The Haryana police on Wednesday arrested Poonam, a woman serial killer (touted as a "killer aunt") who allegedly killed four children in two years because they were "too beautiful".
According to the police, the 34-year-old's obsession over children being more attractive than her own led to the chilling set of murders that she made sure resembled natural deaths.
Haryana News -
— News Arena India (@NewsArenaIndia) December 3, 2025
A woman arrested for killing her 6 year old niece in Panipat has confessed to murdering 3 other children too.
"During interrogation, Poonam confessed that she hates good-looking children and had killed 3 other kids earlier."
- SP, Panipat, Bhupendra Singh pic.twitter.com/Gg7SugSPwK
"During interrogation, Poonam confessed that she hates good-looking children and had killed 3 other kids earlier," said SP (Panipat) Bhupendra Singh.
The tragic death of six-year-old Vidhi (Poonam's niece) on Monday, amid wedding festivities at Haryana's Naultha village, was also considered one such natural death until the girl's grandfather, Pal Singh, realised that there was foul play involved.
The ex-policeman quickly realised that Poonam, who had been missing for a while during the festivities—and whose clothes were mysteriously wet at around that time—had a role to play in the murder of Vidhi, whose dead body was found in a tub of water in a locked storeroom, as per a Punjabi Jagran report.
He filed a case at the Israna police station, after which the shocking details of Poonam's past murders came to light.
A string of revelations
According to the police, Poonam had attempted to kill Vidhi before in 2021—when the girl was just two years old—by pouring a kettle of boiling-hot tea on her face, which she later explained away as a mistake.
The police probe revealed that the first of her four victims was Ishika, another niece aged nine, in January 2023, by forcibly drowning her in a water tank.
Fearing that her firstborn son, Shubham (aged three) had seen the murder of Ishika and to ward off suspicion, Poonam killed him too, after which both the bodies were found in a water tank at their home days later.
The killing spree stopped for a while, after which Poonam again killed yet another niece—eight-year-old Jiya, her cousin's daughter—by drowning her in a tub of water.
The chilling details of her murders have shocked her family and the rest of her village, who claimed she was a woman that typically kept within her home, and had psychotic tendencies. Relatives of the other children killed by her have also filed cases following the big revelation.
