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| Gulati after his arrest in Dehra Dun on Sunday. (PTI) |
Lucknow, Dec. 13: A software engineer has confessed that he murdered his wife, cut her body into 72 pieces and stored them in a freezer to dispose of them in small batches because of friction over an extramarital relationship he had had with a woman in Calcutta.
Rajesh Gulati, 37, an IIT graduate, was arrested last evening when he was driving down Rajpur Road in Dehra Dun with the couple’s four-year-old twins Sonakshi and Siddharth.
Gulati had killed Anupama, 33, on October 17 and had since been telling anyone who asked about her that she was unwell or was away.
Her brother Sujan Singh got suspicious and arrived in Dehra Dun yesterday, and called police when his brother-in-law refused to let him into the house. The police found the polythene bags in the freezer.
“I was alone in Calcutta… During my stay there, I met a lady from south Calcutta in a party whose husband had deserted her. She had a son. I got into a live-in relationship with this housewife but it lasted less than a year. I came back to my wife in 2008, confessed to her and begged forgiveness as I wanted to lead a normal life with her since 2008,” Gulati told the police.
The engineer had married Anupama, the daughter of a businessman in Delhi’s Netaji Nagar, in 1999 and moved to the US with her in 2000.
They came back in 2006, and he left for Calcutta where he had got a job. She stayed in Delhi and the twins were born the same year.
“I was forgiven by my wife when I told her about it. But it kept returning like a dark shadow. This caused more animosity and she registered a case of domestic violence against me. There was no escape from this,” Gulati told the interrogators.
The couple had moved to Dehra Dun with their children in June 2008, after he got a job in Uttarakhand.
On October 17, they had yet another fight and he hit Anupama’s head against a wall. She fell unconscious. Gulati said he had gagged her so she could not shout at him, and this could have suffocated her to death. “Once I discovered she was dead, I was at my wits’ end and worked out a plan to dispose of her body,” he said.
Senior superintendent of police G.S. Martolia said: “Rajesh confessed about this relationship in Calcutta but he has not shown any remorse for killing his wife. There is something psychopathic about this killing.”
Gulati had been taking a few polythene bags at a time and driving to a lake 10km from his house to dump them.
Inspector-general of Garhwal range M.A. Ganapathy said: “It is strange that after the murder, Rajesh had purchased a big deep freezer, he was so cool after the act…. Every day Rajesh went out and dumped some of the pieces on the outskirts of the city. We could only recover 35 pieces.”