By Roy Denish.
For seven years, fear stalked the mist-covered tea estates of Kahawatta and Kotakethana, where elderly women were brutally attacked, sexually assaulted, and murdered inside their isolated homes. Initially blamed on a single shadowy predator, the killings eventually exposed a far more disturbing reality involving a serial offender, copycat murders, family disputes, criminal networks, investigative failures, and vulnerable victims whose deaths received far less national attention than their scale demanded.
The heavy iron blade of a plantation machete, known locally as a manna knife, is an instrument designed for the daily rhythms of survival in the hills of Sri Lanka. In the daytime, it clears thick brush, chops firewood, and slices through the dense undergrowth of the tea estates. It is heavy, weighted heavily toward the tip, and sharpened to a razor edge that can cleave through bone with a single, fluid swing. But when night fell over the mist-shrouded valleys of Kahawatta and Kotakethana in the Ratnapura district, this common agricultural tool was twisted into an instrument of absolute terror.
The midnight silence of the isolated estate tracks was repeatedly shattered by the dull, sickening thud of iron meeting flesh, as an invisible predator used the heavy blade to execute a prolonged campaign of violence that would claim nearly twenty lives and leave a community paralyzed by fear.
Today, The Morning Telegraph is revisiting the serial serious murders carried out by a deranged a lone wolf, who terrorized the estate sector. Some cases have gone cold because of the letharginess of the investigators and it’s not known as to why media kept silent given the magnitude of the cases, especially the perpetrator targeted women over 60 who were feeble and vulnerable. Some of them were brutally murdered.
The nightmare began unfolding in a strict, agonizing sequence of events that pushed an entire region to the brink of madness. The first blood was drawn in 2008. The predator moved like a ghost through the labyrinthine pathways of the tea bushes, watching and waiting.
The chosen targets were almost always elderly women, many well into their sixties, seventies, and eighties, who lived in small, secluded homes scattered across the hillsides. These women were uniquely vulnerable, frequently left entirely alone during the long hours of the day and night while the younger generations traveled to urban centers or distant factories for work.
When the predator struck, the violence was sudden and overwhelming. The heavy manna knife was used to inflict catastrophic sharp and blunt force trauma to the heads and necks of the frail victims, ensuring they had no opportunity to cry out or flee. But the weapon was merely a means to achieve a deeper, more sadistic end. Forensic examinations later revealed that these elderly victims were routinely subjected to brutal sexual assaults before or immediately after their lives were taken.
To finish the grim work, the assailant would gather kerosene or dry thatch, setting fire to the modest wood-and-brick homes with the bodies still inside. In other instances, the corpses were dragged through the darkness, dumped into nearby streams, irrigation canals, or muddy riverbanks. The fires and the water were deliberate, calculated attempts to wash away the biological trace evidence and leave the police with nothing but charred ruins and unidentifiable remains.
By 2010, the body count was rising, and a suffocating cloud of dread hung over these mountain communities. Law enforcement scrambled for answers under immense national pressure. That year, police arrested a separate paraphilic suspect who initially confessed to three of the early murders. However, because DNA profiling technology was deeply limited in the local jurisdictions at that specific moment, investigators could not conclusively lock the forensic evidence to his profile, and the case lines remained dangerously blurred.
The killing fields kept expanding. For seven agonizing years, the death toll mounted until approximately seventeen to eighteen women had been slaughtered in identical fashion. The local population grew desperate. Villagers abandoned their homes before sunset, families huddled together in communal community halls for safety, and angry mobs regularly clashed with local police officers, accusing the authorities of incompetence, corruption, or active collusion with the killer.
The prevailing belief among the public, the media, and early investigators was that a singular, monstrous serial killer, a phantom dubbed the Kahawatta Slasher, was single-handedly orchestrating this historic wave of mass murder.
The true nature of the horror was only unraveled when the Criminal Investigation Department took control of the cases from lethargic local stations. What the detectives and forensic specialists discovered was far more complex and terrifying than the actions of a lone madman.
The Kotakethana murders were not the work of one individual, but rather an unprecedented, overlapping convergence of multiple distinct criminal elements operating under the shared cover of a community-wide panic. The timeline was actually a chaotic mixture of a paraphilic serial killer, deep-seated land disputes, family vendettas, illicit drug trade violence, and highly calculated copycat crimes.
Biological samples, including post-coital swabs and trace fluids recovered from multiple crime scenes across the seven-year period, had been preserved and sent under strict orders from the Pelmadulla Magistrate’s Court to Genetech, located in Colombo 08. As the pioneering private molecular biology laboratory in Sri Lanka, the Genetech Molecular Diagnostics Research Institute possessed the advanced capabilities needed to extract viable DNA from heavily compromised, fire-damaged evidence. The scientists successfully mapped a distinct genetic profile from the historical crime scenes, waiting for a match.
In December 2015, the investigators achieved their definitive breakthrough with the arrest of a thirty-five-year-old local resident named Akurugoda Jayalathge Neil Lakshman, known to his neighbors by the unassuming alias of Mahattaya. Lakshman was the perfect situational predator. Living within the immediate vicinity of the crimes, he blended seamlessly into the daily life of the village. He knew the hidden shortcuts through the rubber patches, understood the geography of the isolated estate settlements, and could observe the daily routines of his neighbors without arousing a shred of suspicion.
His psychological evaluation painted a picture of a classic sexual sadist. His motivations were driven entirely by a desire for absolute dominance and sexual violence rather than any material gain. He targeted elderly women precisely because their advanced age and physical frailty guaranteed total compliance, giving him complete control over his victims without the risk of physical resistance.
When Neil Lakshman was arrested, his blood samples were cross-examined at Genetech. The results were chilling: a flawless, undeniable match to the biological profiles left at six of the core serial killing scenes. This forensic certainty formed the backbone of the state’s case.
The resolution of Lakshman’s case, however, exposed an even darker reality about the human capacity for evil. If Lakshman was scientifically linked to six of the killings, who was responsible for the remaining twelve to thirteen deaths? The answer revealed a terrifying phenomenon of copycat mimicry.
Because the media and local gossip had heavily publicized the specific details of the phantom killer’s methods, the targeting of isolated older women, the sexual assaults, and the burning of the houses, other local criminals realized they had been handed a perfect blueprint for murder. The pervasive atmosphere of terror offered a flawless alibi.
If a villager harbored a bitter grudge over a disputed property line, or if a relative wanted to accelerate a land inheritance, they could commit murder and intentionally stage the scene to look like the work of the serial killer. They knew the local police would automatically attribute the crime to the mysterious predator, deflecting all suspicion away from the true perpetrator.
Throughout the investigation, separate individuals were unmasked for these independent crimes. In one notable case, a local toddy tapper hacked a sixty-six-year-old woman to death simply because she caught him stealing on her land and recognized his face; he then attempted to burn her home to mimic the ongoing atrocities.
Other deaths were traced directly to domestic violence and family feuds where vulnerable women were liquidated for economic gain. Furthermore, the region was experiencing a violent surge in the illicit drug trade. High-profile double killings, such as the murders of the sisters Dayawathi and Thilakawathi, were eventually exposed as targeted hits executed by localized underworld networks to silence witnesses who threatened to expose regional criminal enterprises.
Kotakethana had become a tragic theater where mass murder, personal executions, and serial sexual violence wore the exact same visual mask.
Years of legal battles culminated in February 2024. The Ratnapura High Court brought the central chapter of the tragedy to a close. High Court Judge Lanka Jayaratne found Lakshman guilty of the July 2012 double murder of sixty-three-year-old Liyanarachchige Premawathi and her thirty-two-year-old daughter, Hewagamage Pushpakumari, who had been hacked to death with a heavy blade before their home was burned. Lakshman was sentenced to death, providing legal closure for the core serial killings.
Given the staggering complexity, the high body count, the sophisticated forensic breakthroughs at Genetech, and the chilling reality of multiple killers operating simultaneously, it remains a profound mystery to many why the national and international media did not highlight these massive cases with the same intensity as Western serial crimes. The muted, fragmented nature of the coverage was the result of powerful structural, political, and socio-cultural forces that actively suppressed the story.
The primary factor was the overwhelming, historic shadow of the Sri Lankan Civil War. The Kotakethana murder timeline began in 2008, precisely when the decades-long military conflict between the government and the separatist forces was reaching its violent and absolute climax. The attention of the entire nation, and the resources of every major media outlet, was completely monopolized by national security, massive military movements, geopolitical shifts, and the subsequent post-war political restructuring.
In a country dealing with the collective trauma of a thirty-year war, the slow-burning, isolated deaths of rural women in a distant tea-growing district simply could not compete for editorial priority against the existential narrative of a nation redefining its future.
Furthermore, a deep-seated systemic bias of classism and urban-centric reporting heavily dictated what was deemed newsworthy by the mainstream press. The victims of the Kotakethana atrocities were not wealthy, influential elites from the capital city of Colombo; they were impoverished estate laborers and rural villagers living on the margins of society.
The media infrastructure in Sri Lanka was highly centralized, and investigative journalism resources were rarely deployed to remote rural enclaves unless a direct political angle existed. Because these elderly women lacked social capital, economic power, or prominent family connections, their deaths were initially dismissed by urban editors as minor, routine provincial crime stories fit only for the inner pages of vernacular newspapers, rather than a catastrophic national crisis requiring sustained exposure.
Political interference and the preservation of regional economic interests also played a significant role in dampening the narrative. The Ratnapura district is the financial engine for Sri Lanka’s incredibly lucrative gem-mining and tea-exporting sectors. Intensive, prolonged media coverage showcasing a total breakdown of law and order, corrupt connections between local politicians and drug rings, and a roaming serial predator would have severely damaged the economic stability of the region, disrupted the vital labor force on the estates, and invited unwanted scrutiny into the local political-criminal nexus.
Because multiple suspects arrested throughout the timeline possessed loose ties to powerful regional figures, there was a quiet, top-down pressure to minimize the news, treating each sporadic arrest as a definitive closure of the case to project a false sense of normalcy, even as the killings continued.
Finally, the media lacked the specialized training and vocabulary required to report on complex criminal profiling. Rather than analyzing the structural failures of early local police investigations, the critical need for a centralized forensic database, or the sociological vulnerability of the elderly estate population, journalists reverted to sensationalism.
They published graphic, exploitative details of the crime scenes or focused on superstitious narratives about a curse gripping the village of Kahawatta. They failed to educate the public on how copycats use the media to stage crimes, allowing the darkness in Kotakethana to multiply undetected for seven long years, proving that when a society refuses to look closely at its most vulnerable margins, multiple monsters can easily hide behind a single terrifying name.
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