No One killed Aarushi Talwar

Every morning when Bharti rings the bell, Hemraj greets her. Not this morning. She pushes at the outer grill door and rings the bell over and over. Nupur, groggy-eyed, finally opens the wooden door and asks through the inner grill gate where Hemraj is. Bharti says, “I donft know. Will you throw the key down?” When she comes back, the outer grill gate opens: It’s jammed, not locked. But the inner grill gate is latched from outside. As she enters, she finds Rajesh and Nupur crying.Nupur hugs her, weeping: “Go to Aarushi’s room and see what has happened.h Bharti goes in and as Nupur removes the bedsheet, she glimpses the red line of blood on Aarushi’s neck. Nupur cries out, “See what Hemraj has done.”Bharti asks, “Should I call the neighbours?” Nupur says, “Yes, call.” By 6.50 a.m., the police arrives, by 8, the media. Aarushi’s body is taken for a post-mortem around 9 a.m.May 16, 6.50 a.m. onwardsIndividual blunders lead to collective mess, as the story of Chunnilal Gautam, UP Police photographer and fingerprint collector, reveals. Gautam has clicked ample photos and fingerprints that morning, yet 22 of 24 fingerprints are fuzzy; 23 of his photographs do not match the negatives. He has no photos of blood-stained footprints on the terrace, where Hemraj’s body was found, because “of a large crowd”. What about the bloodstained whiskey bottle with fingerprints? His images do not “match anyone’s.” Strangely, he does not say anything about “dressing up” of the crime scene, the uncreased bedsheet, cleaning of Aarushi’s private parts or her askew pyjamas until March 2010. His new claims have made him a prime witness to the charge of destruction of evidence.

May 17, afternoon, TERRACE

K.K. Gautam, a retired DSP, decides to drop by at his neighbour Talwar’s place. On a policeman’s hunch, he starts checking the flat: Why are three bottles of Sula wine, Kingfisher beer and Sprite lying in Hemraj’s room? Have there been more people in the flat that night? What about the three glasses? Why is Hemraj’s bed dented, as if three people were sitting on it? Why is there so much urine in Hemraj’s bathroom? Excited, he follows the trail of bloodstains on the stairs near the terrace and finds a bloody terrace, a blood-soaked handprint, a cooler filled with blood-red water and a decomposed body lying in a corner, head bludgeoned like Aarushi’s, throat similarly slit, and many injury marks on the body. “It was in such a bad shape under a hot May sun for two days, Rajesh could not identify Hemraj,” he says.

THE AFTERMATH

By May 23 morning, Inspector-General of Police Gurdarshan Singh has declared it an “honour killing”. “Both father and daughter had poor character,” he says at a packed press conference: On the night of the murder, Rajesh is awake till late, he says, as the home Internet router is on till 3 a.m. He hears a sound from Aarushi’s room, finds Hemraj in her bed, and incensed with rage, clubs both to death. Nupur helps him to complete the crime: They slit necks, drag Hemrajfs body to the terrace, dress up crime scene, wipe out evidence.

“In crime, perception is often unrelated to reality,” says Dr Manju Mehta, professor of clinical psychology at AIIMS. And one of the biggest problems of the case was the perception of the parents. In the days immediately following the discovery of the murders, the behaviour of Talwars was viewed as unusual by police and by the public. For days, when Nupur maintained a stoic silence, TV channels went: “Ma, why are you silent” When she finally spoke on television, her steely composure was commented upon: “She’s so unemotional”, “She didn’t even cry”. “It’s a stigma the parents could never live down,” says Mehta. “But grief is a personal journey. It’s also a cultural process. Across the world, societies differ in what they regard as normal grief.”

Rajesh and Nupur, successful dental professionals, earned well and lived well. Rajesh, head of the dental unit at Fortis Hospital in Noida, also taught at the ITS Dental College and had a clinic in Hauz Khas, Delhi. Nupur practised in both places. It helped to have Nupur’s parentsf at a stonefs throw. Nupur came from a cosmopolitan Maharashtrian family, says her cousin Shree Paradkar, a Canada-based journalist.”Many of us have married outside our communities, a trend Nupur began when she married Rajesh, a Punjabi, in 1989.” They had met as students at Delhi’s Maulana Azad Medical College when they were 18. “Both were the indulged children of New Delhi parents, with sheltered upbringing.” Rajesh’s father was a renowned cardiothoracic surgeon while his mother was a homemaker. Nupur spent the first few years of her life in England, when her father, now a decorated war veteran of the Indian Air Force, was posted at the High Commission in London. After graduation, they had the option of moving to the US. But they decided to stay back.THE NEVER-ENDING BATTLEIn their family portraits, Rajesh and Nupur look the model couple: Happy and confident, with dignified smiles. By June 2008, their photos in the media show two people, expressionless and unblinking: Rajesh being taken to jail or Talwars going in for lie-detection, psychological, brainmapping or naro-analysis. But the case goes through a very different spiral as the CBI takes over from May 31. On July 11, 2008, Rajesh is released and domestic workers become the prime suspects.

“There is no substantial evidence against the Talwars. Krishna misled us,h Arun Kumar, CBI joint director, begins his press conference. His team has inspected the Talwars’f flat using scientific equipment, like polylight, for tracing blood or semen not visible to the naked eye. “There’s no sign of dragging a body to the terrace,” he says. In Aarushi’s room, there is no blood or DNA of Hemraj. Dummy sound tests have revealed that nothing can be heard in the Talwars bedroom with the ACs on. Nupur and Rajesh are wearing the same clothes the night before and morning after. And cleaning up of crime scene has been done with the permission of the Noida police.

But by September 2009, Arun Kumar is removed from the case. A new CBI team takes over, based in Dehradun and Lucknow, with AGL Kaul as the investigating officer. Within 15 days, critical changes appear in the case: From post-mortem evidence, new weapon of offence, and cleaning up of crime scene. Finally CBI files a closure report, naming Rajesh as the main suspect, but unable to prove it: “Critical gaps in circumstantial evidence, “absence of clear-cut motive” and “incomplete understanding of sequence of events”. The three domestic workers, however, are absolved. The Talwars file a protest petition, challenging each finding of the report and asking for further investigation. The consequence? Charges are framed against the Talwars and Nupur, who has not been an accused, now becomes one.

June 11,2012-November 12, 2013, CBI COURT

What happens when doctors do not agree with each other, change their statements and get “subjective” instead of scientific? Dr Sunil Dohre, a public health specialist called on to do Aarushi’s post-mortem, has changed his take on Aarushi’s post-mortem five times from May 2008 to September 2009. And he fails to explain why from “abnormalities detected” in genitals he changed his take to vagina as “abnormally expanded”. Or why he never wrote about golf club or scalpel injuries in the post-mortem. According to Dr R.K. Sharma, former head of forensic science, AIIMS, neither golf clubs nor scalpels can cause such injuries. ”Scalpel is such a small instrument, it can only cut skin layer by layer. Not deep wound like cutting a carotid artery,” he says.

Dr Naresh Raj, who conducted Hemraj’s post-mortem, talks about surgical cuts on Hemraj’s neck for the first time in October 2009. But his theory, that Hemraj’s sexual organ was swollen, indicating coitus before murder, comes a year and-a-half after he did the postmortem. All his claims, he says, are based on his “experience as a married man”. Serologist S.K. Singla of CFSL of Delhi, has claimed that Aarushi’s bedroom door was ajar. Any scientific basis for this? No, just an gobservation.h Andrei Semikhodskii, Director of Medical Genomics Ltd. in London says, “I looked thoroughly at DNA reports. They have not been presented properly.”

THE CASE CONTINUES

The search for truth behind the tragic killings has been plagued by continual speculation, shoddy probe, recurrent flip-flops and a snake-pit of infighting among investigating agencies. To senior advocate Rebecca John, this case is a textbook example of “the dangers of an irresponsible investigation, of being guided not by evidence placed on record, but by the public perception of a narrative set up without access to real facts and the consequent breakdown of criminal justice system.”

But the collateral damage is more. “In investigating Aarushi’s death, CBI has destroyed a family,” says Paradkar. Rajesh’s brother, Dinesh Talwar, has a single-point agenda in his life: To fight for his little brother.

“And then there is Avni, the daughter of Nupur’s brother Samir,” Paradkar adds. “Samir and his wife rushed back from Dubai when they heard of the murder in 2008. Just as they reached the Talwars’ flat, Aarushi’s body was carried out. They could not prevent Avni from seeing her beloved Aarushi didi like that. Just four, Avni went into a shock.” What sustains the family is a special star in the sky: A star Avni blows kisses at and sometimes talks to.

“It’s an idea that gives us a measure of comfort. We call it the Aarushi star.” Rajesh and Nupur are lodged in the harsh Dasna jail. Their legal team is gearing up to move higher courts within 60 days, “to clear Aarushi’s name”. That’s just the first step in the long legal battle ahead. Meantime, Aarushi’s close friends, Rajeshwari and Fiza, are spearheading campaigns and protest marches to stop character assassination. The “GIVE Aarushi Talwar Justice” campaign on Facebook is a community of over 55,000 netizens.

What about the parents? They’ve survived waves of stigma. They have inflamed our curiosity. They have invited analysis. They have been called “monster parents” in the past and “freaks in the history of mankind” now. They have borne it all with stoic determination. Yet on November 25, as CBI Judge Shyam Lal pronounced them guilty, five years of grief, loss and suffering gave way to tears. For now, the curtain has come down on the most controversial and captivating murder of our times.

At the end of this article I would like to raise a a few points:

1. In 2010, CBI appealed to the court to close the case as they were clueless. However, it was the parents of the victim, Dr. Rajesh and Nupur Talwar who protested this and demanded that the case must continue as they want justice for their child. My Question is: Had the parents killed their daughter, why would have they demanded the continuation of the case when CBI wanted to close it?

2.The CBI argued that Aarushi Talwar was found in an objectionable position with Hemraj and Rajesh killed them in a fit of rage.   But forensic reports suggest that Hemraj was killed in the terrace. A person in a fit of rage wouldn’t have cared to take someone to terrace and killed him.

3. Both the couple have passed the Narco test and lie detector test twice.

 4. A fourteen year old girl getting laid with a domestic servant of 45years old whom she had known for years seems very strange.