Rethish Pullarkattil Kunjunny, 44, strangled his wife Shighi Padmanabhan and their two 13-year-old daughters Niya and Neha at their family home in Chadwell Heath, Essex.
Two days later, his body was found hanged from a tree near the Walthamstow Reservoir.
The family had moved from Kerala, South India, in 2005 to their Essex home, where Kunjunny worked at a care home. At the same time, he was sending money back to India to finance the building of a house, which his in-laws were handling.
Walthamstow Coroners Court heard that in the week before the murders on May 10, he violently attacked 37-year-old Shighi over the property – claiming her parents were cheating him out of money. 
At 10.45pm on the night of the murder Shighi sent a message to her friend saying: ‘My life is a great failure. I can’t even die because of my two children. I really don’t know what to do. I no longer want to live my life as a wife.’ Shighi’s colleagues contacted the police the next day after she failed to turn up for work. When officers arrived, they found no sign of a disturbance and the family car gone.
However, police ‘escalated the situation’ the next day after growing concerns from the girls’ school. Officers forced their way into the house and discovered the bodies of Shighi and her two daughters, wearing theirpyjamas.
Coroner Wade said Kunjunny ‘obsessively’ held the view that he was being cheated by members of his wife’s family.
‘It perhaps indicates he was a man who was deeply self-obsessed and had no proper insight into the collective interests and welfare of those he should have been responsible for,’ he added.
He told the court that the family were ‘very conventional’ and ‘hard working’, but added that ‘the marriage was not a happy one’.
‘It is not simply a matter of there being some dispute about the funding in the construction of a property in India. There is very real evidence that this was a violent relationship where Shighi Padmanabhan was physically attacked.’
The coroner recorded the cause of Kunjunny’s death as suicide by hanging, and Shighi’s, Neha’s and Niya’s deaths as unlawful killing by manual strangulation.
