Overview
H. A. Wijeratne was born on 17 January 1947 in Uggalkaltota, a village in the Ratnapura District of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), the son of H. A. Tileratne Hami and E. A. Huratal Hami. His right arm was much shorter and thinner than the left, the fingers of his right hand were stunted and webbed, and there was a hollow in his right chest where the main chest muscle was largely missing. His parents put this down in a general way to karma from a previous life.12
His father thought the baby was his younger brother Ratran Hami come back, partly because Wijeratne was dark like Ratran, where the other children were fair. Before his execution, Ratran had told his brother he would return as his son. Wijeratne’s mother did not remember her husband saying anything of this at the birth, a discrepancy Stevenson could not resolve.1
The previous life
Ratran Hami, born in 1904, was about fifteen years younger than his brother. A widower, he had married Podi Menike of Nawaneliya, about five miles away, but only the legal stage of the marriage had taken place, and when he came to take her home she refused to leave her parents’ house. He walked home, sharpened a kris (a Malay knife), returned and stabbed her to death in October 1927. At his trial in June 1928 he pleaded not guilty, saying he had been attacked and had stabbed her without meaning to kill her, but witnesses said he had attacked her deliberately. He was hanged in July 1928, eighteen and a half years before Wijeratne was born.1
Statements
When Wijeratne was two to two and a half, his mother overheard him talking to himself, saying his arm was deformed because he had murdered his wife in his previous life. She had married into the family in about 1936 from a village some 26 miles away and said she knew nothing of the crime until she asked her husband, who confirmed it. He went on to tell the story in pieces, despite his father’s attempts to stop him. Stevenson tabulated 27 statements and recognitions.1
Many were confirmed by his father or the trial record: that he had sharpened the knife on a plank under an orange tree, both of which he pointed out; that he had borrowed fifty rupees from his brother; and that his brother had arranged an almsgiving for him at the prison, which at five he described in detail, with ten monks. Three details of the execution, which his father did not attend, seem to have been new to him: a hood over the head, last rites from a monk, and a sandbag hung on the gallows the day before to test it. Stevenson doubted the sandbag until he found it in a prison executioner’s account published in 1961, years after Wijeratne first mentioned it.1
Some statements were wrong. He said the trial dragged on for two years, when it came about eight months after the murder, and that he had stabbed Podi Menike in the right breast, whereas the post-mortem found her wounds in the back and under the left armpit. He also said he had tried to blame Mohottihamy, a relative living with her family whom he saw as a rival, which the trial record does not show. At six or seven he recognized a belt that Ratran had left with an aunt, then worn by her son, but no one else witnessed this.1
Investigation
The Ven. Ananda Maitreya, a Buddhist scholar known to the family, questioned Wijeratne when he was four or five. Francis Story interviewed him, his teachers and local monks in June 1961, and Ian Stevenson interviewed him, his parents and his older brother in August 1961, when Wijeratne was fourteen. Stevenson obtained a certified transcript of the trial, including the post-mortem evidence, and met Wijeratne repeatedly until 1976.12
Birth defect
At eighteen, Wijeratne’s right arm was 6 to 7 centimetres shorter than the left and about half its size; each finger lacked its middle bone, most were joined, and an X-ray showed a short third rib on the right. Stevenson identified the combination as Poland syndrome, which occurs in about 1 in 20,000 births, and noted that Wijeratne had all four of its main features. Surgery in 1971 freed two fingers and made the hand more useful.2
Wijeratne said his hand was malformed because he had ‘killed my wife by using my hand’, and seemed to link his hollow chest to where he believed he had stabbed her. Since the wounds were on her left side, Stevenson tentatively suggested a confusion of left and right. It is one of four cases he studied in which a birth defect was attributed to wrongdoing by the previous person.2
Assessment
Stevenson acknowledged that nearly everything Wijeratne said was known to his father, so learning from him, normally or by ESP, could not be ruled out. Against this he set the testimony of the mother and the older brother, Ariyaratne, that they had not heard of the crime before Wijeratne spoke; the father’s efforts to silence the boy for fear of reprisals from Podi Menike’s relatives, which Ananda Maitreya witnessed; the three execution details; and the belt. He also thought it significant that Wijeratne admitted the murder outright, while Ratran had denied intent in court, which argued against the court record or his father as the source.1
Later life
In 1961 Wijeratne showed no remorse and said he would probably kill a wife who behaved as Podi Menike had; by 1966 he had changed his mind, and in a 1969 letter he wrote that such a wife should be advised and, if necessary, divorced. He had schizophrenic episodes in 1969 and 1973, each after a rejection, real or imagined, by a girl, and in the first he believed for a week that he was a bird. Three of Stevenson’s colleagues recalled him hinting earlier at a time as a bird between lives, though no notes recorded it.1
He recovered, studied at the University of Ceylon at Peradeniya, became a schoolteacher and married happily in 1980.2 A girl born into Podi Menike’s family in December 1928 and given her name had no memories of a previous life.1