Woman kills ‘abusive’ husband, sleeps with body for 2 nights, held
PERFECT MURDER? Wife tried to pass it off as heart attack, police informer spotted injuries on body minutes before it was cremated
woman in southwest Delhi’s Kapashera planned the perfect murder of her ‘abusive’ husband and almost got away with it too, but for the sharp eye of a police informer who spotted injuries on the body minutes before it was cremated.
The woman, Shilpi Adhikari, 32, police said, killed her husband but did not know what to do with the body after the murder.
She slept beside it for two nights inside her one-room house in Kapashera.
On the third day, she informed her neighbours and tried to pass the incident off as natural death. She almost managed to get away with it too but for a police informer, who noticed strangulation marks on the man’s neck minutes before the body was to be cremated and informed the police. The police on Tuesday arrested Shilpi and registered a case of murder.
Shilpi Adhikari, a native of West Bengal, worked as a housekeeping employee at the Royal Bank of Scotland. She waited for the weekend to execute her plan, when her husband Nitish usually drank heavily and thrashed her. It had to be done on a Saturday. She had waited the whole week. According to investigating officials, on Saturday evening after dinner, she offered Nitish alcohol. She had bought extra alcohol for her husband from a local shop near her house. “She told her husband that it was her treat and continued giving him alcohol till late in the night,” an investigating officer said.
“At around midnight, when her husband passed out she strangulated him. Unsure about what to do next, she continued to sleep in the same 8x10 feet room with the body,” the officer said.
For more than 48 hours, Shilpi did not step out. On Monday morning, at around 9 am, locals in the Kapashera village heard Shilpi crying outside her house. She was wailing loudly, a villagers later told the police.
She told locals that her husband had suffered a heart attack and died in his sleep. Nobody suspected her. The couple had two kids, aged 13 and 11, who live with their maternal grandmother in West Bengal.
According to police, the locals, mostly migrants from West Bengal and Bihar, advised that the body be cremated as it had started smelling because of the heat on Monday as the day temperature was around 37°C.
By noon, the locals reached the crematorium along with the body. Shilpi was there too. An officer said Nitish’s body was on a pyre, when a police informer noticed some marks on Nitish’s body and also realised that the smell emanating from the body wasn’t normal. He secretly called inspector Ashish Dalal, posted at the Kapashera police station.
Dalal and his team immediately rushed to the crematorium and stopped the locals from cremating the body. “Had we been 10-15 minutes late, the body would have reduced to ashes. There would be no evidence and it would have been a perfect murder. We took the body and sent it for post mortem,” an officer told the Hindustan Times.
Doctors told the police on Tuesday morning that the man had died of strangulation more than 72 hours before the body was brought for post mortem. Shilpi, who was detained from the spot, was formally arrested. Nitish, according to Shilpi’s confession was an abusive drinker who thrashed her mercilessly.
The beatings, like his drinking, had increased over the last few months leaving her with no option but to murder him.