A knife, towel and pillow – these seemingly simple items could help the police solve an intriguing murder case where a mother – the CEO of a Bengaluru startup – has been accused of killing her son.

The police have recovered the three items from the service apartment she had stayed at in Goa. Ms Seth checked into the apartment in Candolim on January 6 and stayed there till January 8. She allegedly killed her son in the apartment and stuffed the body in a bag before taking it to neighbouring Karnataka in a taxi on Monday, police said.

When the apartment staff went to clean the room, they found blood stains on a towel. The staff immediately informed the police and told them that she carried an unusually heavy bag, and her son was not seen with her.

The four-year-old child was smothered to death either with a piece of cloth or a pillow, the post-mortem revealed.

The accused may have tried to die by suicide by slashing her wrist and later used the towel to stop the bleeding, the police said earlier.

“The recovery list from the crime scene includes a knife, a distinctive red bag, a towel, and a pillow,” the police said.

When police officials called up Ms Seth, who was then in the cab in Bengaluru Bengaluru – to explain the blood stains, she said they were due to her monthly periods.

She told them that he was at a friend’s place and even gave the officials a fake address. The officials then spoke to the cab driver in Konkani to avoid suspicion by Ms Seth and asked him to take the vehicle to the nearest police station.

That’s when the 39-year-old was caught with the red bag that she used to carry his son’s body. She was arrested from Chitradurga in Karnataka on Monday night and brought to Goa on Tuesday.

The police who are yet to find the motive behind the murder took Ms Seth for a routine checkup today. She was also given a psychological examination, police sources said.

Ms Seth shows “no remorse” over her son’s death, the sources told NDTV last night. In fact, sources said Ms Seth, in police custody till next week, has been “non-cooperative” so far.

The woman has denied her involvement in the crime during the interrogation and claimed the child was already dead when she got up from sleep.

Investigators are examining Suchana Seth’s Call Detail Records (CDR) to unravel her contacts and conversations in the three days surrounding the incident, aiming to shed light on any potential collaborators, the sources said, adding the taxi she travelled by is still in police custody.

Ms Seth has also told interrogators about her troubled marriage and as per sources, she allegedly killed her son reportedly over a custody battle with her estranged husband.

According to the couple’s divorce documents, Ms Seth had filed a domestic violence case in August 2022 against her estranged husband Venkat Raman. She had accused him of physically abusing her and her son, a charge Venkat Raman has denied in court.

Venkat Raman reached Hiriyur in Chitradurga district on Tuesday night and took possession of his son’s body after the post-mortem.

The Goa police would take Suchana Seth to the service apartment where she had stayed to recreate the crime scene later today, a senior official said.

Ms Seth is the CEO of ‘The Mindful AI Lab’, and according to her LinkedIn profile, she is an AI ethics expert and data scientist with over 12 years of experience in mentoring data science teams, and scaling machine learning solutions at start-ups and industry research labs.

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