“The legal fight of a daughter to get her father released is admirable, even though her father is suspected in multiple criminal incidents, including five murders,” the court added.

The mainstream media in Kerala celebrated the decision.

Once called “Ripper Jayanandan” by the press, the 57-year-old inmate of the high-security prison at Viyyur in Thrissur was convicted for two murders that took place in 2005 and 2006 — the first, of an 82-year-old woman who was killed in an attempted burglary, and the second, of a 50-year-old woman. Jayanandan was also found guilty of injuring the latter’s husband.

He was suspected to have committed five other murders between 2004 and 2005 but was found not guilty by the court in all of them.

He is also suspected of having committed a double murder of a husband and wife (61 and 58 years, respectively) in Thrissur, however, the police are yet to file a charge sheet in that case.

In late March, Jayanandan attended his daughter’s temple wedding under strict police monitoring. His parole lasted a fortnight.

In December 2023, Jayanandan was granted parole again — this time to launch his new novel. Once again, it was his wife who moved the court seeking his presence at the launch of his fictional title Pulari Viriyum Munpe (which roughly translates to Before the Dawn), published by Logos Books.

Indira told the court that her husband was reformed, and his writing was a clear indicator of the progress he was making. Jayanandan, who only studied till Class 9 before he became a fisherman, began writing novels in 2016 after he was granted permission by the director general of prisons.

His daughter, Keerthi, who argued for him this time around too, said that the book had sold widely in the state and its proceeds would go to differently-abled children. The Kerala HC granted Jayanandan a two-day escort parole to attend the function.

Keerthi was in Class 6 when her father went to jail. With the income from his fishing now gone, the family had to rely on the meagre money that Indira, who worked as a coolie, brought home.

Despite all odds, Keerthi studied law.

Keerthi recalled being 11 when the police took her father away one November morning in 2006, just as he was leaving to fish. The police accused him of murdering a woman in an attempted robbery some distance from his village. Within days, he was charged with five murders that occurred between 2004 and 2006 in the Thrissur and Ernakulam districts.

Now his legal representative, Keerthi said that in most cases, the primary evidence submitted by the police in court was stolen gold ornaments allegedly recovered from him. She says the DNA samples were not tested in any of them.

“Police have not filed charge sheets in two other murder cases slapped on him in recent years. We will petition for a review of all his convictions. We expect him to be acquitted of those charges very soon,” Keerthi said.

“In the early days, my mother wouldn’t take me to my father’s prison or court hearings because I was too young. A relative suggested I study and become an advocate to help with the case, but by the time I enrolled in law college, verdicts in two cases had been pronounced,” Keerthi said.

In 2021, the police informed the court that the investigation into a double murder case in which Jayanandan is the prime accused was still on. This hurt his chances of getting a pardon on India’s 75th anniversary, when several prisoners who had served three-quarters of their sentences, were released.

Kashmeera, the younger daughter, now a medical student, recalls how much she and her sister idolised their father and accompanied him on fishing trips. Together, they watched TV and also played games together before bed. Occasionally, the family took pilgrimages to Pazhani and Tirupati.

“I remember a day when the police arrived at home… We didn’t know what was going on. My father’s name appeared on TV. They reported the arrest of the prime suspect in the Perinjanam twin murder case. In an instant, our world changed. The next day, the newspapers screamed about the arrest,” Kashmeera said.

“Many students crowded outside to view me as I sat in class. For years, inquisitive passersby stared and gasped on buses and in the streets,” Keerthi said.

A prison mate from Ooty who completed his jail term offered to help Jayanandan fund his children’s education.

Keerthi had to complete the school final under the National Institute of Open Schooling, while Kashmeera studied at a school in Chalakudy by staying with her uncle.

Keerthi passed the LLB entrance exam with first rank and attended Ernakulam’s Government Law College.

“My mother struggled to fund our studies as costs rose. She started masonry. She lost her job after being exposed as ‘Ripper’ Jayanandan’s wife. My father advised my mother to divorce him to avoid the shame of being a murderer’s wife. But she refused,” Keerthi added.

Crime and punishment

Journalist MK Nidheesh, whose research on Jayanandan’s crimes was part of a project at the National Law University in Delhi, agreed with Indira’s argument before the HC and said that there were two reasons for Jayanandan’s reformation: Strong family support and gentle jail officials in Viyyur who did not let him rot him in prison and helped him explore his creativity. Unlike other cases, incarceration did not turn Jayanandan into a notorious criminal.

“His transformation is indicative of yet another Kerala model. The transformative facilities available in Kerala jails and their empathetic staff who respect basic human rights,” Nidheesh said.

Once a fisherman, Jayanandan was sentenced to death in the murder of the 82-year-old victim. His punishment was commuted to life imprisonment after Project 39A, a criminal justice programme at NLU, appealed the sentence in 2016.

Nidheesh, who has researched and published a series of articles on Jayanandan raised questions about how law enforcers manipulated facts to make Jayanandan out to be a serial criminal.

“All stories about him in the public domain are based on his alleged confessions to police. But few people know that he retracted his statements as soon as he was produced before a magistrate and has consistently maintained in these 17 years that the confessions were extracted by the investigators through torture,” Nidheesh said.

When asked about his version of the charges imposed on him, Jayanandan remained speechless but seemed emotional.

Several witnesses told Nidheesh that they were coerced into lying in court to ensure punishment for Jayanandan, who lacked proper legal help because of his poor background, the journalist said.

In one of his investigative articles, Nidheesh interviewed a top police officer who revealed that he tortured Jayanandan to confess to one of the crimes.

The investigation also revealed that the prosecution did not provide lab results that could have facilitated his acquittal in at least one case charged against him.

Stranger than fiction

The book that Jayanandan released on December 23, 2023, was a fictional account that revolved around the positive transformation of a murderer behind bars. Speaking at the release, Jayanandan said that the struggles of a fellow prisoner prompted him to pen the novel.

K Narayana Kurup, former acting chief justice of Madras high court released the book by handing over a copy to KP Rajagopal, a retired police officer who was part of many sensitive crime and murder-related investigations in the state.

Rajagopal is also the father-in-law of Jayanandan’s daughter, Keerthi.

“Only a police officer can understand how easily people are being branded as criminals and put behind bars,” quipped Rajagopal in his address to the function attended by rights activists, social workers, and the general public. The criminal investigation system in the country required an overhaul, he admitted.

Jayanandan’s incarceration for the past 17 years occupies Kerala’s civil society even today. Opinion is divided over whether Jayanandan committed the crimes he is accused — and suspected of — or not. In some ways, his case generated the same divide as the Talwars of Noida did in 2008. Incarcerated for murdering their teenage daughter, Rajesh and Nupur were eventually released for lack of evidence. Society was sharply divided over their roles in the double murder of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar and domestic help, Hemraj Banjade, who was in his 30s.

Speaking on the sidelines of the event to the Hindustan Times, Jayanandan said his initial years in jail were unbearable and there were occasions when he felt like he was on a stormy sea.

When asked about how he conceptualised the novel, Jayanandan recounted the story of when he was still awaiting execution. One day, was travelling in a police jeep which passed a blind mother carrying her infant and holding her aged father’s hand.

Despite his age, the man tried to protect his blind daughter, and they got stuck in front of the police jeep for a while. Later, thinking about them, he found similarities between the old father and one of his fellow prisoners, who was also protective of his family.

He started thinking about human virtues and people’s ability to sacrifice themselves to help others, he said. Jayanandan even wanted to donate his eyes to that woman after his execution.

All these years in jail turned Jayanandan into an avid reader, especially of Malayalam translations of world classics, mythology, and new literary experiments. His inspiration was Henri Charrière’s now best-selling book Papillon, published for the first time in 1970. The French writer, convicted in 1931 as a murderer by the French courts and pardoned in 1970, details in this book his numerous escapes, attempted escapes, adventures, and imprisonment.

Life inside the prison made him an avowed reader, and Jayanandan said he found himself writing only after he started interacting with Anoop Surendran, a law professor whose brainchild, Project 39A, aims also to improve the living conditions of prisoners on death row.

Additionally, he recalls with gratitude the assistance of TP Senkumar, the former chief of the Kerala police and DGP of the prison department, who encouraged prisoners to read voraciously.

At the book release, Jayanandan looked happy and content. He declared that he would keep reading in addition to writing books for the rest of his life.

Jayanandan’s book has done well: 2000 copies of the first print run sold off in a week; the book has now gone into reprint. Meanwhile, Jayanandan is writing another work of fiction, and his autobiography is already with the publishers. It’s incorrect to assume that interest in his case alone is helping sales. Eminent Malayalam literary critic Dr PK Rajasekharan said that Jayanandan’s power and hold over the language is such that he turns his readers emotional.