Why Mount Waverley slaver Kumuthini Kannan will spend more time behind bars

A Mount Waverley mum who enslaved an elderly woman in her family home desperately tried to stop her victim from testifying against her. But her plan backfired spectacularly.

Kumuthini Kannan was found guilty of keeping a woman as a slave. Picture: David Geraghty

A suburban slaver who held a grandmother captive in her Mount Waverley home for almost a decade has copped even more jail time for threatening her victim to drop the case.

Kumuthini Kannan, 55, has been hit with up to another year behind bars for ordering the enslaved woman not to “repeat what you said earlier” when she called the aged care home where her elderly victim was recuperating.

She will serve at least an extra six months’ jail for attempting to pervert the course of justice, which has been added to the four-year minimum she’s already received for her slavery crimes.

Kannan was caught on CCTV at Forest Hill Chase shopping centre on February 16, 2020, where she spent an hour on the payphone harassing the woman she’d already tormented for eight long years.

The next day, the victim was due to meet with her lawyers in continuing to provide evidence for trial.

Kumuthini Kannan before she was imprisoned. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

Kannan, who called her aged care home claiming to be the Tamil interpreter, told her victim she’d been working for the court for 14 years and would be there when she gave evidence.

“Don’t say anything … or they will never send (you) back (to India),” she told her.

“You will rot in this country until you die.”

She told her not to trust the police or the lawyers, and that “they are in it only for the money and to make names for themselves”.

After the elderly woman hung up the phone, she started “screaming, crying and did not sleep that night”.

Years earlier, the vulnerable woman had been found by healthcare workers in a “dangerous state of health”, lying in a pool of urine on the floor of the Mount Waverley home belonging to Kannan and her husband Kandasamy.

She later told police she’d spent eight years trapped there cooking, cleaning and caring for their kids, between July 2007 and July 2015.

She’d been beaten with a frozen chicken, burnt with boiling water and survived on sweet tea and mashed food after her teeth fell out as she was so malnourished.

Kumuthini Kannan (left) and Kandasamy Kannan (right) forced the enslaved woman to cook, clean and care for their kids between July 2007 and July 2015.

County Court judge Martine Marich on Friday said the phone call scheme backfired on Kannan, with her victim notifying the police of what she’d done the very next day.

“It is to the complainant’s enormous credit that despite her advanced age, her exceptionally vulnerable background, her long period of social vulnerability whilst you enslaved her, leading to her eventual neglect and physical decline … that she showed the fortitude to give evidence,” Judge Marich said as she sentenced Kannan.

“You failed in your endeavours despite your attempt to manipulate your tragic and vulnerable victim.”

Kannan – who now has major depressive disorder – admitted to what she did on the eve of her trial in June and pleaded guilty to a single charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Judge Marich said Kannan’s crime struck “at the very heart of the justice system”, and rejected her defence lawyers’ call not to add any more jail time.

Kannan, who did not express “any remorse or contrition”, was hit with two years and six months jail, to be served concurrently with her slavery sentence.

She was re-sentenced to a minimum four years and six months behind bars, with a maximum of nine years – an increase of six months and one year respectively.