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Noida couple Nupur & Rajesh Talwar were convicted on Monday of murdering their only child and their servant in a lurid case that has riveted the nation for the past five years.
A special court set up by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in Ghaziabad found the couple guilty of bludgeoning to death their 13-year-old daughter, Aarushi, and 45-year-old domestic help, Hemraj Banjade, with one of Talwar’s golf clubs before slitting their throats. The Talwars, both dentists, have repeatedly denied any involvement in the double murder.
The court also determined that the parents had destroyed evidence, and Rajesh Talwar was also found guilty of misleading investigators.
Under the Indian Penal Code, murder carries a minimum sentence of life imprisonment and a maximum sentence of the death penalty, which is rarely imposed. Sentencing will be announced on Tuesday.
The couple’s lawyer, Rebecca John, told reporters outside the court that the Talwars had been taken into custody and would appeal to a higher court at an unspecified time.
For five years, the media has put a relentless spotlight on the trial, whose twists and turns have offered a series of mysterious revelations. Questions of a possible relationship between the two victims, a young girl and her middle-aged servant, added tantalising fodder for speculation on the motives of Talwar, who came to be seen as the main suspect.
Yet the conviction comes as a surprise to some, as the case had been marred by bungled police work and inconclusive forensic results from the very beginning.
On the morning of May 16, 2008, the Talwars called the Noida police to report that they had found their daughter dead in her bedroom. They insisted that their live-in help, Hemraj, had killed the girl.
The police immediately issued a bounty for Hemraj’s capture, but it was only a full day later that they searched the Talwars’s apartment, where they found Banjade’s body on a terrace, decomposing in the hot sun. On top of his body was a fallen water cooler panel. Like Aarushi, his throat had been cut.
Later, when asked why the panel on top of Hemraj had not been tested for fingerprints, the Noida police said the panel had been “too heavy,” according to a report in the Tehelka newsmagazine.
Meanwhile, throughout the previous day, many of the Talwars’s neighbours and family members visited the house, which police had failed to cordon off as a crime site. Police also failed to secure Aarushi’s bloodstained mattress, an alcohol bottle in the Talwars’ living room that had blood on it and a number of golf clubs that were presumed to be the murder weapons.
Later, when 26 fingerprint samples from the crime scene were submitted to the special CBI court, 24 of them were too smudged to be used as evidence, and the other two belonged to people who were not suspects.
In the week following the murders, the police and the CBI pieced together a version of the events, which they released to the media. A police officer at a news conference said Talwar killed his daughter and Hemraj in a “fit of rage” after finding them in “an objectionable position” together.
A CBI report in 2009 alluded to a possible honour killing to describe the murders. Soon afterward, the police alleged that the slits on both victims’ necks showed that the knife had been drawn by trained professionals, in a reference to the dentist couple.
In 2010, the CBI issued a closure report for the case, citing “critical and substantial gaps” in their investigation as well as the “absence of a clear-cut motive” and “incomplete understanding of the sequence of events” on the night of the murders.
Both Rajesh Talwar and Nupur Talwar had yet to be named as a suspect at the time — and three of Hemraj’s friends who had also been questioned as possible suspects were released.
The case was subsequently reopened in 2011 after a special judicial magistrate formally charged the Talwars with murder, converting the CBI’s inconclusive report into a charge sheet against the Talwars.
The Talwars’s convictions offer little closure to the drama surrounding the case, as they have vowed to appeal the verdict, a process that is likely to take years.
© 2013 The New York Times News Service
