Spiked juice to ayurvedic drink: Greeshma, Kerala woman who tried to poison boyfriend multiple times before finally succeeding, found guilty

According to the prosecution, Kanyakumari-resident Greeshma and Sharon, from Parassala in Thiruvananthapuram, had been friends since 2021 when she was a postgraduate student of English and he was in his undergraduate final year.

Although they were in a relationship, in March 2022, Greeshma’s family fixed her marriage to a military officer, and she consented to the match. The prosecution alleges that with her planned wedding fast approaching, Greeshma planned to kill Sharon, with whom she had continued a relationship even after accepting the marriage proposal.

She did extensive online searches on the effects that painkillers have on the body and attempted multiple times to poison Sharon, according to the prosecution. Once, she mixed several tablets in water and kept it for him to drink. She also handed him juice laced with tablets. As these didn’t have the effect she was hoping for, she even gave him a juice-drinking challenge, investigators found.

With Sharon emerging unscathed from all of this, she decided to use different ingredients.

On October 14, 2022, around a month before she was to marry the military officer, Greeshma invited Sharon to her house and served him a medicinal ayurvedic drink, in which she had mixed some herbicide, according to the prosecution.

With the ayurvedic concoction being normally bitter-tasting, Sharon did not notice anything unusual. However, after leaving Greeshma’s house, he began feeling uneasy and vomited several times that night, following which he was hospitalised.

On October 25, 23-year-old Sharon died of multiple organ failure while undergoing treatment at the Medical College Hospital in Thiruvananthapuram. Before his death, he had raised suspicion that he was poisoned by Greeshma and told a friend that she had “cheated” him. After his death, his family filed a police complaint.

Greeshma was arrested on October 31 and got bail nearly a year later, in September 2023. Her mother and uncle were also arrested on suspicion of abetting the crime and destroying evidence.

The case was registered under IPC sections 364 (kidnapping or abducting to murder), 328 (causing hurt by poison), 302 (murder), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence and giving false evidence to screen offender), 203 (giving false information) and 34 (criminal act done in furtherance of common intention).

Police said that during questioning, Greeshma told them she had wanted to break off her relationship with Sharon and that she had asked him to get rid of visuals of their intimate moments. She claimed that she feared Sharon would share the visuals with her husband-to-be and this was why she planned his murder.