A man who strangled his wife and their two young children while drunk, and was then shot by police with a stun gun after holding a knife to his own throat, has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 40 years.
Saju Chelavalel, 52, pleaded guilty at a previous hearing to the murder of Anju Asok, 35, an NHS nurse, and their son, Jeeva Saju, six, and daughter, Janvi Saju, four.
Chelavalel, originally from Kerala in India, said he was under the mistaken belief his wife was having an affair and lost control while drunk, killing her at about 10pm on 14 December last year at their flat in Kettering.
Passing sentence at Northampton crown court on Monday, the high court judge, Mr Justice Pepperall, said Chelavalel’s actions had been brutal and “extraordinarily selfish”.
The judge said the children would have been “terrified and deeply traumatised” after hearing their mother’s murder but could have been brought up by relatives.
“Fuelled by alcohol, wallowing in self-pity, engulfed in your resentment at your wife’s perceived infidelity, you instead chose to snuff out their young and precious lives,” he said.
Chelavalel sobbed in the dock as the court heard earlier in the hearing about an audio recording which prosecutors allege captured the sounds of coughing and retching as he strangled his wife.
The prosecutor, James Newton-Price KC, said the audio recording also captured the sound of a blender being used to make a “toxic” mixture of chocolate and pills, intended to send the children to sleep before Chelavalel strangled them with a dressing gown cord in the early hours of 15 December, hours after he had murdered his wife.
Police responded to a 999 call from a concerned neighbour at 11.12am that day, and after smashing a window to gain access to the property, found Chelavalel holding a knife to his throat.
Newton-Price said Chelavalel urged police to shoot him, and left instructions for the family’s bodies to be cremated in India.
The barrister told the court: “He responded [to the officers] with words to the effect of: ‘I am going to kill myself.’ He said: ‘You shoot me, you shoot me.’”
The court heard that no evidence of an affair was found on the phone belonging to Asok, who had worked as a nurse at Kettering general hospital, but Chelavalel had made searches on dating sites in the days leading up to the murders.
During police interviews, Chelavalel claimed he could not remember killing his children, but said he had lost control of himself when his wife made an offensive comment about his mother.
George Carter-Stephenson KC, for the defence, said that “whatever sentence the court imposes”, Chelavalel “has to live with the knowledge of what he did on that particular night”.
