A mild-mannered primary school teacher proposed marriage to unmarried women without asking for dowry, spent one night in a lodge, and handed them a "contraceptive pill" outside public bus stand washrooms—leaving 20 women dead from cyanide poisoning. The reason might surprise you. Between 2003 and 2009, a baffling pattern of unattended deaths troubled police across Karnataka and neighboring states. Young women from lower-middle-class families were turning up dead inside the cubicles of public washrooms at major KSRTC bus stands in Mysuru, Madikeri, Hassan, and Bengaluru. Each scene looked identical: The victims showed zero external injuries, signs of physical struggle, or weapon wounds. Their gold jewelry, handbags, identity proofs, and cash were gone. Beside them lay only a tiny, empty plastic capsule foil or a sachet. Local police precincts initially treated the deaths as isolated suicides caused by failed love affairs, closing the case files without connecting the dots across district borders. Behind this calculated routine stood Mohan Kumar—a 46-year-old physical education teacher from Bantwal, known chillingly to forensic history as "Cyanide Mohan." His modus operandi was a masterclass in exploiting social vulnerability: The Target: He scouted bus stations and temple towns looking for unmarried women in their late twenties or thirties facing difficulty finding grooms due to societal pressure or heavy dowry demands. The Pitch: Presenting himself as a respectable, eligible bachelor under various false Hindu and Muslim aliases (Anand, Sudhir, Shashidhar), he claimed to be an influential government official. He won over their trust by promising immediate marriage without demanding a single rupee of dowry. The Setup: He convinced the women to elope with him, instructing them to wear their finest bridal sarees and carry all their family gold ornaments. He took them to out-of-town lodges, spent the night, and convinced them to leave their jewelry in the room the next morning before visiting a nearby temple for wedding rituals. The "Pill": On the way, near a crowded bus stand, he handed them a capsule, falsely claiming it was a pregnancy prevention pill to avoid conceiving before the wedding ceremony. To avoid vomiting, he instructed them to swallow it inside the private washroom with a sip of water. The capsule was packed with industrial-grade potassium cyanide, sourced from local goldsmiths under the pretext of cleaning silver ornaments. Within seconds of ingestion, the cyanide paralyzed cellular respiration. As the victims collapsed inside locked cubicles, Mohan walked back to the lodge, packed up their gold and cash, and caught the next outbound bus. The five-year killing spree collapsed in October 2009: A 22-year-old woman named Anitha from Barimar went missing after leaving home for a temple. Her family relentlessly tracked her call records. When police analyzed the phone logs, they noticed a recurring number that had gone silent the day of her disappearance. Detectives traced the handset tower pings to Deralakatte near Mangaluru, leading to Mohan Kumar’s arrest on October 21, 2009. When police raided his quarters, they recovered: 8 packets containing raw cyanide powder. Multiple fake identity cards, voter IDs, and over 100 mobile SIM cards used to groom victims. Piles of gold jewelry pawn receipts. Under sustained interrogation, Mohan confessed to luring and murdering 20 women across Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu. His judicial trials set historical legal benchmarks: Between 2013 and 2020, Mohan Kumar was tried in 20 separate murder cases, securing convictions in all of them—including five death penalties (later commuted to life imprisonment without remission) and multiple life terms.