KOLKATA:The city police probing the grisly incident in which a middle-aged man hid the skeletal remains of his sister and her pet dogs for nearly six months, in a case that bore an uncanny similarity to Hitchcock’s timeless flick ‘Pyscho’,now suspect that differences over the sale of the premium property in one of the city’s upmarket areas could have triggered it.
It was while questioning 44-year-old engineer Partha De, after his 77-year-old father, Arabinda De committed suicide by setting himself on fire on Thursday, that the police learned about him sleeping with the skeletal remains of his sister Debjani, who had died in December.
The police searched the home on Monday and found a will drafted by Arabinda and after questioning his brother, Arun, who also resided on the sprawling property, came to know about their attempt to sell it last year.
According to police, Arabinda wanted to sell the property, whose market value would be around `100 crore, in August and divide the proceeds between his children Debjani and Partha.
However, differences cropped up between Arabinda and Arun over the expected price and the sale was stalled.
Arabinda had met his lawyer the day before he committed suicide and did not reveal about Debjani’s death and was “visibly worried about his children”, police sources said.
Partha, who had a “counselling session” at the Pavlov Mental Hospital on Monday, revealed that his sister had died after going into meditation since the death of their two pet Labradors, refusing to communicate or to eat.
He told the doctors that Debjani died due to malnutrition in December but he informed his father about it only in March.
He said that he “loved the body odour” of his sister and hence had decided to keep her body with him in her room. Partha even blamed his grandmother’s sorcery for the death of his mother Arati De, who died of cancer in 2007.
Investigators would be able to interrogate Partha only after the medical team gives its nod on Tuesday.
And the authorities are planning to sent the skeletons to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory at Hyderabad to establish the identity and the actual cause of the death.
