But when the body of a young Dalit law student named Sashi was found hanging from that very toddy tree, the silence broke.
“Then who?” Varma whispered.
At dawn, Varma arrested Sub-Inspector Venkata Rao. Under pressure, Rao confessed: Sashi had threatened to expose the smuggling ring. Rao had called him to the tree under the guise of a “settlement.” With the help of the Sarpanch’s son and two constables, they had strangled the boy and made it look like a suicide.
That night, Varma didn’t raid the Reddys. He went to Muthyalu, the toddy climber—a frail, terrified old man with shaking hands. Varma sat next to him on the parched earth and said, “Muthyalu garu, you climb the tree every morning. You saw who tied the rope.” murder telugu movie real story
Frustrated, Varma did the one thing the village didn’t expect. He visited Sashi’s room. It was a leaking shed behind a tea stall. Inside, buried under a pile of law textbooks, he found a diary. The last page wasn’t a suicide note. It was a list of names and dates. And next to three names, Sashi had written one Telugu word: “Sakshi” (Witness).
The prime suspect was Nalla Biksham, the Reddys’ muscleman. But Biksham had an ironclad alibi: he was at a temple festival five villages away, captured on a grainy CCTV eating a jilebi .
The old man pointed a gnarled finger toward the police station. But when the body of a young Dalit
But his mother, Yellamma, a woman who sold pappu (dal) for a living, refused to cry. She looked at the ligature marks on her son’s neck—two distinct grooves, not one. Someone had pulled the rope from both sides, she knew. She walked ten kilometers barefoot to the town police station.
The second name: The Sarpanch’s son, Ravi.
The third name: The toddy tree climber, Muthyalu. Under pressure, Rao confessed: Sashi had threatened to
Muthyalu wept. “They said they’d kill my grandson, sir. Biksham didn’t do it. Biksham was the decoy.”
In the dust-choked village of Peddapur, nestled between the dry Krishna riverbed and a single highway, three things were sacred: the temple, the toddy tree, and the word of the Sarpanch .
The first name: Sub-Inspector Venkata Rao.
Enter Inspector Arvind Varma, a cynical, chain-smoking officer transferred from Hyderabad for “taking bribes from the wrong people.” He had no interest in village feuds. But when he saw the post-mortem report—hyoid bone broken, not from hanging but from manual strangulation—he lit a cigarette and said, “Book a murder.”
Inspector Varma, watching from his jeep, crushed his last cigarette. He knew he’d be transferred again by Monday. But for one Sunday, the truth was louder than the silence. Note: This story is a fictionalized narrative inspired by the genre of "real story" Telugu crime dramas like "Matti Kuthuru" or news cases such as the Rohith Vemula or the Kurnool student murders, but does not depict a specific real person or event.