Aarushi (4 page)

Zee News ran it; so did Headlines Today, Aaj Tak and
Mail Today
. The story claimed the CBI as the source, and was based on the ‘information’ that Rajesh Talwar had booked a dozen rooms at a Delhi hotel and the couple spent three or four hours there. It went on to say that Hemraj was blackmailing Aarushi. There was not one line of confirmation from the CBI, the hotel or its staff. The Talwars were never asked for a version.

This was in early July 2008; Rajesh Talwar was still in jail. Nupur wrote to Arun Kumar, in charge of the CBI team, in despair. The CBI issued an official denial. And the channels? Not a word of the story was recanted. No apology was offered.

***

Vijay Shanker, the CBI director, had been watching the circus keenly, and he was horrified. When the case was handed over to his agency, he told me, he felt duty-bound to bring some sanity back: ‘If the CBI doesn’t investigate this, who will?’

As the head of the CBI team that took over from the UP police, Arun Kumar’s first job was to make an inventory of the investigative blunders that had occurred over the two weeks since the incident. He immediately noted something that any experienced investigator would. This was the delay in the discovery of the second body. As the UP police fumbled along, Hemraj’s body lay for a whole day on the roof, just one locked door away from discovery.

Kumar thought it was impossible that the murderer(s) would make the assumption that the police would not find the body on the first day. ‘No killer would think that, especially when the body was in the same building,’ he said. The Talwars, an educated, intelligent couple, were the least likely people to make this assumption, he thought. It was simply too risky. There was no way they could have prevented every policeman on the scene from looking behind the bloodstained terrace door. In fact, Mahesh Mishra, the superintendent of police (SP) who arrived on the scene on the morning of 16 May, had left instructions with subordinates to break the lock.

Yet the UP police announced that the Talwars had tried to hide the body. Kumar found this claim illogical. He also learned that Krishna Thadarai, the Talwars’ clinic employee who lived just a few apartments away in the same block, in L-14 Jalvayu Vihar, had been picked up by the UP police on the first day. Hemraj was assumed missing, and the police thought that Krishna, a fellow Nepali who also worked for the Talwars and knew Hemraj well, perhaps knew his whereabouts.

Krishna was a 22-year-old who had come to India from his village in western Nepal about ten years ago for medical treatment, but had stayed back. He was keen to educate himself and had just appeared for his 12th grade exams from an open school. He had been working for Rajesh Talwar for two years.

The young Nepali was confined and questioned for about ten days by the Noida police, who shifted him from station to station in the area, as hapless relatives tried to reach him with food. The confinement was illegal, and investigators never mention it, but this is just how the system works for his class of people. Arun Kumar had watched Gurdarshan Singh’s press conference, and something struck him as he read Krishna’s account in the case diary: ‘The version given by Singh was exactly what Krishna had told the police, almost verbatim.’

It was Krishna who had successfully seeded the idea in the police that Rajesh Talwar was an adulterer and debauch, who was having an affair with his friend and colleague Dr Anita Durrani; that Aarushi was anguished when she discovered this and sought comfort in Hemraj’s arms; that Rajesh was deeply suspicious of Hemraj.

Then there were details which had been extracted from the Talwars’ routine: that on Tuesdays and Saturdays, when Nupur Talwar went to work in Dr Sidharth Mehta’s Khan Market clinic, Dr Durrani and Dr Talwar would close the Noida clinic early and head for the L-32 flat. (They did this because they often went together to pick up Aarushi and Dr Durrani’s daughter Vidushi from school; this was Nupur’s responsibility on other days.)

Krishna also said he was always told to take the day off early on those days, and that he never actually saw Talwar and Durrani together. When asked about this, he said that Hemraj had seen the two in the Talwars’ flat. Arun Kumar wryly noted that, with Hemraj dead, this was an unverified piece of hearsay.

As Arun Kumar went through the case diary in the first week of June, what became clear to him was that the theory floated by the UP police wasn’t a result of any investigation. It was what one man had told them, sans corroboration.

In the meantime, the CBI and forensic teams from the CBI’s forensic lab, Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), began collecting whatever evidence was left at the crime scene. In a statement made to CBI investigators on 1 July 2008, K.K. Gautam said he had done a ‘formal inspection’ of Hemraj’s room and that he had concluded from the depressions on the mattress that three people may have sat on it. He had also observed three glasses, two of them containing some amounts of liquor, and a bottle of whisky which was a quarter full. He had inspected the toilet too and deduced that more than one person had recently used it. His statement suggested the presence of outsiders on the night of the murders. Kumar decided that Krishna would need to be interrogated again.

***

The first court-authorized narco analysis test in India was done at the Sabarmati jail in Gujarat in 1989 by a young behavioural scientist named Dr S.L. Vaya. At the time police liberally, but completely illegally, injected sodium pentothal (or truth serum) into suspects. Dr Vaya felt that a valuable investigative tool such as this needed to be legitimized, and administered by professionals. ‘There was no lab to speak of at the time, so I used to carry equipment around in a box. The first procedure was done in jail that way,’ she said, ‘but I insisted on consent and a court sanction.’

Soon, police forces from all over the country began using her team’s services at the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL), Gandhinagar, and other labs like it. FSL Gandhinagar was highly regarded and charged a high fee for the procedure, Rs 50,000 per subject. This became a steady revenue stream for the institution.

The lab is reasonably well equipped today. The narco room looks like a hospital operation theatre where the patient lies down and is brought to a trance state with carefully measured injections of the truth serum. The sodium pentothal injection has two effects on a human being: it produces a sense of serenity and well-being; it also makes them talk—and reveal information without fear. Scientists say this is the most humane way of eliciting information from suspects, filling gaps in an investigation.

Alongside this, brain-mapping is done in a soundproof room where the subject sits behind a one-way glass window (the scientists outside can look in), with electrodes attached to various parts of the body. The procedure is non-invasive: an earpiece gives audio cues, while a screen provides the text and is used to show the subject photographs. The machine looks for waves of different frequencies, each band indicating how the brain has processed the cue. There are pre- and post-test interviews, relevant parts of which find their way into the final report.

Dr Vaya was a respected veteran in her field by 2008. The CBI had turned to her lab in the other notorious crime from Noida, the Nithari killings. In December 2006, skeletal remains of women and children were found in a drain behind Moninder Singh Pandher’s house in the Nithari village of Noida. Pandher and his servant Surinder Koli were accused of raping, killing, dismembering and disposing of 17 children, including ten girls. That case had opened up when Koli revealed in his narco test details such as how he would find out the names of his victims from the loudspeaker announcements during evening prayers asking for information on missing children. Koli was convicted but his death sentence was later commuted.

The polygraph or lie detector test consists of a customary pre-test interview, after which subjects are familiarized with the equipment and given sitting instructions. A number of tubes and wires are then attached to them. These record physiological responses to questions read that must be categorically answered in ‘yes’ or ‘no’ terms. The questions come every 25 seconds.

The questions are straightforward. As the subject answers questions, every physiological change in the subject, whether it is in respiration, pulse rate, blood pressure or even skin reflex—through electrodes attached to fingers—is recorded. A comparison with his normal physiological performance guides the examiner to an opinion on whether or not the subject is telling the truth.

The Supreme Court has judged that the forcible use of such scientific tests is a violation of fundamental rights. Even when the tests were conducted with consent, the court has said that the subject is not in control of his responses so the results are inadmissible. ‘However, any information or material that is subsequently discovered with the help of voluntary administered test results can be admitted, in accordance with Section 27 of the Evidence Act.’ This meant that if a suspect revealed something during the test like, say, where he had kept Hemraj’s phone after the murder, the test and his narration would not be admissible as evidence; but the police could, based on what he had said, recover the phone and then present it as evidence which would be admissible in a court of law.

Bibha Rani Ray, then director of the CFSL, conducted the polygraph test on Krishna. She and other behavioural scientists concluded that he was being deceptive and manipulative. He was intelligent and very keen on shifting blame. He was also ‘loyal to no one’.

Within days the results of Krishna’s lie detector tests were confirmed by narco analysis at Bangalore during which he spilled details of the crime and the weapon used. Among other things, Krishna said that he and two other servants in the area, Rajkumar and Vijay Mandal, were present in the Talwars’ flat with Hemraj at midnight; he witnessed Rajkumar committing the crime; and Rajesh Talwar had nothing to do with the murders. According to the scientists conducting the test, Krishna’s answers were out of sequence and filled with attempts at deception. This is why the CBI also admitted that there was some evidence of the servants’ involvement when they filed the closure report; however, this was too little to go by.

Days later, on 18 June, the CBI sought, and got, an extension of Krishna’s custody. The CBI presented before the magistrate the case diary in which it recorded that Krishna had confessed to the crimes, that a khukri had been used and that he could recover Aarushi’s mobile phone. Remand was granted, and the CBI raided the servants’ quarters of L-14 Jalvayu Vihar. Vijay Kumar and Anuj Arya of the CBI were both a part of this raid. The recoveries included a khukri with specks of blood on it and a bloodstained purple pillow cover.

In the following three weeks, Rajkumar and Vijay Mandal were also taken into custody. Rajkumar was employed by the Durranis. He was a little younger than Krishna and everyone who knew him, including his employers, remarked about his good looks and easy manner. He got along well with the Durranis and the Talwars. The cellphone handset he used had originally belonged to Aarushi, who had passed it on to her friend Vidushi, who in turn had handed it down to Rajkumar.

The Durranis found it hard to believe he was involved in the crime when he was arrested. But when the results of his scientific tests came in, R.K. Saini, the CBI counsel, showed the results to them saying,
‘Dekhiye kaise nevley paale the aap logon ne’
(Look at the sort of mongoose you’ve had as a pet).

Vijay Mandal worked for Puneesh Tandon and lived in the garage below. He was also in his early twenties and had had a troubled childhood; his lasting memories were the severe beatings he got at the hands of his parents. He left home to find employment, but his anger problems meant he couldn’t hold down jobs.

Rajkumar’s scientific tests were similar in their fundamentals to Krishna’s, but had many differences. He said they watched TV and listened to Nepali songs; Krishna got drunk on the terrace; and there was a fight between Hemraj and Krishna in which Hemraj admonished him,
‘Awaaz se sab jag jayenge’
(The noise will wake up everyone). Then Aarushi was murdered.

At the lab, Dr Vaya’s report records, Rajkumar was fidgety and uncooperative. He was confronted with the story that Krishna had put out about him ten days earlier at the Bangalore laboratory. In constant fear of being implicated, he asked the scientists at one point:
‘Main isme phas to nahin jaoonga?’
(I won’t get trapped in this?)

In Dr Vaya’s assessment, Rajkumar was capable of withstanding long hours of interrogation and determined to protect himself. So despite his narrative, culled from interviews and tests in the lab, Dr Vaya felt Rajkumar was unlikely to confess.

Vijay Mandal’s scientific tests in Mumbai also revealed that all three of them were present with Hemraj in the Talwars’ flat at midnight and that there was a struggle with Aarushi; he also spoke of his fear when he realized Aarushi was dead.

The most important point of convergence was their independent admissions that
they were with Hemraj
late that night.

The problem was that Krishna said Rajkumar committed the murders, and Rajkumar said Krishna committed the murders. Outside of the tests, when questioned by the police, all three claimed alibis: each said he was asleep, at home, and not at the Talwars’ flat. Vijay Mandal in fact had his employer give the alibi that he was in bed by 9.30 p.m.

In a conversation with me after the trial, Bibha Rani Ray remembered that it had become fairly clear to her that the servants had some sort of ‘infatuation or lust for the girl’. She said she could not tell for certain that all three servants were present at the crime scene, but that ‘Someone was there, not necessarily all three, but someone was there. They all had easy access to the house.’

***

It emerged that Rajesh had scolded Krishna publicly for a poorly made dental cast a few days earlier. The assistant felt humiliated and was simmering with rage and had told Hemraj that he would sort his employer out. But as a motive for murder, this was disproportionately weak.