The Tamil Nadu police were taken aback by the suspected motive of 26-year-old Vijay Muniratnam, also known as the “Spiderman,” who had carried out a daring heist at a jewelry store in Coimbatore after two weeks of a furious chase. He explained to them that he only took a small amount of gold since he needed Rs 1 lakh to rent a house; he didn’t take it anymore because he didn’t need it.

Vijay broke into Jos Alukkas’s jewelry store on 100 Feet Road in Coimbatore on November 28. Although there wasn’t much loot, Vijay’s cleverness in scaling three stories through a tiny opening one foot wide between the wall and an elevation panel—a feature commonly found on building facades—perplexed the police. Police officers trying to mimic Vijay’s acrobatics kept sliding back and landing on their backs because the space was so small.

According to V Balakrishnan, the commissioner of Coimbatore police, five teams were assembled to find Vijay. “We found most of the stolen goods within 24 hours of the theft and detained Vijay’s wife, but he wasn’t taken into custody until Monday, December 11. We organized into five groups, engaged 47 police officers, and went through more than 350 CCTV cameras’ worth of evidence,” he declared. Both Vijay’s wife and their three-month-old child are incarcerated.

The investigation’s deputy commissioner of police, G Chandeesh, stated that Vijay fled to his native Dharmapuri district following the arrest of his wife. He knows the Dharmapuri forest area well, so we needed help to catch up with him. Even though our teams saw him twice, he could trick us, the man claimed.

Vijay traveled from Dharmapuri to Nellore, Kalahasti, Tirupati, and Chennai. Police put several of his close friends and family under surveillance after he threw away his phone. The first breakthrough occurred early on December 11 when Vijay called a friend using a panipuri vendor’s phone that he had found on Marina Beach in Chennai.

“We arrived at the panipuri vendor, who informed us that a man dressed in the black pilgrims’ uniform from Sabarimala had taken his phone to make a call,” DCP Chandeesh stated. The police squad searched the beach and its surroundings but could not locate him.

Within sixty minutes, Vijay called a family member. Mylapore was identified as the location. He had taken a passer-by’s phone this time. More calls were made to Vijay’s friends and family, but they came from random numbers, leading the police on an hours-long wild goose chase.

The subsequent call came from the Chennai neighborhood of Koyambedu, addressed to a friend. The police, listening in, discerned a crucial hint: Vijay intended to purchase a SIM card shortly. After racing to Koyambedu, an undercover police squad set up shop at every cell phone store in the area. The police finally located their man. Vijay was dressed in a navy blue shirt and skinny jeans while waiting at one of the phone stores.

Vijay, a cleaner for buses and lorries in Coimbatore, admitted to police during questioning that he had stolen some sovereigns because his main objective was to obtain Rs 1 lakh to pay a friend and secure a lease for his house in the Anamalai neighborhood of Coimbatore. Chandeesh said, “He felt it was a better option than paying rent.”

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Additionally, Vijay admitted to the police that he had never considered stealing jewelry; instead, he had planned to steal cell phones because, in his words, “selling stolen phones was easier than getting rid of stolen jewels.”

But on the nights he tried to rob, there were too many people milling about, making the two mobile shops he targeted unsafe to rob. One of these evenings, he happened to notice the plywood section on the wall of the Jos Alukkas jewelry store while strolling along 100 Feet Road. Before long, he broke through the fake wall and squeezed through the small opening. He noticed a ray of light above in the utter darkness of the cavity. Then he started to climb, using protruding iron rods to slide up.

Police found him at his friend’s house in Anamalai a few days after the heist, but Vijay had eluded them. He made a spectacular escape by climbing a wall that was fifteen feet high to reach the roof, where he took off one mud tile and disappeared through the small opening. The police claim that Vijay fled in fear after another team showed up at the location a few hours earlier about a bike theft case.

Vijay allegedly went to considerable measures to avoid detection because “someone had misinformed him that the jail term for a jewellery theft is 15-20 years,” according to the police. According to the officers, he could spend up to six years in prison if found guilty.