Phone app snares gay pharmacist for murder of his wife
A GAY pharmacist who murdered his wife to start a new life with his boyfriend was found guilty yesterday after iPhone activity data was used to convict him in a UK first.
Mitesh Patel, 37, married Jessica Patel, 34, to ‘cover up’ his sexuality, then plotted to kill her so he could cash in her £2million life insurance and move to Australia to be with ‘the man of his dreams’.
The pharmacist feared the shame of being outed in his Hindu community and instead embarked on a ‘double life’ involving gay dating apps and illicit casual sex.
In the end Patel resorted to murder to ‘break out of the prison of his marriage’. He strangled Mrs Patel with his bare hands and a Tesco bag-for-life, then tried to pass it off as a botched burglary at their home near the pharmacy they ran in Middlesbrough.
Data from the iPhone health app, which was used by both Patel and his wife, exposed his lie that Mrs Patel was murdered by an intruder. In the minutes after he strangled her on May 14, the app, which tracks the user’s movements, monitored Patel’s frantic activity as he raced around the house to stage the burglary.
Mrs Patel’s health app showed no movement until 7.44pm, when her husband lifted the phone from her lifeless body and took 14 paces to deposit it outside so it looked like the ‘burglar’ had dropped it.
Patel’s claim that his wife was still alive when he went out on an ‘evening walk’ crumbled when the app showed her phone remained motionless until 8.40pm that night – when a police officer picked it up after being called to the house by Patel in a tearful 999 call. A legal source said it is believed to be the first use of such in-depth iPhone health app analysis in a major UK trial.
The couple married in 2009 but Mr Patel began a relationship with Amit Patel, 37, a GP who now lives in Australia, in 2012. Teesside Crown Court heard that the pharmacist told Mr Patel, who remains his lover, that he married because it was his ‘cover-up’. He had known Mrs Patel since they were children but she suspected her husband was gay from the early days of their marriage. She complained to friends and family their sex life was non-existent.
Patel had sex with men throughout their marriage and used gay dating app Grindr daily, including on the day of the murder.
When police examined his Apple MacBook, they found internet searches including ‘I need to kill my wife’. But he first wanted her to have a child through IVF so he could raise it with Amit Patel after her death. He ultimately ‘brought forward’ the murder when Mrs Patel confronted him over his gay affairs and refused to be implanted with two fertilised embryos.
After killing his wife Patel lied to police, insisting he had returned home from an evening walk to find the house ransacked and his wife’s body bound with duct tape.
A jury found him unanimously guilty of murder. Judge James Goss QC told him: ‘You will be sentenced to life imprisonment tomorrow morning.’