CHENNAI: Dr Sathya’s final moments were cruel. A thin copper wire was tied around her neck to strangulate her. Apparently even that did not kill her. She was then repeatedly stabbed in the neck with a knife. She had nail injuries, contusions near her mouth and chin; signs of a struggle against an assailant (or assailants) who wanted to prevent her cries from reaching anyone outside her second floor flat at Kummalamman Koil Street in Kilpauk, in day hours of August 20, 2015.
When her roommate and Kilpauk Medical College student Dr K Sangeetha entered the flat around 3pm, the knife was still in Sathya’s neck, and she was lying in a pool of blood under her cot in her bedroom.
It’s 2018, and no one knows who killed Sathya. It is not that Chennai Police didn’t “solve” the case. In four days, they had arrested Arindam Debnath, then 22 years old. The Tripura native had come to Chennai in 2011 for studying engineering, and was staying in the adjacent flat. They accused him of killing Sathya when, after apparently being reminded of his lover, he tried to hug her. The investigations finished within a month and the chargesheet, with a set of evidence and witnesses against Debnath, was filed on November 18, 2015.
But the recent verdict of the trial court, which acquitted Debnath, has painted a sorry state on how police investigations are conducted, even in cases of such brutal murders.
In her verdict, judge R N Manjula stopped short of wondering as to how the investigating officer — the then Kilpauk Police Inspector Sundaramurthi — did not even bother collecting vital clues like fingerprints from the crime scene. Even the knife left on the victim’s body was removed before the inquest; something which anyone with elementary knowledge about criminal investigations would not do.
The verdict — delivered on December 2017, with a full copy made available recently — makes it plain that all evidence and witnesses produced by the police against Debnath were either doctored or tutored. Some key clues from the crime scene were ignored.
The real killer has gone scot free and Debnath — repeatedly refused bail since his arrest — has spent two years and four months in a prison in a far away land. He is yet to complete his Bachelor of Engineering course.
Wrong from the start
To understand how this investigation was riddled with missteps from the start, one has to start from the afternoon of August 20, 2015.
It was around 3 pm when Sangeetha, after finishing work, had entered the flat, and alerted the police immediately. Sathya’s death was soon being sensationalised on TVs and newspapers for the next few days. According to police records, they had no clue about the assailant’s identity till August 24, 2015. Debnath had confessed to Kumar, a “social worker” from the same locality only on that day who in turn handed over Debnath to the Kilpauk Police.
The police’s theory was this: The latch at Sathya’s house was not properly locked since it had been repaired, and Debnath managed to enter the house at 9.30 am by repeatedly pushing the door.
On seeing Sathya asleep, he tried to approach her. Sathya resisted, and fearing that she would inform others, he strangled her with a copper wire and stabbed her in the neck using a kitchen knife from Sathya’s house. He then took her Micromax phone with the idea of selling it, and left after locking the door from outside.
The phone that Debnath allegedly took was the crucial material evidence on which the case was built. According to police, after killing Sathya, Debnath went to his flat, changed his clothes, and went to a cellphone shop in Maduravoyal — run by Panneerselvam — at 11 am, and sold it for Rs 1,200.
Police claimed that Panneerselvam had taken photos of Debnath using that phone, and that they seized the phone and a memory card with Debnath’s images, on August 24, 2015, based on the confession given by Debnath.
When the police checked his house on the same day, they said that the dress that Debnath had worn while murdering Sathya five days ago was still there.
Dressed down
The first of the glaring inaccuracies in this investigation began with that dress. Despite the presence of clothes supposedly soaked with the victim’s blood, sniffer dogs did not trace the scent to Debnath’s flat on August 20, 2015. Instead, they ran till Ega Theatre on Poonamallee High Road. The police also failed to explain why Debnath did not even attempt to wash the clothes for five days.
But what may have also changed the trial court’s opinion was a forensic test that said that the blood on the clothes was from a male. Whereas, the stains from Sathya’s clothes were properly matched to her through DNA tests.
The police relied on three more witnesses. Two of them were TV operator Dilli Ganesh and his assistant Devaraj, whom the police said had seen Debnath entering Sathya’s house on the fateful morning. The third was E Robert, an 18-year-old water-can supplier, who had allegedly seen Debnath emerge from Sathya’s house in blood-stained clothes.
All three turned hostile and refused to stand by their initial statements. The court had to discount them from the trial.
This finally left the police with only the cellphone and the memory card. It could be explained only as utter carelessness on their part that they did not even attempt to prove beyond doubt that it was Sathya’s phone.
“It is not found anywhere on record whether the investigation officer had taken the pain of collecting the bills for the cellphone’s purchase by enquiring PW 19 Dr Sesu, the husband of the deceased. PW 19 was not called upon to identify the cellphone while he was deposing evidence,” the judge said.
Picture imperfect
Then the only scientific proof the police were left were the photos of Debnath that the Panneerselvam had taken. But the forensic report for the memory card gave conflicting details about the time of photos. While the report said the date of creation of the folders (where the images are stored) were created in quickly successions on August 20, 2015, it said the actual timings at which the photos were taken varied a lot. Three were taken at 5.38 pm, one was taken at 10.32 pm on the same night, and another was at 1.56 pm the next day.
The court noted that though the forensic report on the memory card was submitted, there was no mention about the seizure of such an object in the seizure magazar or Form 91 (the documents in which police must record all seizures relating to a crime).
Also the court said that the police didn’t explain as to who installed the card in the phone within the short time span.
“If so, why were there no other files found on the card? Since the deceased would have used the cellphone along with it, it should have also contained several other files of her use.”
The shopkeeper and his staff had told the court that they did not insert the memory card into the cellphone. “The strange and fishy circumstances surrounding the cellphone creates doubts as to the trustworthiness of the confession and recovery of the cellphone, as alleged by the prosecution,” the court said.
The time inconsistency of the photos and the court’s remark on the Debnath’s written confessional statement that was submitted by the police has left many questions for the latter to answer.
“The signature was not denied by the accused. However I find that there is some alteration/correction in the date, which is visible to bare eyes. It appears that the date ‘20-08-2015’ has been changed into ‘24-08-2015’ unsuccessfully. The ‘4’ in ‘24’ neither appears like ‘4’ nor like ‘9’.”
So the court wondered if the statement was genuinely given by the accused on August 24, 2015, or if “he was illegally kept in police custody right from August 20, 2015.”
The final nail was by the statement made by Kumar, the “social worker”. When examined in court, he confessed to having read about the arrest of Debnath in newspapers on August 24, 2015. “Had the accused been brought by PW 10 (Kumar) on 24.08.2015 to the police station… it would not have been possible for the journals to publish the new item...”
So the police’s theory became utterly indefensible since the person who claimed to be the first to know had already read about Debnath’s arrest in newspapers!
A real miss
Two other crucial pieces of evidences that could have led to the real culprit were carelessly — if not intentionally — mishandled.
Joseph Francis, one of the sons of the building’s landlord, had stated in his cross examination that there were some blood-stained fingerprints on the passage between the second floor (where Sathya’s flat was located) and the third. When questioned in the court about whether those fingerprints were collected from the scene, Inspector Sundaramurthi claimed that he “did not know”.
“In the absence of any eyewitness to an occurence like murder, chance fingerprints available at the scene of occurrence can serve as material piece of evidence, which should never be omitted by any investigating officer. But, it is strange to hear from PW 26 (Inspector Sundaramurthi) that he did not attempt to collect them or the weapon used,” the court said.
The court went a step further in criticising how the knife was handled by the inspector. “A knife was stabbed on the neck of the deceased, and it was seen even in the photographs taken at the place of occurrence… The prosecution did not offer any explanation as to how it was seized before completion of inquest.” So, who killed Sathya? And why did Debnath spend two years and four months in Puzhal prison?