Word: shanmugavela
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...Carolyn had been to the estate before the night she was strangled. Residents of the row of two-room shacks say she had come several times to see one of their neighbors, a self-proclaimed spirit medium named Shanmugavela. Outsiders are closely watched in this small community of 27 Indian families and some 50 Indonesian workers, and Carolyn's blond hair and Caucasian features made her particularly conspicuous, says Ghulam Hussein, a 53-year-old estate worker. Previously, Ghulam says, Shanmugavela had taken her to a nearby temple devoted to a demigod called Muniandy...
...from where Carolyn was strangled, just beyond her grave, which was finally discovered by police a few weeks ago after a tip-off. There, in a lean-to fashioned from a corrugated-iron roof and four wooden posts, the only decoration a single spear stuck into the raw earth, Shanmugavela and the three other killers conducted a gruesome set of rites upon Carolyn's corpse, an otherworldly ceremony they believed would bring a mundane reward: winning lottery numbers. It's not clear exactly what the offering to Kali involved, but Nithiyanantha Gurukkal, one of Malaysia's most senior Hindu priests...
...prestigious private hospital in Ipoh, an old mining town in central Malaysia where the family settled. But by late 1999, she and Raslan communicated mostly by shouting and Carolyn had formed a friendship with an ethnic Indian man named Michael. Police say Michael introduced Carolyn to the spirit medium Shanmugavela, promising that he could solve her marital woes. Both Michael and another man who allegedly participated in the murder are currently serving prison sentences for unrelated offenses and are still under interrogation by the police about Carolyn's murder...
...Shanmugavela, who died last year in a traffic accident, many of his neighbors on the estate say he was a fraud who faked the trances he fell into. "People here avoided him," says 63-year-old Thenavai, grimacing through teeth stained black by years of chewing betel nut. "We all knew about his character. But outsiders believed he could cure them and give them winning four-digit numbers...
...Even if Shanmugavela did exploit the gullibility of the outsiders, some part of him must have been in thrall to the goddess's dark power. After making the offering, police sources say, Shanmugavela fell into a trance in the makeshift Kali temple and intoned a four-digit sequence, these numbers the twisted legacy of a woman's life. Michael drove straight to a betting shop and put down a few hundred dollars, carefully repeating the sequence. The numbers were, of course, losers. Had they been the winning numbers, would the sacrifice of Carolyn's life have been any less...
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