KOCHI: When the body of a four-day-old baby was found near the fish landing point at Mampally near Anchuthengu on July 18 this year, the police was initially caught in a fix. For them, identifying the baby itself was a herculean task.
The cops initially felt the newborn could have been discarded into the sea from one of the nearby coastal districts and washed ashore at Mampally. To check this, they alerted all the hospitals, Asha workers and Kudumbasree volunteers in Kollam, Thiruvananthapuram and Kanyakumari districts.
But the efforts did not yield results. That was when the officers at Anchuthengu station thought of conducting an elaborate secret investigation at Mampally and nearby areas. And the breakthrough came by the third week of July as they tapped an informer, an elderly lady, who provided a vital information.
She told of her suspecion that a woman named Julie living in Mampally was pregnant as she complained of back pain. The elderly woman could gauge that it was pregnancy-related. But the police were initially not convinced as the young woman has been a widow for the past few years, and nobody in her locality verified that she was pregnant.
Julie worked in a shop selling kerosene and since the matter was very sensitive, the police took a cautious approach. They clandestinely monitored her at the shop and found that she appeared exhausted. Still, that was not evidence to detain her.
It was at that moment Station House Officer G Praiju thought of checking her mobile call details. The call detail record revealed that Julie was a voracious mobile phone user, but between 4pm on July 14 and 8am on July 15, she did not use it even once.
The timing of her abstinence from using the phone raised doubts among the officers. Julie was taken for questioning and during medical examination she was found to have given birth recently.“On questioning, we came to know that she gave birth in the wee hours of July 15. The labour pain had started by 4pm on July 14, and that’s why she stopped using the phone,” the SHO said.
During further questioning, she acknowledged that the baby was hers and since it was stillborn, she buried it secretly in her compound.
The SHO felt she was lying and talked to her over the phone pretending to be a forensic doctor. Julie fell for that trap and confessed over the phone that she had smothered the baby to stop him from crying. Since the baby was born out of wedlock, she feared humiliation from her relatives and neighbours and decided to do away with the baby.
The incident came as a shock for Julie’s family as even they did not know she was carrying. “She used to wear dresses in such a way that the baby bump was not visible,” said another cop.