Sunday Times 2
Three-act tragedy
View(s):The Sathasivam case was closed six decades ago with a not-guilty verdict, but the murder that shook Colombo society continues to intrigue the public, with unanswered questions still hanging in the air, writes Stephen Prins
Thirteen months before October 9, 1951 murder of Ananda Sathasivam, wife of Ceylon’s crack cricketer Mahadeva Sathasivam, the couple took a trip to England. It was November 1950. About the same time, the other woman in Mr. Sathasivam’s life also left Ceylon for England. She was Yvonne Stevenson, a tall, handsome British citizen born to Dutch and Polish parents. She was pursuing her exotic, good-looking and famous Ceylonese lover, and she had given him an ultimatum.
Four months later, in February 1951, Ananda Sathasivam returned to Ceylon – alone. During the sea voyage, she wrote her husband a poignant letter postmarked Aden to say the marriage was over, as far as she was concerned. Saluting her husband as her “Dearest”, the letter said the affair being conducted behind her back was known in the Colombo social circle and she was having none of it. She was prepared to “release” her husband “from the bond of this unhappy marriage”, stressing that “we are just not made for each other.” Showing sensitivity and understanding, and implying forgiveness on her part, she went on to say that “the real aim of this letter is to let you know that it is absolutely useless our trying to make a happy home together. You want gaiety and variety, of which I am not in favour.” She adds, “The past has gone, never to come back, so let us look forward to a brighter future, more suited to our entirely different temperaments.” The letter ends, “Anyway, all is well that ends well, so let us part as FRIENDS. Wish you all the best. Yours no longer, Ananda.” The sentiments were heartfelt, large-hearted, and admirably noble for a woman whose very public husband was flagrantly cheating on her.
Ananda Sathasivam’s next letter to her husband, written shortly after her arrival in the island, said: “Four walls and money will certainly build a house, but you will find that it needs a loving and happy wife to make it a home. You may find happiness with the woman you take out, but never again with me.”
On September 6, Ananda Sathasivam visited a lawyer and filed action for divorce on the grounds of “desertion.”
After the verdict: Mahadeva Sathasivam, in white suit, and Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, Counsel for the Defence, far right. Pic courtesy cricketique.files.wordpress.com
On September 17, an anxious Ananda Sathasivam wrote to the Superintendent of Police. The letter was a request for police “protection.” Her husband was returning to Ceylon on the 21st, and, “in view of the pending divorce”, she would not be allowing him into the house. “. . . From my knowledge of my husband, I have reason to fear that he may attempt to force his way into the house and use violence and cause a breach of the peace,” she wrote.
“In this situation, I need protection, and I therefore request that you will instruct the Bambalapitiya Police to afford me the same if I telephone them. I have a telephone in the house and the Police Station is close by.” The letter closes on a note of grave concern for the rest of the family: “I may mention that I have my four young children in the house with me and I am also apprehensive on their account.”
On 22 September, Mahadeva Sathasivam, accompanied by his mother, arrived in Ceylon. They were met at the Colombo Port jetty by a close friend, who gently informed Mr. Sathasivam that he was no longer welcome at his wife’s home; Mrs. Sathasivam was going ahead with the divorce.
The party of three went to the Grand Oriental Hotel, opposite the port entrance, to discuss the next move. Mr. Sathasivam asked his friend to provide him temporary accommodation, which was readily granted.
In the 19 days between and including September 22 and October 9, Mahadeva Sathasivam and his friends made many attempts to persuade Ananda Sathasivam to drop the divorce. She listened but was non-committal. Her mind was made up.
On October 8, the day before the murder, divorce summons was served on Mahadeva Sathasivam, who was staying with his friend in Horton Place. As if one court summons wasn’t enough for one morning, almost simultaneously, around 8.00 a.m. that day, a second summons was served on Mr. Sathasivam. This summons was in connection with a financial matter.
Although barred from visiting his wife, Mr. Sathasivam turned up at No. 7 St. Alban’s Place on three occasions, and stayed over. The third visit was late on October 8; in fact it was already October 9, the day of the murder. Mr. Sathasivam was dropped off at No. 7 by a lawyer friend. It was 1.30 in the morning.
The prosecution presented two narratives that dovetailed to perfection and placed Mahadeva Sathasivam in an acutely awkward situation. The first was the tale of a man caught between two women, and possibly wishing to be rid of one in order to marry the other, while presumably keen to secure his rightful share of his wife’s estate in the event of her death. The second was the servant boy’s account of his being coerced by the husband into assisting in the killing of the wife. The Crown made out that Mr. Sathasivam had a plan – to free himself from the marriage and frame the servant boy in his wife’s murder by transferring the body from bedroom to garage.
The trial pivoted on the servant boy’s testimony as Crown witness.
Lawyers defending Mr. Sathasivam held that the servant’s story was a fabrication, that the servant boy was the killer, and that he had acted entirely on his own. They insisted the murder was committed downstairs, in the kitchen. The defence version was that the lady of the house had come down to the kitchen, after the master had left the house that morning, and the servant boy, who was preparing lunch, had on impulse attacked her. Mrs. Sathasivam was thrust against a wall and throttled in a standing position, and her limp body then removed to the adjacent garage. The victim’s jewellery, including the gold thalikody worn by married Tamil women, was removed. The boy was presumed guilty of sexual assault and robbery. The indecent assault charge was downplayed later on in the trial, and intent to rob became the boy’s motive for murder.
Justice Noel Gratiaen, presiding judge: Address to the jury a model of balance and impartiality
The defence won its case on forcefully driven points that buttressed their construction of the murder with the servant boy positioned in the kitchen as the sole assailant. The servant boy’s alibi — that he was in Wellawatte when the master was still in his Bambalapitiya residence — was thrown out after the three persons claiming to have seen the boy in the next district around that time were found to be false witnesses.
The when and the where of the case was the grounds on which the legal and medical experts collided and clashed. Dr. Milroy Paul and Dr. M. V. P. Peiris, the two distinguished surgeons called in by the prosecution to give evidence, crossed swords and surgical knives with the government forensic specialist who had conducted the autopsy. Dr. Paul was Professor of Surgery at the University of Colombo, and Dr. Peiris was Associate Professor of Surgery.
Determining the time of Ananda Sathasivam’s death was crucial. Prof. G. S. W. (“Jed”) de Saram, who performed the autopsy, said death would have occurred between 10.00 a.m. and 11.30 a.m. Dr. Paul and Dr. Peiris stood by their estimate that death had occurred between 9.35 a.m. and 11.15 a.m.
G. S. W. de Saram, Professor of Forensic Medicine, University of Colombo, based his approximation of time of death on his reading of the victim’s body temperature at 6.55 p.m. on October 9, taken at the scene of the crime. It should be noted that Prof. de Saram had insisted on doing the autopsy alone, expressly rejecting the assistance of the Judicial Medical Officer. Also considered in determining time of death was the body’s state of stiffening, or rigor mortis, and the progress of food and liquid in the victim’s stomach, which would indicate the lapse of time between breakfast and death. Prof. de Saram started his autopsy on Ananda Sathasivam at the General Hospital Mortuary at 7 a.m. on October 10, the day after the murder.
The Supreme Court trial began on March 20, 1953. Throughout the 57-day hearing, the courtroom was as packed with spectators, albeit on a smaller scale, as the cricket stadiums and stands wherever Mahadeva Sathasivam came out to bat.
The prosecution did not have a smooth time of it in trying to nail down its case. Forensic expert Prof. G. S. W. de Saram’s estimate of the probable time of death, between 10.00 and 11.30 a.m., was more favourable to the defence than the prosecution. Tension developed between professor and prosecution.
To further its case, the defence appealed to the eminent British forensic expert Sir Sydney Smith, based at the University of Edinburgh. Sir Sydney formed his initial impressions in remote mode, so to speak, from his office in Scotland. All pertinent court documents were forwarded for his scrutiny, including the testimony of his former student, Prof. G. S. W. de Saram. Sir Sydney recreated the scene of the Bambalapitiya crime in his Edinburgh laboratory. He wrote back, and his assessments were in effect an endorsement of his ex-student’s findings. When Sir Sydney appeared at the Supreme Court trial, his evidence substantially reinforced Prof. de Saram’s conclusions, along with his own observations and elaborations, none of which contradicted Prof. de Saram’s findings. Teacher and student were in accord. Their conclusions reflected favourably on the accused, much to the satisfaction of the defence.
Important points debated and pondered during the trial included the savage act of someone, shod or barefoot, having stamped on the victim’s throat and broken her voice box; the cause of injury No. 18, a contusion and the only injury found on the back of the victim’s body; the curious fact of a kitchen mortar being placed on the victim’s neck in the garage; the uneven staining of the soles of the victim’s bare feet – a court photograph shows one foot sole begrimed, the other almost clear; a “wavy mark” on the kitchen floor that might have been caused by a dragged foot, and a urine stain that reached to a few inches above the hem of the victim’s voile saree, indicating a standing position at the time of death.
A hand mirror, placed on a wooden bench near the body, had come from the victim’s dressing table upstairs. Its presence suggested an unhurried assailant, one who would leave the crime scene only after confirming that the victim had stopped breathing and was a corpse. One thing he had neglected to do, on entering the master bedroom upstairs to look for a mirror, was to close the almirah door and switch off the ceiling fan. Not that it really mattered.
The Sathasivam case bristles with contradictions and questions unanswered or unsatisfactorily dealt with, queries that would occur naturally to a layman, but perhaps not to a lawyer, a medical practitioner, or a police officer.
For example, would the servant boy have been given a conditional pardon and made Crown witness if there had been any doubt in the Attorney-General’s Department about the boy as a truthful witness? The pardoning of the servant boy surprised many and was aggressively criticised by defence lawyer Dr. Colvin R. de Silva.
And what blocked out from the jury’s inspection Ananda Sathasivam’s letter to the Superintendent of Police, written 24 days before her death, expressing fear at the hands of her husband? The letter was not produced at the trial. A layman would consider the letter a crucial document in support of the prosecution’s arguments.
And why, on the morning of the murder, did Mahadeva Sathasivam break his daily routine of visiting his mother at her home? From his friend’s house in Horton Place, Mr. Sathasivam would call on his mother every day, in the morning or at lunch time. Instead, he left No. 7 that morning in a Quickshaw cab and headed straight to the Galle Face Hotel, where he joined two close friends with whom he spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon drinking. The older Mrs. Sathasivam called the friend’s house in the afternoon, presumably some hours after the murder had taken place, to question her son on his failure to visit her that day.
The star performers
If the Sathasivam court case were to be rated according to individual courtroom performance, counsel for the defence Dr. Colvin R. de Silva and presiding judge Noel Gratiaen would be unanimously declared the two stars, both class acts deserving of a standing ovation.
Prof. Ravindra Fernando’s book, “A Murder in Ceylon”, carries a condensed transcript of Dr. de Silva’s three-day address to the jury, and what appears to be the full text of Justice Noel Gratiaen’s address, given over two days. Both make thrilling reading. Both addresses are virtuoso performances, given by two maestros in full command of their legal art and craft. Dr. de Silva’s words have the force and clarity of a superior intelligence — keen, mean, trenchant, coruscating. So good was his delivery that his rival, Assistant Solicitor-General T. S. Fernando, said he wished all murder cases had the benefit of Dr. de Silva’s compelling courtroom presence. T. S. Fernando’s own address was adequate, but nowhere as dazzling as that of Dr. de Silva’s.
Justice Noel Gratiaen’s address makes up a good one-third of Prof. Ravindra Fernando’s book. It is a magnificent achievement, comprehensive and inclusive of every last detail brought up in the trial, as well as points and opportunities missed by the experts but caught by the judge. It is informative, fair and wise, like a lecture by a learned academic; sympathetic and shot with flashes of humour, like a speech by an after-dinner speaker; cautioning and advisory, like a head prefect’s talk to the upper and lower schools, and, in its consideration for a jury overwhelmed by facts, conflicting statements and other ambiguities, avuncular, like the words of a kindly elder advising a family caught up in a very prickly domestic situation.
Justice Gratiaen’s address at the Sathasivam trial is looked upon in the legal world as a model of balance and impartiality. The presiding judge’s wide learning and scholarly interests — he had a Bachelor of Arts from Oxford — frequently brighten up a solemn and lengthy address. There is a reference to Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, a murder story. And in one marvellously inspired moment, the judge likens the case to an empty stage in a theatre.
Imagine No. 7 St. Alban’s Place as a stage set, the judge says. The curtain comes down on the activities in the house from the hour the occupants woke up that day to the time the children left for school with the ayah, at 8.15 a.m., ending Act One. Act Two covers the time from 8.15 to 9.30, and Act Three the hour within 9.30 and 10.30. Acts Two and Three are “played on that tragic stage in complete darkness.” The audience is then asked to visualise Acts Two and Three as outlined in the two contradictory scripts given by the servant boy and his master, and to consider their plausibility in the light of testimonies given in court.
Under the judge’s wig is a powerful mind, one that sees the multi-angled Sathasivam case in the round. The judge tells his tale with the flair of a born storyteller, with narrative touches worthy of an artist.
To be continued