Solving Crime: Paramour’s gift and a keen Kolkata cop help crack model’s murder near Bengaluru airport in 13 days

Kolkata-based model-cum-event manager Pooja Singh Dey. (Express)

Struggle to identify the body

On July 31, 2019, farmer Muniraju was walking to work around 5 am near Kadayarappanahalli village in Bengaluru North when he saw a dead body next to the airport compound. Muniraju immediately alerted the Bagalur police who rushed to the spot.

B Ramamurthy, who was then the inspector at Bagalur police station, recalls, “I had finished my night shift and was sleeping. I got a call within an hour and rushed to the spot. The woman appeared to have been hit with a cement block on her head, and she was stabbed. There was no bag, purse or mobile phone. The Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) officials and sniffer dog squad arrived at the spot. A car’s tyre marks were found a few metres away.”

“We were totally clueless. The road where the body was found leads to the KIA back gate. She was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a Titan watch. This particular road is an isolated one and passes through a couple of villages. Travellers headed to KIA usually take this road to skip the toll plaza where they will have to pay money. At that point we did not even know if she was heading to the airport,” Ramamurthy adds.

“With the branded jeans and Titan watch, our investigation began on four different lines: checking where the jeans were bought from using the barcode found on it; ascertaining the Titan watch model and where it was sold; scanning CCTV footage from the area; and tracking missing complaints filed across the country,” he explains.

Her complexion indicated that she was a north Indian from a middle class or upper-middle class background and her watch and jeans were expensive, Ramamurthy says. Nearly 20 officers, divided into 10 teams, started collecting information. A police constable, who was part of the investigation, shares, “I was tasked with finding out how many such Titan watches of those specific models were sold. We found that 1,400 of those watches were sold across the country and we collected everyone’s contact numbers and created a broadcast list on WhatsApp. We shared the information with all of them, mentioning the murder, but got no clue.”

Two other officers found that 14,000 pairs of jeans of the said brand were sold in Delhi, Maharashtra and Karnataka, 800 of which matched the size worn by the victim. Messages sent to the phone numbers collected yielded no proper lead. CCTV footage showed a Swift car passing the area but its registration plate was unclear due to low light.

“We had checked online stores as well, taking details from Amazon, Flipkart and other e-commerce websites about customers who had bought it over the last two years,” a police officer adds. There were no missing complaints that indicated links to Bengaluru. “We even called all the Titan watch customers, of which 250 numbers were either switched off or not reachable.”

By then, there was an outcry about the Bengaluru police’s inability to crack the case or even identify the woman. “As days went by, we found a tattoo with the letter ‘S’ on the body. We assumed that the deceased woman’s name might start with the letter ‘S’ and further filtered the data we had from the customers’ list. It was now down to 115,” says a police officer.

“We also approached the KIA authorities and sought details of passengers who had not made it to their flight on July 29, 30 and 31,” a police officer says.

A twist followed by another

On the seventh day after the body was found, a constable at Bagalur police station received a tip that a woman was murdered and dumped near KIA and the informant expressed the suspicion that it was done by her husband. “We heaved a huge sigh of relief. Soon after, we took the person, a Bengali, into custody. Within a few minutes into the questioning, he admitted that he had killed his wife at Neelasandra and threw the body near the airport. We thought we had cracked the case and asked him to take us to the spot where he had dumped the body,” recalls Ramamurthy.

“To our shock, he took us to a different location. We began to think he was tricking us, but the local residents confirmed that a dead body was discovered there a week ago and that the Sidlaghatta police had registered a case. They were about to close the case as an unidentified body when we took the accused to the police station and handed him over,” says a police officer.

Confirming this, Ramamurthy says, “Yes, we were happy that we had cracked a murder case with little effort but the case we had registered was headed nowhere. No one trusted us other than DCP (North East) Bheemashankar S Guled. He told us he was confident that the team would crack the case.”

A gift watch and a Kolkata cop

As days passed, Bagalur police directed the doctors to conduct a post-mortem. Meanwhile, Ramamurthy was being pestered by calls from a Kolkata-based police officer. “He was calling me for the fourth or fifth consecutive day. A month ago, I had gone to Kolkata to recover gold ornaments stolen by a habitual offender, Karthik alias Escape Karthik. I had recovered gold worth nearly Rs 50 lakh and the New Town police station in Kolkata had helped me. One of the constables kept in touch and repeatedly requested me to hand over Karthik as they suspected that he had stolen gold in Kolkata as well.”

“I mentioned the murder case here and said we were busy with the investigation. He asked me for some details. That conversation was a turning point. A week ago, a person named Soudeep Dey had come to the police station to file a missing complaint saying that his wife had been to Bengaluru and was missing. Though an FIR was not registered then, it was entered in the police station diary. I sent her photo to the police constable and asked him to contact the man to verify,” Ramamurthy recounts. It was the eleventh day since the body was found.

“Meanwhile, I received a call from a man named Ali from Delhi who said he had bought the Titan watch but had gifted it to his friend. I sent photos of the body to Ali as well. He confirmed that it was his friend Pooja Singh Dey,” the officer says.

Over the next few minutes, Ramamurthy also received confirmation that Pooja was Soudeep’s wife. The two had been married for seven years and did not have children. Later, investigation revealed that Pooja was in a relationship with Ali which Soudeep was unaware of, he adds.

On the thirteenth day, Pooja’s family members and Ali reached Bengaluru.

Arrest in next 5 hours

Identifying the body meant that Bagalur police had won half the battle. The next crucial step, closing in on the accused, took place swiftly in the five hours that followed. On checking Pooja’s mobile phone activity, they found that she had flown down to Bengaluru the previous day and hailed an app-based cab to Crescent Road to meet someone. Later, she took an Uber to Sahara Pavilion hotel in Singasandra where she stayed. But she had not booked any cab from there.

A police officer who was part of the investigating team says, “We went to the hotel and asked whether any vehicle picked her up when she checked out. The receptionist said that the cab which had dropped Pooja came back to pick her. We traced the driver and identified him as Nagesh H M, 22, a resident of Hegganahalli Cross.”

Nagesh’s arrest was announced on August 23, 2019. (Express)

“We got his address details from Uber and found him resting at his house. He had robbed a trolley bag and a vanity bag, gifting the latter to his sister,” the officer adds. Nagesh had managed to transfer Rs 14,000 from Pooja’s digital wallet, besides taking Rs 500 which she was carrying, her ATM cards and other valuables.

Interrogation revealed that Nagesh tried to rape Pooja and killed her when she resisted. According to charges framed by the police, while ferrying her from Crescent Road to Sahara Pavilion, Nagesh told her that he would drop her at KIA and there was no need to book a cab using the mobile application. Both agreed to Rs 1,200 and Pooja asked him to pick her up at 3.50 am and drop her at the airport.

According to the police, Pooja fell asleep in the cab while Nagesh drove towards Shettigere Cross to Beguru. Around 4.45 am, he took a wheel spanner and threatened her to give him money. When she refused, he hit her on the head with the spanner. Bleeding, she fell unconscious. He then drove to Kadayarappanahalli village through Beguru and stopped the car at around 5 am.

As she attempted to run away, Nagesh chased and stabbed her four times. Later, he dropped hollow bricks on her head twice. The accused then parked his car at a service station and transferred the money using the PayTM application.

Ramamurthy says Nagesh’s brother had bought a Swift car for him but he was finding it hard to pay the EMIs. He tried to rob Pooja assuming she was carrying expensive valuables.

Nagesh’s arrest was announced on August 23, 2019. Lodged in Chikkaballapura prison, he never got bail. The police filed the chargesheet in the case on March 15, 2021. When the trial was about to begin, Nagesh died of food poisoning in judicial custody in September 2021, a police officer says. On account of his death, the case was abated and closed.

In the wake of the murder, public outrage over the safety of passengers traveling in cabs forced the police to divert the vehicles via the toll stretch at night. They also installed CCTV cameras and civic agencies had to light up the streets.