Geography and Serial Killing

Geography is the study of the physical feature of a given location, its atmosphere, and its inhabitants and their activities. Geography, a subject that is considered far distant from Criminal Science by the general populace, but plays the role of an undeniable partner in most crimes that take place on earth. Each serial killer partners with this unstoppable force of nature to commit murders. The mountains, or the flatlands, the thick forests or the parched lands, the deep water, or the desiccated deserts, each distinctiveness of the geography is heavily reckoned by the serial killers who hound in such locations. They devise their murder strategies partnering with these undeniable forces of nature.

"The Flow" which is mentioned in Taoism, is a concept worth explaining here. The Flow is otherwise known as "the effortless living", is a stage one will achieve when practicing something for the millionth time. When you do something repeatedly, and when you keep at it for a very long time, you will learn all the efforts you initially put were useless, had you sunk with the forces of nature, been drunk in life through the whole act. At that moment, everything you desired will come to you. You just need to stay put while the earth moves underneath your feet to take you wherever you want to go. The Flow is all about aligning with the forces of nature and flowing through it to get what one covets the most.

  

 "Killer Kuppusamy" drove in a green mopped two-wheeler through the mud road of a remote village in Tamil Nadu. Heavily drunken, he never felt the gutter of the road and experienced the mopped was almost in a flow. It was a sunny afternoon, the land was flat around, with some foliages here and there.  He rode for miles without seeing more than a few human beings. The warm wind and long sceneries stretching to the horizon, Kuppusamy eyes fell on a woman grazing cattle in the distance. He parked his mopped beside a bush and observed her for a while. After he made sure there was no one in the vicinity, he sneaked from behind and strangled her with a rope he was carrying. Her cries for help muffled in the warm wind and her virulent gestures for life overlooked by the distant sceneries surrounding her. When she fell, he dragged her behind a bush, removed her clothes, and violently fornicated with her body. Once he was done, he removed her gold stud and put it in his pocket. He started his mopped and rode to the end of the scenery.

Kuppusamy killed many women in the Pudukkottai, Sivagangai, Dindigul, and Trichy districts of Tamil Nadu in three months in 2009. All murders happened during the daytime, and in all cases, he attacked his victims in deserted lands. The Geography understands him, because a while ago in a closer district, in a similar geographic location, there was another serial killer named Ramesh who employed a similar method of operation. Like Kuppusamy, he also strangled lone women in the middle of the day for sex in deserted lands. They both did not know about each other's existence, but they followed the same methods of murder. They have both devised methods for killing aligning their routine perfectly in sink with the Geography.

During my research, I rode my old bike through the mud roads where Kuppusamy traveled to study his "hunting protocol". The population there was concentrated in villages. Passing a village, I had to ride miles without seeing any houses or buildings before reaching another village. Occasionally, I saw lone women collecting wood and feeding cattle. It is part of their daily routine to venture to these deserted lands to collect woods, graze cattle, their day-to-day struggles to keep poverty at bay. They spent whole days in the open lands and went home before night. Like Kuppusamy, like Ramesh, some other unknown murderers will be lurking around perfectly in sink with the Geography.

The article is written by S. A. Deepak, Ph.D. He is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at D.G. Vaishnav College. You can read his books on serial Killers in India at the below link.

Read this Book