In September 2001, a gruesome discovery shook the forest belt of Karnataka.
On the morning of September 13, a forest guard patrolling the Konanakallu Reserve Forest stumbled upon a corpse — a man in his 40s.
Authorities suspected he had been murdered elsewhere and dumped there.
Initial documents found in the victim’s pockets identified him as “Jayakumar,” along with a mobile number.
Police believed they had found their victim.
But dialling the number revealed a twist: the person who answered was a wealthy businessman from Shivamogga named Jayakumar.
He told police that the missing man was actually his writer, Naresh Shanbaug, and that his driver, Mahesh, was also missing.
The writer and driver had been sent to Hassan district to collect ₹10 lakh in cash on Jayakumar’s behalf — but only Shanbaug’s body was found; the cash and driver had vanished.
Police discovered that the accused had avoided detection by relying on landlines, STD booths, and frequently shifting locations — in an era when mobile phones and SIM-card tracking were not yet common.
Each call from STD booths scattered across places like Bengaluru, Hassan, Shivamogga, Tumakuru and Udupi complicated the trail.
A breakthrough came after officers traced one of the numbers to a house near Udupi — it turned out to belong to an astrologer.
Pretending to be customers seeking help to recover stolen money, police cornered him into revealing that he had known Mahesh, who once worked as his driver.
Follow-up investigation and call-detail tracing eventually led them to a store in Bengaluru’s Kumaraswamy Layout.
There, they found another suspect, a man named Shivakumar. In his house, police recovered ₹6.29 lakh in cash. When interrogated, Shivakumar confessed, implicating Mahesh and his father-in-law, Venkatappa, in the murder and robbery.
According to police records, after Shanbaug collected the ₹10 lakh, the conspirators diverted the route.
Scared of identification, they sedated Shanbaug with a high-dose anaesthetic, struck him on the head, executed him, and dumped the body in the forest.
Nearly ₹8 lakh was recovered; the rest had been spent on a scooter, a refrigerator, and rent.
In 2005, a local court in Tumakuru sentenced Shivakumar, Mahesh, and Venkatappa to life imprisonment.
Although Shivakumar absconded on parole in 2010, he was re-arrested in May 2014.
Retired police officer D Palakshaiah — who led the investigation — later said it remained one of the toughest cases of his career.
The case was so notable that the National Crime Records Bureau included its investigation methodology in its annual report.
How a body dumped in a remote forest, ₹10 lakh in cash, and a missing driver — all linked by STD-booth phone calls — eventually led to one of Karnataka’s most challenging murder-robbery investigations, solved against all odds.
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