Cyanide murder plot uncovered when pathologist ordered extra test that proved it wasn’t a heart attack
SAM Abraham’s death was a tragic heart attack until a decision to tick a box changed everything. What police uncovered was a deadly passion that spanned 15 years and 9000km.
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HE couldn’t say what made him do it. Cyanide is not routinely tested for when people die.
But it was a decision to tick a box by forensic pathologist Michael Burke that led police to uncover the truth about the death of young dad Sam Abraham in his suburban home in Melbourne’s north.
In performing an autopsy on Mr Abraham’s body for the Coroner in 2015, he would check a box on the toxicology form that would request an extra test to be conducted for any presence of cyanide.
Giving evidence later in court, the senior pathologist could not explain why he took that extra step that day.
But the results would reveal Mr Abraham had “extremely high” levels of the toxic poison in his system; and that was the cause of his death — not heart attack, as had originally been thought.
LOVERS GUILTY OF CYANIDE MURDER PLOT
ACCUSED KILLER LAY IN WAIT FOR POISON VICTIM
Homicide detectives were notified and an investigation began. But it was tricky.
They had treated the death as non-suspicious and did not seize anything from the scene that could have been used as evidence.
Because time had passed, any forensic evidence at the scene was lost.
All they had were some photos taken of the scene for the Coroner by a local police officer. One photo in particular showed a plastic cup on a bedside table in the bedroom with an orange liquid in it. Mr Abraham’s body lay nearby.
It was clue that would help to build their case against the two people police suspected were behind Mr Abraham’s death.
From college in India to secret Melbourne rendezvous
FRESH-FACED and with big dreams and aspirations, Sofia Sam and Arun Kamalasanan first crossed paths at an Indian college some 15 years ago.
The Mahatma Gandhi University classmates quickly bonded and formed part of a close circle of friends who did everything together.
Almost 9000km away from their home in the Indian state of Kerala, they would again become close.
The friendly pair had always stayed in touch and when Ms Sam was to marry Sam Abraham in 2008, Mr Kamalasanan was a guest at the traditional Indian wedding.
Again, when Ms Sam and Mr Abraham, both 33, had baby boy Reyhan, Mr Kamalasanan says he loved him as if he was his own as he always wanted a child.
And when the young family moved to Australia in late-2012, seven months later Mr Kamalasanan followed, despite having a pregnant wife.
He quickly became entwined in Ms Sam’s life.
They would meet on their work lunch breaks in the city; and have secret rendezvous at his house.
His housemate told how he once came home early from work to find them acting suspiciously in the lounge room with the door locked.
Ms Sam told police, when being charged with murder, her husband was also friends with Mr Kamalasanan. He was not jealous of their friendship. He trusted her, she said.
It was that same trust that likely lead to his death.
Police close in on secret lovers
IN THE weeks and months after the murder, under the watch of investigators, the pair were seen together running errands, shopping, meeting in parks and CBD cafeterias.
They were spotted visiting VicRoads, where she signed over ownership of her dead husband’s car to Mr Kamalasanan.
CCTV footage also captured the pair, six weeks after the murder, arriving in the same car together at Lalor train station. But bizarrely, as they stepped from the vehicle, they quickly walked in different directions to be not seen together.
Ms Sam looked back over her shoulder several times like she was worried someone was following or watching her.
HOW POLICE TRACKED COUPLE AFTER CYANIDE DEATH
She can then be seen entering the train platform, with Mr Kamalasanan following about 2 metres behind her. When she stops to top up her Myki, he walks straight behind her like they don’t know each other.
He goes out of the camera’s sight behind a pole.
But as Ms Sam later goes to walk past that very spot, she briefly stops and can be seen handing something to him, before continuing further down the platform on her own.
“The two of them would not have been able to have any open relationship in Australia until all of this had been sorted out,” Prosecutor Kerri Judd QC said, trying to explain their suspicious actions later to a Supreme Court jury.
The final piece of evidence that allowed police to swoop and arrest the pair in August 2016 was a secretly recorded confession made by Mr Kamalasanan.
“I am a murderer,” he tells an undercover police officer who had befriended him over five months.
“I took that guy off.”
He then details how he poisoned Mr Abraham drawing a detailed map of the house to point out how he sneaked in.
Mr Abraham was drugged with sleeping pills slipped into an avocado shake Ms Sam had made for him.
As he became drowsy and slipped into a deep slumber, he was carefully fed cyanide-laced orange juice over a period of time.
“I went there with the powder, sleeping pills ... and I gave it,” he says.
Asked why he did it, he replied: “You know, I’ll do anything for my friends. This guy was troubling her for some time.”
SECRET DIARIES REVEALED IN CYANIDE PLOT
He says he brought the cyanide powder back in his luggage on a flight from India.
Mr Kamalasanan had tried to protect Ms Sam, telling the covert officer she had no knowledge of his murderous plan.
He tells one undercover cop: “Even if I’m going into under law I don’t want her to.”
The defence tried to argue the confession was simply not true, and that tactics used by police to get it were deceitful.
A court-imposed gag order prevents the Herald Sun from detailing how police befriended him or got him to confess.
But police said, at the time of the confession, the only people who knew the cause of death had been determined as cyanide poisoning were at the Coroner’s office, and the police.
“It is too great a coincidence that the very way in which he describes killing Sam Abraham is the very way in which Sam Abraham was killed,” Ms Judd told the jury.
Deadly bond now broken
A SUPREME COURT jury had no doubt in their minds the pair plotted to poison Mr Abraham at his family home in Epping in the early hours of October 14, 2015.
They had both denied any involvement in the love triangle killing.
The pair sat metres away from each other in the dock of the Victorian Supreme Court during the trial.
But their once strong bond, which police revealed had turned into a love affair in the two years before the killing, is now broken.
Sources say Ms Sam wants nothing to do with Mr Kamalasanan.
The three-week murder trial had heard Ms Sam considered Mr Kamalasanan a close friend she could turn to for support. But she always knew he had stronger feelings for her. She denied their relationship had ever been sexual or romantic.
But secret diary entries found by investigators told another story.
“I wish to sleep in your arms but I can’t do that, I want to be yours but you are not mine, you are the one for me but you don’t belong to me,” Ms Sam wrote in her diary.
Another entry read: “Why I am made with rock heart, why I am so cruel, why I am so cunning ... why you make me bad.”
In Mr Kamalasanan’s electronic diary, he recorded coming to Australia from his native India to meet Ms Sam.
“Met my love for the first time in Melb after seven months. Yes I reached near her. A promise, to be there, wherever you go,” he wrote.
“It took a long time to gather the strength to let her know about my love and how much I love. Now she knows how much I love her.”
In another entry Mr Kamalasanan wrote: “I am sure that one day she will be mine, this life or next. I will wait for her.
“I am afraid ... how many more days I need to live in pain without her.”
It was those strong feelings, and their desire to be together — as well as evidence they had set up a joint bank account 18 months earlier — that the prosecution argued was their motive for plotting to poison Mr Abraham.
It was suggested they wanted to make it look like a tragic accident, and once they had got away with it, they would live happily ever after together.
Justice Paul Coghlan will sentence the pair at a later date.