Six months ago, what was first reported as an unexpected, natural death has now been reclassified as a well-planned murder. Dr. Mahendra Reddy, a well-known general surgeon in Bengaluru, was arrested for allegedly killing his wife, Dr. Kruthika Reddy. Police said that Mahendra, a well-known dermatologist, used his medical knowledge to give his wife a deadly overdose of anesthetic. The pair got married on May 26, 2024, therefore they had only been married for less than a year.
On October 14, police detained Dr. Mahendra Reddy, who works at Victoria Hospital, after forensic findings showed that his wife’s body had anesthetic drugs in it, showing that her death was not natural.
M. Parashuram, the Whitefield DCP, said that the murder was planned “with clinical precision.” “Mahendra had carefully plotted the murder of his wife. “He knew about her medical problems and used his professional knowledge to take advantage of them,” the DCP stated.
The orchestration: from stomach pain to deadly injection
The investigators have laid out the surgeon’s planned measures that led to his wife’s death:
On April 21, Mahendra gave Kruthika an intravenous (IV) drug at their home, saying it was only for stomach pain.
April 22: He brought her to her parents’ house in Marathahalli, saying she needed to rest. That night, he came back to give her another IV dose.
Kruthika said on April 23 that the IV site hurt. Mahendra supposedly told her over WhatsApp not to take the line out, promising that he would come back that night to give her one last dosage. He went to her room around 9:30 PM and gave her the deadly injection, which is thought to have been an anesthetic.
April 24: The next morning, Kruthika was found unresponsive. Mahendra is said to have not tried CPR, even though he had training as a surgeon. She was sent to a local hospital quickly, but she was dead when she got there.
Reason and Discovery
The case was reopened and changed from an Unnatural Death Report (UDR) to a murder probe because Kruthika’s father, K. Muni Reddy, kept complaining. The later autopsy and Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) results showed that anesthetic drugs were in her organs, which proved that the first guess of natural death was wrong.
Kruthika’s father said he felt very betrayed: “Our daughter thought her marriage was based on love and respect.” But the same medical knowledge that should have saved others was used to kill her.
Investigators think that Mahendra’s motive came from anger after he found out that Kruthika had long-term metabolic and stomach problems that her family supposedly didn’t tell him about before they were married. This news is said to have caused months of anger, which led to the carefully planned poisoning.
Police said that Mahendra stayed calm even after his wife’s death, acting as if it were an unfortunate medical event. When asked, the surgeon is said to have shown no emotion and asserted that he was innocent.
After the FSL results were in, the police changed the case from murder to murder and arrested Mahendra under Section 103 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS). Seemant Kumar Singh, the police commissioner in Bengaluru, praised the investigative team for “solving a murder that had been disguised as a medical tragedy.”
Colleagues at Victoria Hospital said that Dr. Kruthika Reddy, who had an MD and DNB in dermatology, was a devoted and kind clinician who “always talked about empowering women through dermatology.” She was just a few days away from opening her own skin clinic, Skin & Scalpel, on May 4.