(Top) Rick and (above) Subhra

Calcutta, Dec. 17: Rabindranath Dey today confessed to battering nine-year-old Subhra Chakraborty and dumping her for dead ? his face was calm and his voice steady.

The case comes close on the heels of another child’s murder ? Rick Nath was killed on December 2 by a neighbour who he used to call dida.

With children falling victim to one macabre murder after another, police have decided to take the help of doctors to get to the bottom of crimes orchestrated by psychopaths.

The 20-year-old Dey, who worked as a domestic help in Subhra’s neighbour’s house in Burtolla, today told a team of stunned police officers how he had tortured the girl.

“Yes, not only food, I did not even allow her to drink a single drop of water for three days.? When, at last, the child fell unconscious, I thought she was dead and dumped her in an adjacent garden.”

The police ? who think the murderers of several other children in the city may have been mentally unstable ? will now involve psychiatrists during interrogation.

The police suspect that like Bela Bose, a patient of obsessive compulsive disorder who murdered Rick, the killer of 13-year-old Hassan Iqbal from Tangra had a mental problem. “Had the assassin wanted to eliminate the boy, it could have been done in a less gruesome manner,” said an officer. “Hassan was gagged, suffocated with a pillow and then strangled.”

Senior police officers say Subhra would have met the same fate. “Had Dey known that she was alive, he would not have dumped her,” said an officer.

During interrogation, the police said, they found it difficult to read Dey’s mind.

According to Anuj Sharma, the deputy commissioner of police, headquarters, psychiatrists will not only be able to identify if the accused has an unsound mind, but “can also be involved in counselling minor and young accused”.