Solving Crime: Probe into case of missing Udupi millionaire Bhaskar Shetty unravels greed, murder and an affair

Like many youths from the state’s coastal area who come from a humble background but have big dreams for the future, Bhaskar Shetty too went to the UAE at a young age and eventually earned enough to start his own business. His ventures flourished over the years and it wasn’t long before he owned seven supermarkets in Dubai. Amid all this, he married Rajeshwari and the couple had a son Navaneeth.

Besides his businesses in Dubai, Shetty also owned other properties including Durga International Hotel as well as residential and commercial buildings in Udupi. As he neared 50, Bhaskar Shetty planned to settle down in his hometown, but that was when he came to know of his wife’s affair with Niranjan Bhat, a priest. The discovery of this uncomfortable truth would soon culminate in his death.

Shetty goes missing

It was on May 8, 2016 that Shetty finally moved back to Udupi after a long stint in the Gulf and started residing with his wife and son. The marriage, however, was on the rocks. Estranged from his wife and son, Shetty preferred to stay at the hotel he owned rather than go to his family bungalow in Udupi’s Indrali. He would, however, go home once a day for daily prayers.

On July 28, Shetty inexplicably went missing and the very next day his mother Gulabi Shetty approached the Manipal police with a complaint. The police initially suspected that he may have been kidnapped for ransom, but the focus shifted to Rajeshwari after Gulabi accused her of mistreating Shetty, officers said. Rajeshwari, on her part, claimed that Shetty was having an affair, but the investigators could find no proof of any such relationship. The investigation broadened to include Navaneeth and Niranjan when Joggu Shetty, another relative of Bhaskar Shetty, shared details of their strained relationship with the missing man.

A police officer said, “Initially, the suspects were Rajeshwari and Navaneeth. We questioned them but they managed to mislead the officers. The biggest challenge was that there was no body and we did not even know whether he had been murdered. However, when we checked their Call Detail Records (CDR), the entire plot unravelled.”

“In one of the calls, Navaneeth had contacted a friend of his in Mumbai and offered Rs 1 crore to confess to killing his father. Prior to the murder, he had also sought some of the materials required from the same friend. This was enough to pick up the mother and son,” the officer revealed.

A police official who was then posted at Manipal police station said that in the first week of August, Rajeshwari and her son were questioned separately with some of the evidence gathered from the phone conversations. Unable to defend themselves any longer, they admitted to having killed Bhaskar Shetty. The two were arrested on August 8.

Two days later, the police nabbed the priest Niranjan Bhat based on the duo’s confession. A day after his arrest, Bhat tried to die by suicide in police custody but the officers intervened and rushed him to a hospital.

CID takes up the probe

News of the arrests sent shockwaves across coastal Karnataka. Bhaskar Shetty belonged to the influential Bunt community in the region and members of the community took out a huge protest alleging that the local police shielded Rajeshwari and sought a probe by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) instead.

However, a police officer who was with the CID then, said, “To be honest, the local police had done their job but they were not getting sufficient evidence to proceed. Nevertheless, due to community pressure, the government decided to hand over the case to CID.”

The then CID deputy superintendent of police T Chandrashekar, who took up the probe, realised that without finding Shetty’s body, it would be hard to go ahead with the probe. The case was so sensational that the then CID director general of police H C Kishore Chandra and other senior officials visited the crime spot, which is unusual.

Further interrogation brought to light details that helped the investigators piece together the entire chain of events, officers said. Rajeshwari and Navaneeth were worried because Shetty had threatened to transfer his properties to his mother and to an orphanage, it emerged. This allegedly prompted them to hatch a plan to murder him. With this purpose, Navaneeth bought pepper spray, 20 litres of petrol, rod, rope, matchbox, chloroform and other items.

A yagashale for cover

According to the police, on July 28 Shetty went to his bungalow as usual. Rajeshwari told officers that she picked up a fight with him that day. When he was distracted, she used pepper spray to disorient him while Navaneeth beat him unconscious with an iron rod. The two then dragged Shetty to the bathroom and drowned him in the bathtub. To ensure his death, they even poured poison into his mouth.

Rajeshwari and Navaneeth took the body in their Verna car to Nandalike, 36 km away, where Niranjan was waiting with cans of ghee, petrol and large packs of camphor, they revealed. The trio then burnt the body in Niranjan’s yagashale, a holy space where large pujas and homas are conducted. Niranjan later collected the remains of the body, including bones. He put it in a bag containing laterite stone, ashes and bricks and threw it near the Kalakaru bridge. A police officer said that the day Shetty’s body was burnt, neighbours assumed that some homa was taking place at the yagashale.

Investigators traced the movements of the accused and their phone calls for nearly a month before the murder. Chandrashekar, who is now an Assistant Commissioner of Police in Bengaluru, said, “The accused were cornered with the evidence and had no choice but to reveal the details. They took us to the place where they had dumped the bones. We sent it for forensic analysis and Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) test and both confirmed that it was the remains of Bhaskar Shetty. We did not have an eyewitness and had to rely strongly on circumstantial evidence. We had a good team then and took statements from where the accused had bought all these items to such an extent that we even had evidence and statements from the place where Navaneeth had purchased the matchbox. The entire case was built on circumstantial and scientific evidence alone.”

The CID team filed a 1,300-page chargesheet before the court. In June 2021, Udupi Principal District and Sessions Judge J N Subramanya sentenced Rajeshwari, Navaneeth and Niranjan Bhat to life imprisonment.

It was only when the investigation drew to a close that Navaneeth realised a cruel twist awaited him. A police officer said, “Interestingly, Rajeshwari killed her husband not only to take his property, but also so she could continue her affair with Niranjan. While Navaneeth helped her to kill his father for the sake of property, he was in the dark about his mother’s affair. It was only after the arrest and media reports that Navaneeth came to know about it.”