by Avirook Sen
‘Honestly?’
‘Ya, honestly . . .’
‘Rajesh Talwar . . . too soft, too emotional. Not capable of murder . . . would not be able to live with himself . . .’
‘And . . . ?’
‘Nupur Talwar . . . Yes.’
Having gone through the trial so far, Tanveer Ahmed Mir told me that he would have loved the opportunity to grill K.K. Gautam. He knew something that very few people were aware of about Gautam’s involvement. The former policeman was extremely fond of appearing on television, and the vernacular channels loved him for his ‘face value’. He had given them several gloating interviews on the morning of the 17th, focusing on his role in the discovery of Hemraj’s body, and theorizing, with his experienced policeman’s mind, how the murders took place.
Mir had seen raw footage of one of these interviews. In it, when asked where Hemraj was killed, a supremely confident Gautam is seen saying it had to be on the terrace. Had the body been dragged up to the roof, ‘rivers of blood’ would have flowed down the stairs, he said. Gautam had told the court that all he saw were some stains leading to the roof.
‘I don’t know whether the judge would admit this evidence, but I’d certainly have taken the chance,’ said Mir. All he would do, he said, was ask Gautam, ‘Are you the man in this video?’, and then play it in court. ‘It would have exposed all his lies and debunked this whole dragging theory.’
There was no guarantee, of course, that Gautam would identify himself in the clip. Given the conduct of witnesses in the case, he may well have said his eyes were failing him and pointed to his treatment under Dr Choudhry. One policeman who was shown a photograph from the roof and asked whether he could see the clearly visible handles on the desert-cooler panel covering Hemraj simply said he could not. Everybody else could. Another policeman claimed he couldn’t smell Hemraj’s putrefying body. Everybody else could. And later, when A.G.L. Kaul would be shown a copy of a petition he had filed in the Supreme Court, he would tell the Ghaziabad court he had no idea about the document and would simply refuse to recognize it.
Still, Mir felt, it would have been worth a try.
***
As winter came that year, the trial slipped into a more regular pace. The almost childish fights of the early days slipped into more sedate sparring. It was as if both sides were taking a breather after the furious early rounds. But it isn’t as if this phase didn’t throw up something bizarre or inexplicable on a daily basis.
What had happened to the mobile phones that belonged to Aarushi and Hemraj, for instance? Prosecution witnesses marched in to provide answers, but their testimonies ended up posing questions for the CBI.
The phones used by Aarushi and Hemraj were missing when their bodies were discovered on 16 and 17 May 2008. They were important pieces of evidence because the people who got rid of them were most likely the killers.
While making their case against Aarushi’s parents, the CBI suggested that the Talwars were in possession of the phones. In Hemraj’s case, a call was completed several hours after his death—at about six on the morning of the 16th, when Nupur Talwar tried to contact him. Records from the service provider showed that this person was in the Jalvayu Vihar area.
The prosecution’s case was that the Talwars both made and received this particular call and then got rid of the phone to create the impression that it was with someone else. Hemraj’s phone had not been recovered. But the CBI claimed that it was active in Punjab well after the murders. Aarushi’s phone was recovered after a year and a half of police work.
Sometime in the summer of 2008, weeks after Aarushi’s death, a domestic servant working in the Jalvayu Vihar area found the teenager’s mobile phone. It lay in a park. She picked up the instrument and took it home. Four and a half years after the incident, Kusum, the lady who found the phone, was in the witness box.
Kusum took the phone home and a few days later her brother arrived from Bulandshahr and took it away for his use, little realizing what he was getting into. A year and a half later, while the phone was still active, the police traced it and came knocking at the brother’s door and picked him up. Kusum and her husband were taken into custody shortly thereafter. They told their simple story.
But it was a story with many gaps—gaps that only a proper investigation could have filled. Kusum told the court that investigators never took her to the spot where she found the phone. And the man who actually used it, her brother Rambhool, was not even on the list of witnesses.
The CBI nevertheless took the line that someone placed (rather than dropped or disposed of) Aarushi’s phone in the park in a manner that would tempt a passer-by to pick it up.
They also argued that since all the data on Aarushi’s phone had been wiped clean, it could have been the Talwars. There was no logical explanation as to why only the Talwars could have erased the data, and in any event the phone wasn’t produced in court—the Talwars were never given the opportunity to have an expert inspect the evidence. The CBI simply stood by its claim.
Without the item itself and with the bland testimony of the bewildered domestic help who said little except that she found the phone in a park, there wasn’t much scope for factual contradiction, and even less for any logical conclusions.
But Hemraj’s phone was different—and more important in order to solve the mystery. Someone had received a call on the phone after he was dead—in the Jalvayu Vihar area, where all the initial suspects lived. Where was that handset?
In the 2010 closure report, A.G.L. Kaul had made a startling revelation that begged many questions: he claimed that the mobile phone Hemraj had been given by the Talwars was active in Punjab well after the murders. How did the phone get there? Who was using it? Kaul did not provide any answers, neither did he investigate.
During the trial, the CBI was asked how Kaul and his team knew the phone was indeed in Punjab. The witness for the prosecution who came after Kusum had the answer: the agency had no way of knowing.
M.N. Vijayan, nodal officer for Tata Teleservices, was the man who had provided the call details for the phone that Hemraj used. On being questioned, Vijayan told the trial court that he had provided the CBI details only for the one critical call made to the Tata number on the morning of the murders, 16 May 2008. He also said that the phone was never placed under surveillance.
But where was the phone? In fact, it was never found: the closure report merely says it was active somewhere in Punjab. There could have been only one way of getting this information, and that is by finding out from the service provider. The records provided by Tata Teleservices show no activity on the phone beyond that early morning call on 16 May. So how did Kaul know the phone was in Punjab at a later date? Vijayan’s testimony made it clear that there was no way he could have known.
***
The case moved at its elephantine pace and the press lost its keen interest in it by November 2012. The CBI was still calling in its witnesses. On the list was Dr Naresh Raj, who had conducted Hemraj’s autopsy and whose changed testimony was central to the closure report. Judge Shyam Lal asked when Dr Raj would testify but the CBI had a problem: the agency could not find Dr Raj, even though his whereabouts were a matter of record and he lived in government accommodation.
The following week, as the CBI prepared to bring in a batch of expert witnesses—and the hunt for Dr Raj continued—Saini told the court (with some indignation) that the accused had filed an application under the Right to Information (RTI) Act with the CFSL. The suggestion was, once again: ‘Look at the extent they are going to!’ The application itself was fairly innocuous. The Talwars sought details of the quality and standards guidelines followed by the lab.
Forensic laboratories around the world make this information public on their websites, but not the CFSL. During the trial, witnesses representing the CFSL had been either non-committal or sketchy in their testimonies with regard to guidelines. The RTI application was filed so that the defence could question CFSL witnesses on whet
her they had followed procedure in their testing.
The Talwars filed the RTI application one afternoon in November. Its concerns were limited to the CFSL and its guidelines, and had nothing to do with the CBI. Yet the next morning, Saini told the court that such an application had been filed. For an agency that had been working for several weeks on trying to find one of its own witnesses—a doctor in government service—this is pretty fast work.
How did Saini know? Information of this kind is generally passed on, after due process (as I was reminded), through the information department of the CFSL. The officer who headed the department, J.G. Moses, told me he was aware that the RTI was filed, but he had not passed on this information to the CBI: ‘I did not tell them,’ he said. The thing is, only the Talwars and the CFSL knew the application had been filed. And the Talwars certainly didn’t tell Saini.
***
In the absence of Dr Raj, other scientists were brought to testify for the prosecution. One of them was Rajinder Singh Dangi, a senior scientist at the CFSL, who came to testify for the prosecution. Dangi had conducted a ‘scientific experiment’ and submitted a report recreating the crime scene on the roof of the Talwars’ flat, specifically about the alleged shifting of Hemraj’s body after his murder.
The experiment in question was carried out using every scientific tool required. These were listed methodically as part of the ‘forensic opinion’: two 10-ml bottles of red paint (Shalimar Superlac); a 10-litre bucket; 4 litres of water; one bed sheet. In addition, there was an unsuspecting volunteer from the lower constabulary—who was made to lie on the sheet, get carried, and then get dragged.
Shalimar Superlac (red) came into the picture because ‘recreation of the crime scene’ required a ‘blood trail’. On the terrace, a sheet was duly soaked in paint, a constable lay on it and was then dragged. It was noticed that the drag marks made by the heels were ‘parallel’.
One of the other conclusions drawn from the experiment was that it was indeed possible for two people to drag a body in a sheet up a flight of stairs.
During his cross-examination, Singh was asked why he chose Shalimar paint. Did it have the exact consistency of blood? He didn’t have any idea about the densities of blood or paint, said Singh, but he said: ‘Woh khoon jaisa tha . . .’ (It was like blood).
The judge didn’t take too kindly to this. He chided Singh saying it wasn’t the kind of answer that the court expected from an expert. But it didn’t stop there. Counsel for the defence asked the witness whether such a demo test referenced any scientific papers. The CFSL scientist responded that it did not and added that there was no ‘tradition’ which required it to.
Did the Shalimar paint solution clot the way blood does? Singh avoided the court’s ridicule on this one and admitted that it did not. Was he briefed that Hemraj was allegedly carried to the terrace by a man and a woman? And was a woman involved in carrying the constable wrapped in a sheet? Singh gave the correct scientific answer to this question: he was not briefed, and no woman was involved.
Why did a senior scientist from one of India’s top forensic labs carry out this ‘dummy test’? Well, he was asked to. The test was A.G.L. Kaul’s brainchild; it was conducted within months of his taking over and about a year and a half after the murders. And what did it actually prove? Singh eventually admitted his findings were ‘inconclusive’.
***
With most experts having come and gone, it was the turn of the Noida policemen to testify. Part of the Uttar Pradesh police force, they were the first responders and the case’s investigators for a fortnight, before the investigation was handed over to the CBI.
Constable Pawan Kumar, a fresh but overweight recruit posted at Noida’s Sector 20 police station, had completed his night rounds in his area and just deposited his rifle when a gateman from the Jalvayu Vihar housing complex arrived to say there had been a murder. This was early on the morning of 16 May 2008.
Kumar got to the crime scene by 6.30 a.m. and stayed less than half an hour. He told the trial court that Dr Talwar let him in and then showed him to Aarushi’s room. She lay there covered in a white sheet, he said, but her head was exposed. Her throat had been slit.
Kumar got on the phone to his superior when he saw the body, and other policemen arrived soon after. Kumar observed two other things during his brief stay in the Talwars’ flat: that an ‘aged couple’ arrived when he was there. (Aarushi’s maternal grandparents, the Chitnises.) He also said that the people in the house were ‘normal but tense’.
The recording of that phrase, ‘normal but tense’, appeared to be the only reason Kumar was called in as a witness. In the CBI’s criminal psychology book, at least as far as this trial was concerned, if you were ‘normal’ after your daughter had been murdered, you were clearly not grieving; however, you would be ‘tense’ if you were guilty. Hence the compact ‘normal but tense’.
The phrase wasn’t something that Kumar communicated in any manner to anyone at the time of the murder. During his cross-examination Kumar admitted he hadn’t mentioned it to his superior when he called him from the scene; neither did he record this observation in the general diary. The phrase first came up when the CBI’s investigators summoned the constable to their office more than a year after the double murders.
The statement was never shown to him, said Kumar. In any case, it was in English, a language he said he studied till ‘class six or class eight’. Throughout the trial, whenever a witness had nothing substantial to offer by way of hard evidence, the prosecution’s fallback was on the conduct of the Talwars. Through the testimonies of policemen or morning-walkers or friends or crematorium priests, the prosecution wasted no opportunity to suggest that the Talwars were not grieving.
This strategy played very well with the media, which seldom bothered to take into account the subjectivity of the observer or the simple fact that one cannot weep for twelve hours at a stretch.
In Pawan Kumar’s case, he repeated the catchphrase dutifully when led on by Saini (the defence objected, and was overruled) and had little else to say. Like other witnesses from the lower constabulary, he recalled very little apart from this—he didn’t, for example, know who he was out on his rounds with on the night of the murder, or even the name of his SP. In fact, he remembered so little that the judge gave him some food for thought: ‘Eat less,’ said Judge Shyam Lal, ‘you might remember more.’
***
Each time a policeman came to testify in the Aarushi–Hemraj murder trial, his common sense seemed to have exited. Subinspector Bachu Singh, in uniform, and wearing thick prescription glasses, made his appearance as a prosecution witness. During the course of his cross-examination, he made an incredible admission: he had no sense of smell, he told the court.
Bachu Singh had volunteered that when he saw the victim Hemraj’s body on the terrace, about 36 hours after the manservant had been killed, he found it in mint condition. There was no decomposition, no putrid smell. This tested Judge Shyam Lal’s patience. The trial judge let the policeman know that common sense hadn’t taken an adjournment: ‘What are you talking about? No stink after a body lies outside almost two days in the middle of May?’
This is when Bachu Singh pulled out a classic ‘Sir, hamein na badboo ata hai, na khushboo’ (I can sense neither stink, nor aroma).
The entertainment continued. R.K. Saini stepped in for his witness, trying to explain that a body may not decompose. In Punjab, where he was from, summer actually sets in around July–August nowadays, he told the court with a twitchy smile. May, when the murders took place, is relatively cool. (For the record, the temperature in the Delhi region on the relevant day in May 2008 was 47 degrees in the shade.)
Having heard Saini out, Judge Shyam Lal asked the witness with undisguised irony whether he too was from Punjab. ‘No sir,’ said Bachu Singh, ‘I am from Mathura.’ This is about the only undiluted truth the policeman said in court that day.
The policeman’s description of the corpse in court was m
eant to suggest it was easily identifiable, and this had to be understood in the context of his claim that the Talwar family refused to identify Hemraj positively. Ergo, they were buying time: only the guilty would do that.
Bachu Singh was a seasoned policeman; it was he who wrote out the panchnamas for both murders. But as his day in court wore on, the suspicion that he may have doctored them became increasingly reasonable. In Aarushi’s panchnama, for instance, a line appears to have been added (in visibly smaller letters) that her pyjama strings were untied. This fit the theory—formulated two years later—that her genitals were cleaned.
Singh denied he had made this amateurish alteration to the document. He told the court, ‘It might appear so . . . But I just did it to fill out the line.’
The judge smiled; the scribe took it down. The fact is that this kind of ‘line-filling’ was all over the police documents in the Aarushi case. Bachu Singh offered a stunningly simple explanation for this in court: ‘Hum aise hi karte hain’ (That’s how we do it).
When he appeared in court, with his thick glasses and his amiable, if mischievous, manner, Bachu Singh was hiding a secret that had nothing to do with the case, but had a lot to say about policemen in Uttar Pradesh. He had successfully plotted a murder in his native Mathura at around the same time that he was taking his oath in this murder trial. The policeman was convicted about a year later—for bumping off a woman who was causing trouble for his family. He was sent to the same Dasna, where the Talwars would eventually go.
***
Subinspector Dataram Nanoria, the first investigating officer in the case, actually had a conviction against him for the custodial death of a prisoner. He had done time, and was out pending appeal when he came in to testify. Nanoria was among the policemen who had broken the lock to the terrace and discovered Hemraj’s body covered by a cooler panel on the morning of 17 May 2008. But he didn’t seize the item as evidence—although it may have yielded DNA or fingerprints—because ‘it was too large and heavy’, he told the court.