On the night of November 18, 1988, authorities in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, responded to what was initially reported as a minor traffic accident. Upon arrival, they discovered a woman, Radha Maharaj, suffering from severe internal injuries. She succumbed to her wounds while being transported to the hospital. Sixteen miles away, another body was found on the side of the road—Krishnadath Maharaj, Radha's husband. Both victims' clothing was soaked in seawater, and a substantial sum of $25,000 in cash, which the couple had borrowed, was missing. The cause of death for both individuals was determined to be cyanide poisoning.
Krishnadath Maharaj, a man of Caribbean descent whose parents had immigrated from India, operated a small grocery store alongside his wife. The couple had recently taken out a loan to expand their business, but financial difficulties soon followed. Their daughters noted that the household had become tense, and their parents had been receiving mysterious phone calls from an unidentified man. Three weeks before their deaths, they brought home the borrowed cash, but they never disclosed the purpose of the payment or the identity of the recipient.
Authorities suspected that the deaths of Krishnadath and Radha were linked to a series of cyanide poisonings that had plagued St. Croix since 1984. The previous victims included another couple, Edsel Striden and Carmen Torres, who had also borrowed a large sum of money before their deaths. Their bodies were similarly found covered in seawater, and their funds had vanished. The first known victim in this pattern was 38-year-old Haig Caesar, who had died in 1984 after consuming a potion given to him by an individual claiming to be a voodoo practitioner. Caesar had paid $100,000 in cash to this man, believing it would remove evil spirits guarding buried treasure beneath his home. Instead, the potion contained cyanide, and both the money and the supposed voodoo practitioner disappeared.
Investigators suspected that all five cyanide poisonings were the work of a con artist who practiced Obia, a form of underground sorcery often mistaken for voodoo. This individual allegedly convinced victims that they needed to pay large sums of money for supernatural assistance, only to poison them and steal their funds. Despite these suspicions, no arrests were made, and the identity of the perpetrator remains unknown. The deaths of Krishnadath Maharaj and the other victims continue to be part of an unsolved mystery that haunts the island of St. Croix.
