Content note: this post discusses multiple deaths within one family, including a child. We’ve kept out graphic detail.
Six deaths in one family over fourteen years. Every one of them written off as natural: a heart attack, old age, a sudden illness. Then, in 2019, someone finally asked the obvious question. This is the Koodathayi case, the one Netflix turned into Curry & Cyanide, and if you live in Kerala you’ve heard every version of it. Let’s lay out the real one.
The Ponnamattom family, Koodathayi, Kozhikode
Koodathayi is a small place near Thamarassery in north Kerala. The Ponnamattom house was a respectable one: Tom Thomas, a retired education department official, his wife Annamma, their son Roy, and Roy’s wife Jolly, who told everyone she taught at the National Institute of Technology in Calicut.
She didn’t. That lie held for years, and it turned out to be the least of it.
Fourteen years of funerals
- 2002. Annamma, 57, collapses after eating and dies. Heart attack, everyone says.
- 2008. Tom Thomas, 66, dies suddenly. Old age, everyone says.
- 2011. Roy, 40, Jolly’s husband, dies after a meal. This time there’s a post-mortem, and it finds cyanide. The family accepts a suicide verdict. The case is closed.
- 2014. Mathew Manjadiyil, Annamma’s brother, who had apparently been asking questions about Roy’s death, dies.
- 2014. Alphine, the one-year-old daughter of Shaju, a relative, dies suddenly.
- 2016. Sily, Shaju’s wife, collapses at a dental clinic and dies.
In 2017, Jolly married Shaju. The pattern, laid out like that, is almost unbearable to look at. For fourteen years, nobody did.
The man who wouldn’t let it go
Roy’s brother Rojo Thomas, living in the US, never accepted that Roy killed himself. He pushed, and kept pushing, and in 2019 Kerala Police finally reopened the file. Bodies were exhumed. In October 2019 Jolly Joseph was arrested, along with two men accused of supplying the cyanide: a goldsmith named Mathew, and a man named Praji.
Police alleged she’d confessed to all six, with motives that ranged from money and property to simply removing people who were in her way or suspicious of her. The confessions were later contested by her defence, which is where things get slow.
Where the case stands
This is the frustrating part for a true crime fan. The investigation was thorough, the charge sheets ran to thousands of pages, and then the trial got stuck in the way Indian trials do: separate cases for each death, witness lists in the hundreds, delays, applications, bail hearings. Jolly has spent years in Kozhikode’s women’s prison while the first of the six trials inched forward. As far as I can find, there’s still no final verdict in any of them. (If that’s changed by the time you read this, tell me in the comments and I’ll update.)
What Curry & Cyanide gets right
The 2023 Netflix documentary is one of the better Indian true crime films, mainly because it talks to the family. Rojo, Roy’s sister Renji, and the neighbours give you the texture of a small Kerala community where a woman could claim a job she didn’t have for years and nobody checked. The film is careful not to convict Jolly on screen, which some viewers found unsatisfying and I found honest.
What it doesn’t do well: it leans hard on reenactment, and it doesn’t explain how six deaths in one house, including a cyanide finding in 2011, produced zero follow-up for eight years. That’s the real story, and it’s about institutions as much as it’s about one woman.
Why this case stays with me
Because of the 2011 post-mortem. Cyanide was found. The word “suicide” was written down, and the file closed. Everything after that was avoidable. We’ve written about another Indian case where the first few days decided everything: Aarushi Talwar.
Did you watch Curry & Cyanide, and did it change your view of the case? Tell me below.
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