Wife's murder kept in deep freeze for 2 months

Wife's murder kept in deep freeze for 2 months

D S Kunwar | TNN | Dec 14, 2010, 01.25 AM IST

DEHRADUN: A software engineer succeeded in keeping under wraps the murder of his wife for two months but the law finally caught up with him on Sunday night. After a spat on the night of October 17, Rajesh Gulati (37) allegedly smothered his 36-year-old wife Anupama Gulati to death in their two-room rented house at Prakash Nagar in Dehradun Cantonment. To cover up the heinous crime, Rajesh bought an electric cutter from the market and chopped off the body into 70 pieces.

Then he bought a deep freezer to stash away body pieces. Police sources said Rajesh also bought a bundle of black polythene carrybags to store the body parts. He had planned to secretly dump them at remote locations on Dehradun-Mussoorie road. When his four-year-old kids — twins Sonakshi and Sidhant — would enquire about their mother, Rajesh would tell them that she was away in Delhi.

The murder came to light on Sunday morning when Anupama's elder brother, SK Pradhan, reached Dehradun and sent a friend to his sister's house with Anupama's passport. Suspecting foul play after they were unable to locate her, he lodged a missing complaint with the police. Acting swiftly, a joint team of Uttarakhand Special Task Force (STF) and Special Operations Group (SOG) conducted a raid at the techie's residence and cracked the case.

Dehradun SSP G S Martolia said the police team recovered severed parts of the body, including Anupama's head, from the deep freezer after sustained interrogation of the accused.

According to SSP Martolia, the culprit was taken to the shops from where he had bought the stone-cutter electric machine, polythene carrybags and deep freezer. He was also taken to spots where he had disposed off body parts. The accused is reported to have confessed to his crime.

Narrating the sequence of events, IG (Garhwal Range) M A Ganpati said that on the night of the incident Rajesh slapped his wife after a domestic quarrel. ''He told us that she fell on the corner of a wall after which she became unconscious. A jittery Rajesh thinking that his wife, after regaining consciousness, would report the matter to the police decided to kill her. And then he throttled her by thrusting cotton into her nose and mouth before using pillow to kill her,'' said Ganpati.

Rajesh was later remanded in a four-day police remand by the court of Dehradun chief judicial magistrate (CJM) Kunwar Amrindra Singh.