Prathibha Srikanth Murthy  Prathibha Srikanth Murthy was a 28-year-old BPO employee of HP Globalsoft (the BPO arm of Hewlett-Packard), who was raped and killed on 13 December 2005, after leaving home for her night shift. Prathibha's murder on 13 December 2005 sent shock waves across the country. It was a murder that made companies change their policies towards safety of working women, a crime that made police debate about night shifts for women employees and NGOs demanding nothing less than capital punishment for Shivakumar, the taxi driver charged with murdering Pratibha. Prathibha was barely 15 days old when her father died in a stove burst in 1977. Her mother's name is Gowramma  Pratibha was married to Pawan Shetty, a private company employee. She joined HP Globalsoft in 2005 after her marriage. Gowramma claimed that her son-in-law and in-laws never battled to bring justice to Prathibha. After Prathibha died, her husband has left Bangalore and remarried. On 13 December 2005, Shiva Kumar called Prathibha Murthy on the mobile and misled her into believing that the regular driver, Jagdish, was on leave and he had been given the task of dropping her at the office. Kumar then took the victim to a deserted place, where he raped her and slit her throat. He dumped the body in a pit nearby, where it was found three days later. Kumar was arrested on the basis of Jagdish's statements. The trial related to Prathibha's murder was done in the Seventh Fast Track Sessions Court, Bangalore. The trial started in January 2007, but was later shifted to a fast track court in December 2009. The court examined 64 witnesses. Shiva Kumar reportedly told the police that he committed the crime since he was starved of sex and hence frustrated ever since his wife became pregnant (Shiva Kumar's wife was seven months into her pregnancy when Prathibha was murdered. She delivered after he was arrested, and then left him soon after). The trial revealed that Shiva Kumar had tried to collect two women that same night before Prathibha. The first had already left for work when he phoned her; the second found it strange that he did not know the directions to her house, and chose not to use him for her ride to work. He later retracted the statement in court. The public prosecutor sought death sentence to the accused.