CHENNAI: The Director General of Police K Ramanujam has issued orders to the CB-CID to take over the investigation into the murder of psychotherapist and psychiatrist Dr Emma Gonsalvez over three months ago.
The octogenarian, who was running a clinic on the seventh floor of her residence on Dr PV Cherian Road at Egmore, was found dead on June 13.
Her unassuming relatives arranged for the funeral after they mistook hers to be a natural death even while one of the relatives tipped off the police the next day. The family had cleaned and preserved the body in a freezer when the police recovered the body.
Preliminary post-mortems revealed strangulation marks in the neck and aberrations on the nape. The case, which was initially registered as a suspicious death case, was altered to a murder case.
A CCTV grab from the apartment complex showed a person entering and leaving the flat of Emma on the evening of June 13. Twenty days later, the city police arrested Immanuel Fernandez (45), a nephew of the deceased, and claimed that the arrested had destroyed the evidence and had forged a will as if purportedly written by Emma in 2007.
The arrest was made after the police recovered a will written by Emma in 2008 to hand all her property over to Immanuel, who was assisting her in several means and his motive to murder the elderly could not be ruled out completely.