Gwalior’s domestic violence case throws light on sordid saga of fraud and murder
GWALIOR: On March 13, the Gwalior Police began investigating an unfortunate, but not unusual case. A 28-year-old woman accused her husband, a 30-year-old man named Rajesh Mehra, of domestic violence. Nine days later, he is in police custody. Except his name is not Rajesh Mehra, but Rajendra Kamariya. And he now stands accused of changing identities, fraud, and four murders, including those of a woman he was in a previous relationship with, and of two young children, all in the last 12 years.
Rajendra Kamariya was born in 1992 in the village of Jorasi, 20km from the city of Gwalior. His father, Veer Singh, was the village milkman.
He was the second of three brothers, and there was not a lot of money to go around. It was a life, Kamariya would tell anyone that would listen, that he was destined to outgrow.
He studied in the local school till class 12, but ran away from home to Gwalior in 2010.
He honed in on a local property dealer, who had political connections.
There was a real estate boom at the time, and Kamariya was left impressed by the affluence of the industry. He quickly learned the ropes, made contacts, and began travelling through Madhya Pradesh and its neighbouring states for business. Soon, though, even real estate was no longer enough for his ambitions, and a life of crime beckoned.
In 2011, Kamariya met and entered a relationship with a 30-year-old woman named Geeta Gehlot in Jhansi. She was already married, and her 32-year-old husband, Manoj Gehlot, was an obstacle in their path. “So, on December 31, 2011, Kamariya and Geeta killed Gehlot. The two took Manoj to celebrate the New Year on the banks of the river
Betwa. They bought four bottles of beer, and sleeping pills. Manoj consumed the beer laced with the sleeping pills, and fainted. When he was unconscious, they threw his body in the river,” said ASP Crime Branch, Rajesh Dandotiya. Manoj Gehlot lived away from his family, and his wife was an accomplice in his murder, so there was no police complaint made at the time.
The two then began their life afresh in Mauranipur, a town near Jhansi, where Geeta’s mother lived. But their happiness was short-lived. Kamariya wanted Geeta to hand over the property that was in her name, as well as land that belonged to her husband, but she refused. Enraged, he began plotting her murder.
In January 2013, Kamariya summoned his younger brother Kallu Kamariya and his cousin Guddu to Mauranipur.
The three of them stabbed Geeta Gehlot, her 10-year-old son, and a young nephew who happened to witness the crime, to death. When they left Mauranipur, Kamariya took the property papers with him, and in time, transferred the land to himself. “Geeta’s family filed a case in Mauranipur but he had disappeared by then,” Dandotiya said.
Three months later, the Uttar Pradesh Police managed to arrest the other accomplices in the crime, but Kamariya was in the wind. Unknown to UP police, he had moved to Delhi, and taken another name, Rajesh Yadav. “We now know that to ensure the two kept his secrets, he kept financially helping their families,” Dandotiya said.
The change of identity
In the national capital, Kamariya came across the Mehras, a couple aged 64 and 63, with no children.
The man was a property dealer, and the wife was principal of a private school. Kamariya was suave and a smooth talker, and while he first approached the man with a property deal, a personal relationship soon developed.
He sold them the story of a young man, alone in the world, abandoned by his family, and who wanted to achieve success. He was a repository of bright business ideas, and quickly, they asked him to move in with them and treated him like their son, police officials said.
He assumed the Mehra surname, and this became the basis of a brand new, “formal” identity. He found ways to get government identification, including a passport registered under the name “Rajesh Mehra” that eventually took him to 18 countries across the world.
All along, Kamariya (now Mehra) was duping the couple financially, and despite warning signs, they were blinded by their affection for him. For instance, he took ₹5 crore from the couple to invest in a real estate project, and when they followed up, he claimed he suffered a loss during the lockdown.
In recompense, he handed over government land by giving them fake papers.
“They checked with the revenue department and were told that it was government land. Kamariya dodged them again and said it was his land but the government had taken it over, and he was owed ₹2.75 crore in compensation which he would soon give to them. They believed him,” police officials said.
HT reached out to the couple, but they did not want to be identified further, ashamed that the man they treated as a son is guilty of both fraud and murder. Gwalior superintendent of police, Amit Sanghi said, “Kamariya not only changed his name but also his looks. To escape identification, he took to wearing a turban with a moustache, only to change to a clean-shaven look months later. The Mehras have realised that he has defrauded them of ₹5 crore and will soon file a case with us.”
Domestic violence was his downfall
Cut to March 13, 2022, when a frantic 28-year-old woman arrived at the Jhansi Road Police station in Gwalior with a domestic abuse complaint. She told the police that she first met Rajesh Mehra in 2014, on board a train. The pattern was much the same.
They befriended each other quickly. She was 20 and wanted to work, and within a year, he had helped her find a job at a call centre in Delhi, and they were married in November 2015.
By 2017, they had a son. There were red flags here too, that were ignored.
“After our marriage, he would often abuse me, and threatened me several times. He would say that he will kill me and nobody would find out, and told me to ask around about him in Jhansi. I thought this was all bluff and bluster, and did not pay much attention,” she said in her complaint to the police.
Around six months ago, the 28-year-old said she came across some property papers, that carried the name Rajendra Kamariya.
“She confronted him, and found out that he had fooled a couple with the surname Mehra, who lived in Delhi. He won their trust, and not only started looking after their business, but began claiming he was their adopted son.
He then defrauded them of their property, and left them in the lurch,” police officials said.
The woman decided to separate from Kamariya, and began living with her parents. On March 13, she stepped out of her house in Gwalior when Kamariya and two others allegedly forcefully took her to his house and assaulted her.
“She somehow managed to escape and filed a police complaint. At this point, we started our investigations like any other domestic violence complaint,” said Rajesh Dandotiya, ASP, Crime Branch. By March 16, Kamariya had been arrested from a farmhouse near Gwalior.
The police investigation Investigators of the Madhya Pradesh Crime Branch said that this was one of the most intriguing cases they have dealt with.
As they made enquiries, they received a tip that Kamariya was a wanted man in Jhansi, accused of the triple murder of Geeta Gehlot, and two young children.
That accusation quickly checked out, but the police investigation did not end there, and there was a loose end to tie up.
There was a police complaint from Geeta Gehlot’s family, but none from that of her late husband Manoj Gehlot, missing since January 2012. They began looking for unidentified bodies found at the time, and their investigations led them to Jhansi.
On March 20, the Crime Branch found a case of an unidentified body that was fished out from near a pump house in the Betwa river around that time, the post-mortem records of which recorded cause of death as methanol poisoning. By June 2012 though, that case had been closed for the lack of identification, the FIR registered saying that an unidentified man had been killed by an unidentified person.
As they interrogated him, police officials said they confronted Kamariya and claimed they knew that he had killed Manoj and thrown his body in the Betwa river. Panicked, Kamariya confessed, officials said.
The Crime Branch investigations have also revealed that Kamariya duped at least four more people, two in Delhi, one in Gujarat, and one in Gwalior. In one of those cases, in 2013, he duped a Gwalior businessman, Harishankar Shivhare, by selling him government land for ₹36 lakh, using fake paperwork.
The proceeds from his crime meant Kamariya lived a luxurious life, with three SUVs all valued at about ₹25 lakh. When he travelled across the world, he lived exclusively in five-star hotels, and had at least two homes; a farm house in Billaua and a home in Gwalior. Both these homes, police found, were full of imported furniture and antiques.
On Wednesday, Kamariya was produced before a Gwalior court after five days police remand, and has been sent to jail.
The UP Police is expected to appear in court on Friday with a production warrant, for the four murders he committed in Jhansi.
Police officials are still picking through his lavish, but macabre life and believe that more dirt may still exist. One unanswered question is why the family of Manoj Gehlot has filed no case. There may yet be many more.
ON WEDNESDAY, KAMARIYA WAS PRODUCED BEFORE A GWALIOR COURT AFTER FIVE DAYS POLICE REMAND, AND HAS BEEN SENT TO JAIL.