[7] Reddy had been charged in a road rage incident, but the local DAR inspector chose to ignore this "petty case".
After the rape, Reddy killed his victims and removed their jewellery to make the crime appear like a robbery.
[6] In November 1996, Reddy attempted to rape a high school girl, who was walking at KEB Colony in Chitradurga.
The next month, he was arrested and dismissed from service, when his first victim identified him at a Republic Day police parade by chance.
[3] Reddy, along with four others, was charged with Roopa's murder, and remanded to judicial custody (later, in 2004, he was acquitted in this case due to lack of sufficient evidence).
The police initially tried to hush up his escape, but Reddy's father filed a habeas corpus petition in the High Court.
Reddy told the boy that an evil spirit had entered his mother's body, so he had tied her to the window grill.
[6] On the night of 3–4 March 2002, Reddy escaped from police custody again, while being transferred from Bellary to Bangalore in a KSRTC bus.
The District Armed Reserve (DAR) personnel of Bellary, who accompanied him, claimed that he was handcuffed at the time, but Reddy denied this when he was arrested two months later.
When the bus stopped at a dhaba near Hiriyur bypass, he requested the policemen to remove his handcuffs on the pretext that he needed to answer the call of nature.
[9][7] On 17 May 2002, Reddy arrived in Bangalore from Tumkur, and left his luggage in the cloakroom at the Yeshwanthpur railway station.
As he entered the salon, an auto-rickshaw driver Sathyavelu recognized him from a newspaper photograph and an earlier court appearance.
His baggage, seized from the cloakroom, contained several women's garments: 18 pairs of panties, 10 bras, 8 churidars, 6 saris, 4 blouses and 2 nighties.
[10] On 4 October 2007, a division bench of the Karnataka High Court also convicted Reddy, but the judges differed on the death sentence.
Justices Altamas Kabir and A K Pathak argued that Reddy was incapable of rehabilitation, and that his rape and murder of Jayashree fell under "rarest of the rare" category, a requirement for capital punishment in India.
A 3 episodes documentary called "Beast of Bangalore: Indian Predator" [17] was released on Netflix on 16th December 2022 depicting Umesh's heinous crimes.
The documentary included interviews with local police officials, victims and associates who helped Umesh in some of his crimes.