A Murder in Ceylon: The Sathasivam Case is a book by Professor P. Ravindra Fernando, a Sri Lankan forensic pathologist, toxicologist and academic, published by Vijitha Yapa Publications in Colombo. Written in English, it runs to 480 pages and examines one of the most consequential criminal trials in Ceylon's legal history — a 57-day proceeding in the Supreme Court of Ceylon that drew on circumstantial evidence, competing medical opinion, and the testimony of international forensic experts.
The case at the heart of the book concerns the death of Anandan Sathasivam, wife of Ceylon cricketer Mahadeva Sathasivam, whose body was found in the garage of the family home in Bambalapitiya, Colombo, on 9 October 1951. Mahadeva Sathasivam was tried before the Supreme Court of Ceylon and, after spending roughly twenty months on remand, was found not guilty on 25 June 1953. The trial turned on forensic and medical evidence — there were no eyewitnesses — and the proceedings brought some of the sharpest legal and scientific minds of the era into direct confrontation in court.
Professor Fernando approaches this material as a forensic specialist rather than a journalist. The book sets out the pertinent facts and the expert evidence presented at trial in careful, methodical order, giving readers a clear account of how forensic pathology was applied — and contested — in a colonial-era courtroom. The case is widely regarded as a landmark in the development of forensic medicine and criminal law in Sri Lanka, and the author situates it within that broader institutional history rather than treating it as mere sensation.
Beyond the courtroom drama, the book traces the lasting effect the Sathasivam case had on legal and forensic practice in Sri Lanka, making it as relevant to students of law and forensic science as it is to readers drawn to true crime. The cover photograph, reproducing contemporaneous newspaper headlines — including reports of the arrest, witness testimony on the time of death, and the eventual verdict — immediately conveys the public attention the case commanded at the time. Those headlines have lost none of their charge more than seventy years on.
The book is published by Vijitha Yapa Publications and is written in English, making it accessible to an international readership with an interest in South Asian legal history, forensic medicine, or the social fabric of mid-twentieth-century Ceylon.
