Mother kills, chills nation: Who is Suchana Seth, Bangalore CEO arrested for killing 4-year-old son

A woman killing a child has sent shockwaves across the country for various reasons, the main being that the murderer is the mother. First, the details. The victim was four years old, his parents were separated, his father got weekend visitation rights… None of it the boy’s fault. Death by strangulation or suffocation in a service apartment in Goa, body kept for 36 hours till it was packed into a suitcase and loaded into a cab for a cross-country drive to Bangalore.

The rest – how Suchana Seth was caught – reads like a whodunnit. After the cleaners found bloodied towels, they alerted the police. Her cabbie, guided by the police, drove her to a police station. They found the boy in the box. Now Suchana is a household name. We know where she studied, where she works, whom she married, when they filed for divorce. It is even said she is only a self-claimed CEO of a company, that there is no such firm. We are looking into her past and claiming to find patterns.

Was it post-partum depression, mental health issues, sudden despair – people are debating this furiously. A Bengali married to a Malayalee… hmmm. Filed for divorce, main custody of child with the mother. Gender activists are studying the general attitudes in legal separations: custody grants of minors and visitation rights favouring one parent over the other. One pays the bills, one gets to…kill?

There are many shock factors here. The murder itself. The murderer being a murderess. The actions after the murder. No one can get over the image of her sitting with the body – 36 hours, we are told – for so long and then stuffing it into a bag. Many are hoping that she did it when he was sleeping, that it was over fast, that he didn’t suffer too much. Others are hoping a Netflix documentary will soon shed light on it all. And before that of course the book.