HYDERABAD: In a brutal murder reminiscent of the Shraddha Walker case, a 48-year-old male stock trader in Hyderabad killed his lady tenant after she demanded the Rs 7 lakh he owed her.
The man chopped the victim's body parts and dumped her severed head at a garbage dump near the banks of the Musi River in the city on May 17.
Police said the arrest of B Chandra Mohan on Wednesday helped them piece together some gory details of the murder.
The victim, Anuradha Reddy, was a tenant living on the ground floor portion of the house owned by Chandra Mohan, Deputy Commissioner of Police (South East Zone) Ch Rupesh said.
Mohan murdered Reddy, aged 55, on May 12 and allegedly undertook a series of shocking acts to wipe out evidence of the murder.
After stabbing the woman to death, the accused is said to have chopped Reddy's body parts into six pieces using stone cutting machines. He preserved some parts of the body in the victim's refrigerator while the rest was stuffed inside a suitcase in the house where she was living.
Mohan carried the decapitated head in a black polythene bag and flung it into a garbage dump near the river on May 15, police said, adding that he then planned to dispose of one body part at a time.
Some workers of the local civic body noticed the decapitated head of the woman on May 17 and alerted the police.
Police formed eight teams to investigate the case and a detailed analysis of CCTV footage in the area helped crack the case and nab the accused, the DCP said.
"As part of the investigation, the police analysed the CCTV footage on the route where the severed head was found for almost a week. Some suspects were picked up and after verifying, the police zeroed in on the accused and after his interrogation, it was revealed that he killed the woman," Rupesh said.
On the motive behind the murder, the official said, "The accused was in a relationship with the deceased woman for the past several years. She was a tenant and stayed in the ground portion of his house. The deceased used to lend money to known persons on an interest basis. In 2018, the accused took nearly Rs 7 lakhs from her but did not return the amount in spite of repeated requests by the deceased."
The woman was pressurizing Mohan for the money, due to which he felt disgusted and hatched a plan to eliminate her, police said.
On May 12, Mohan picked up a quarrel with the woman on the issue of paying her amount and allegedly attacked her with a knife and inflicted stab injuries over her chest and stomach resulting in her spot death, police said adding that Mohan then searched online on how to dispose of the body.
He decapitated the victim's head and kept it in a polythene bag and separated the legs, hands from the body by cutting them with stone cutting machines.
Subsequently, the accused brought phenyl, incense sticks, and perfume spray bottles and regularly applied them over the body parts of the deceased to ensure the stench does not spread in the house and in the area, police said.
Mohan took the cellphone that belonged to Reddy and was sending messages to her close contacts in order to make them believe that she is alive and staying somewhere, police added.
Shraddha Walker case
In an earlier case, Aftab Amin Poonawala, the prime accused in the Shraddha Walker murder case was arrested in November 2022, about six months after allegedly killing his live-in partner Shraddha Walker.
He had chopped her body into 35 pieces and kept them in a fridge for almost three weeks at his residence in South Delhi's Mehrauli.
Poonawala later disposed of the body parts over several weeks in various places in and around Delhi, police had said.