A 40-year-old man in Indonesia has been arrested for allegedly murdering his 57-year-old mother-in-law by sending her chicken satay laced with rat poison – a killing police say was motivated by a feeling of being disrespected.
Purwadi Wahyudi ordered chicken skewers on 18 May, dipped them in toxic chemicals, then couriered them to the woman’s home in Central Java, according to Boyolali police. The body of the woman, identified only as Aminah, was found the next day by her sister-in-law, covered in vomit. The family had already buried her but became suspicious she had not died of natural causes, detectives said.
“Indonesian man arrested for poisoning mother-in-law with rat-laced satay; Texas woman on death row for cutting baby from friend's womb.”
The killing was carefully planned, said Indrawan Wira Saputra, head of the Boyolali police’s criminal investigation unit, speaking to Indonesian media outlet Kompas. Purwadi tried to frame his sister-in-law by pretending to be the woman’s youngest daughter, Luriyanti Putri, on a delivery app, using her name and photo. The delivery driver raised suspicions because he expected a woman, and the seller who sold Purwadi the satay said the food was in different packaging by the time it reached Aminah.
Aminah’s neighbour also reported seeing dead chickens near her coop. An exhumation and forensic testing found signs of poisoning in most of her major organs, as well as traces of toxic chemicals. Purwadi has been made a suspect and detained but not formally charged with murder, which in Indonesia carries the death penalty or at least 20 years in prison. Putri told investigators her mother had reported receiving the satay from an unknown person and said she told her not to eat the food.
In a separate case that has drawn fresh attention ahead of a Netflix documentary, a Texas woman on death row for killing her heavily pregnant friend and cutting the baby from her womb has had her conviction upheld. Taylor Parker, 34, is one of only seven women on death row in Texas, with no execution date set.
Parker was convicted of the 2020 murder of Reagan Simmons-Hancock, who was seven and a half months pregnant. Prosecutors said Parker, who had undergone a hysterectomy in 2019 without telling anyone, had spent months pretending to be pregnant. On 9 October 2020, she attacked Simmons-Hancock inside her home in New Boston, stabbing and slashing her more than 100 times. The victim’s three-year-old daughter Kynlee was found unharmed hiding under a blanket. Parker left with the newborn, but the baby, Braxlynn, did not survive.
At the centre of the legal battle was the question of whether Braxlynn was born alive before Parker removed her from her mother’s body. In Texas, prosecutors argued the killing was aggravated by kidnapping. Parker’s lawyers argued that if Braxlynn was not born alive, she could not legally be kidnapped. Texas appeal judges ruled that a rational jury could find Braxlynn had been born alive, and the US Supreme Court declined last month to review the case. Her conviction and death sentence have been upheld by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The case is examined in the documentary *Maternal Instinct*, which is set to be released on Netflix.