Ex-serviceman’s missing wife found ‘murdered’ in bed box

A 60-year-old woman who had been missing from the past two days, was found dead inside a bed box of her bedroom at her Bhiwani house on Friday. The deceased, Rajbala Devi, was the wife of a retired armyman, Ramesh Kumar.

The police said Kumar now works as a security guard at a school. On the morning of July 25, he went to the school at 6 am as usual. He returned home in the afternoon for lunch and left for work again. When he returned in the evening, the gate was locked from outside and his wife was not at home.

The police said Kumar thought his wife must have had gone to someone’s house in the neighbourhood and slept. He woke up the next morning to find his wife had not returned. He called his daughter living in Rohtak to enquire if she had come there, but she told him that her mother was not there.

Kumar then lodged a missing complaint with the police. As his relatives came to his home to enquire about his missing wife, one of them on Friday morning complained of a foul smell coming from the bed. They opened the bed box and found Rajbala’s dead body stuffed inside.

The police said they have sent the body for postmortem at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences Rohtak and have registered a case of murder against unknown person(s) based on preliminary investigation conducted by the scene of crime team. Bhiwani DSP Jagat Singh said they were scanning the CCTV footage around the area. “The body of the woman was decomposed and the postmortem will reveal if smothering was the cause of death or if it carried any other injury mark. The experts have confirmed it’s a case of murder and more can be revealed from the autopsy report,” Singh said. HTC