the extremely powerful Russell's Viper, one of the most aggressive snakes in Asia.
Snake hunter Vava Suresh is well known for rescuing snakes from human habitats in Kerala.
(Photo: Raj K Raj / Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
On February 26, Kumar bought a lethal Russell's viper from snake trainer Chavarukavu Suresh - unrelated to Vava Suresh - for 10,000 rupees ($ 135), according to prosecutors.
The next day, she left the snake on her staircase and asked Uthra to fetch her phone from the first floor bedroom, hoping it would bite her and kill her.
But it failed in the attempt since Uthra saw the serpent and gave the alarm voice, says the sentence.
Kumar captured the snake and put it in a plastic bag, and on the night of March 2, he tried again.
Kumar mixed sedatives in a bowl of Indian rice pudding before Uthra fell "sound asleep."
While she slept, Kumar made the snake bite her before throwing her out of the house to destroy the evidence.
Russell's snakes are nocturnal and live in dry places, under bushes.
Uthra awoke screaming in "excruciating pain" and, with some delay, was taken to the hospital by Kumar, who claimed that she had been bitten outside the home at night while doing laundry.
The woman contradicted the version of events by saying that she had never washed her clothes after dark.
The next day, while his wife lay in the hospital, Kumar again searched his phone for snakes, but this time he searched for "cobra."
The murder with the second serpent
Uthra spent 52 days in Pushpagiri Hospital in the Kerala city of Thiruvalla recovering from the snake bite, and when she was finally discharged into the care of her parents on April 22 last year, she was unable to walk.
While in bed, his leg bandaged after the skin grafts, Kumar decided to attack.
On May 6, just 15 days after the woman was released from the hospital, she introduced another snake into her parents' home that she had bought from Chavarukavu Suresh, who was a snake handler.
This time it was a cobra.
Before going to bed, Kumar gave Uthra a glass of juice mixed with sedatives, according to the sentence.
While he slept, Kumar threw the snake at him, but the reptile didn't bite him, so he grabbed his head and jabbed his fangs into his left arm, twice.
Signs that it was not an accident
Despite his efforts to make it look like an accident, several clues suggested that the bites were unnatural: from the width of the fang marks to the position of the bites, to the inability of the cobra to have entered the room on your own.
The two pairs of bite marks on Uthra's arm were 2.3 and 2.8 centimeters wide, respectively, much greater than the typical width of cobra fangs, which ranges between 0.4 and 1.6 inches, experts told the court.
That indicated that the cobra's upper jaw had been pushed as if it were being milked.
The time of day also raised suspicions.
"Cobras don't tend to bite unless provoked a lot. And after 8 pm they are usually inactive," said Hari Shankar, deputy inspector general for Kerala police, who served as the lead investigator on the case.
In court, the researchers proved their point by setting up an experiment to show whether a cobra would attack a sleeping person.
In the video, the same type of cobra was thrown on a bed with a mannequin at night.
The video shows the snake sneaking around multiple times, only biting into a chicken breast tied to a limb when repeatedly taunted.
https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/SnakeMurderWEBTAG1.mp4
Experts also raised questions about how the cobra got into Uthra's room.
Cobras can only rise vertically to a third of their length, the court was told, meaning that the 152-centimeter cobra that bit Uthra was only able to rise to a height of about 50 centimeters, not tall enough to enter through the Windows.
Also, three vents in the room were sealed.
And finally, Uthra had slept through what was possibly one of the most painful experiences of her life.
Vava Suresh, the star snake hunter Kumar had seen on the internet, was called to testify.
He told the court that during his 30-year career he had been bitten 16 times by a Russell's viper and 340 times by a cobra, resulting in "excruciating" and "severe" pain, although only three viper bites and 10 of Cobra were "critical," he said.
The snake catcher said he had to amputate the middle finger of his left hand after a cobra bite, and that after another bite he can no longer fully rotate his right wrist.
He said that a snake that bites to protect itself does not attack twice, as the animals save their venom.
And he was sure Uthra would have woken up to being bitten, if she hadn't been sedated.
The Indian spectacled cobra can grow up to 1.8 meters long.
Cobra test and analysis destruction
Kumar stayed awake all night after the attack, according to the sentence, during which he destroyed the evidence by washing the crystal glass and the stick used to manipulate the snake.
He also deleted his call history, which showed that he had been in contact with the snake handler, the sentence says.
After Uthra was pronounced dead, her brother Vishu found the cobra inside the family home and killed her.
He followed the police advice to bury the snake in the house and marked the spot with a stick.
During the investigation, the snake's carcass was unearthed and post-mortem examination showed that its abdomen was empty, a "very significant" fact, according to researcher Shankar.
"It usually takes seven days for a snake to digest food," he said.
"Which means that it had been at least seven days since he had eaten something. A cobra that lives in a natural habitat eats at least twice a day.
"So that means that the snake that bit Uthra had been kept in confinement."
https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/SnakeMurderWEBTAG2.mp4
Death by snakebite
Uthra's death is not the first in India involving a snake murder charge.
On October 6, the Supreme Court of India denied bail to Krishna Kumar, one of three accused of murder for the death of a woman from the northern state of Rajasthan by leaving a poisonous snake in a bag near her bed. according to local media NDTV.
People buying poisonous snakes from snake charmers to kill other people by snake bite is "a new trend" that "is becoming common in Rajasthan," Judge Surya Kant said during the bail hearing, reported. NDTV.
Snakebite deaths are not uncommon in India, with 1.2 million such deaths between 2000 and 2019, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
But Shankar, the researcher, said that 99.9% of snakebites in India are characterized as "accidental".
"We don't know (how many) of those cases could have been murders but passed on as an accident," he said.
"(In those cases), it is very important to prove that the bite is homicidal. We prove that the person was drugged and we retrieve the defendant's container, we prove that he bought the snake, his search patterns on his mobile, all those things."
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Snake seller pose
On May 8, the day after Uthra's death, Chavarukavu Suresh, the snake handler who sold the cobra to Kumar, learned of her death from the local newspaper.
He tried to phone Kumar, according to the court, but he did not respond.
The next day, Kumar called Suresh back and told him not to tell anyone that he had sold the snake to him.
Suresh said that he asked Kumar why he had committed a "grave sin", and Kumar replied that he could no longer live with his wife.
If Suresh was silent, he said, they could pass his death off as a "curse of the serpent" and both would avoid being implicated in murder.
In Kerala, the "curse of the snake" is a superstitious belief that cobras have the power to curse families who do not worship them.
Suraj Kumar is taken into custody by police after being sentenced to life imprisonment for killing his wife.
But, when the police detained Kumar, they also arrested Chavarukavu Suresh, who confessed to selling the two snakes to him, although Suresh insisted that he had nothing to do with the murder plot.
Kollam's chief judicial magistrate pardoned him, leaving Kumar as the prime suspect.
Chavarukavu Suresh subsequently testified against Kumar in court.
Sentence
The prosecution called multiple experts who testified that Russell's snake bite was also unnatural.
Experts said it was almost impossible for the snake that lives on the ground to be able to navigate the smooth tiles to the first floor of Kumar's house, where Uthra was bitten.
Additionally, the bite marks were vertical, suggesting that she was bitten while lying down.
Snake expert Vava Suresh told the court that Russell's vipers like dry and arid landscapes, while Kumar's house was built on marshy terrain.
He also said that locals had told him they had not seen a Russell's viper in the area in 15 years.
Kumar has pleaded not guilty to the charges, but the judge convicted him of four crimes, including attempted murder and manslaughter, and handed him two life sentences.
"This is shocking to us"
Five weeks after Kumar's conviction, the woman's family remains shocked that the man they trusted to love their daughter conspired to kill her.
"The police and the prosecution have done their job well," said his brother Vishu.
"Despite being a very rare case, they have been able to prove their guilt.
"But (Kumar) was stoic and showed no remorse. That's shocking to us."
His goal now is to make sure Uthra's 2-year-old son grows up happy and remembers his mother for the caring and caring woman she was.
Every time Uthra's family shows their son a picture of his mother, he smiles, Vishu said.
"He raises his hand to the photo and says 'Uthra amma, Uthra amma,'" using the Malayalam word for the mother, he said.
"We will make sure he knows who his mother was."
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