Indian woman’s plan to disfigure lover and pass him off as her dead husband goes awry over a bowl of mutton soup

A 27-year-old Indian woman who was having an extra-marital affair reportedly hatched a plan to murder her husband, disfigure her lover and pass him off as her dead spouse – until her plan unraveled over a bowl of mutton soup.

According to local media reports, the woman, M. Swathi who worked as a nurse at a private hospital in Nagarkurnool, Telangana state, had an affair with a pysiotherapist, Rajesh.

Swathi used to patronise Rajesh’s physiotherapy clinic two years ago. It was at this time that she revealed to Rajesh that she was unhappy in her marriage and the couple apparently began their affair thereafter.

The lovers decided to kill Swathi’s husband, 32-year-old Sudhakar Reddy, and carried out their plot on 27 Nov by first injecting Sudhakar with anaesthesia before bludgeoning him on the head with an iron rod, after he had fallen unconscious, thereby killing him.

The couple then burned Sudhakar’s body and dumped it in the Nawabpet forest.

In a shocking turn of events, Swathi then poured acid on her lover’s face to disguise him as her dead husband. She told her family members that her husband had been a victim of an acid attack by unknown assailants.

It is believed that Swathi planned to have her lover undergo plastic surgery so he could eventually assume the identity of the husband she had just murdered.

This crafty scheme however came to a halt when Rajesh refused to eat mutton soup that was served at the hospital where he was admitted. He told the hospital staff that he was vegetarian, arousing the suspicions of Sudhakar’s family who knew Sudhakar was not a vegetarian.

The family’s doubts grew when they started noticing more differences between the late Sudhakar and Rajesh’s behaviour. To test Rajesh, they asked him to identify relatives – a test he failed.

After failing the test, Rajesh pretended to be unable to speak and started communicating with hand gestures instead. Unconvinced, Sudhakar’s brother lodged a police report and the police found discrepancies between Sudhakar and Rajesh’s fingerprints during their investigations.

Swathi subsequently admitted to murdering her husband during police interrogations.

In a disturbing admission, Swathi confessed that her plans were inspired by a 2014 Telugu movie, ‘Yevadu’. The revenge drama, starring Ram Charan and Allu Arjun, tells the story of an injured young man being given the face of his plastic surgeon’s late son.

The action thriller is itself inspired by the 1997 Hollywood movie, ‘Face/Off’, starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage.

Swathi was arrested for the murder of her husband last Sunday, 10 Dec.

The police also found that Rajesh was not a qualified physiotherapist, as he had claimed, and that he had dropped out in the first year of a four-year physiotherapy course.