A murder in cold blood,solved 16 years later

Maya Pawar received no answer when she rang the doorbell at her employer Bhanumati Thakkar’s home on the morning of October 13,1997. Neighbours had not seen Bhanumati,58,for a whole day,and Maya,35,the domestic help,did not think much of it.

As Maya climbed the stairs to the Thakkars’ second floor home in Vrindavan Society in Chunabhatti the next day,she detected a foul smell emanating from the home. After calls to Bhanumati went unanswered,neighbours called the police,and forced their way in. They found the home ransacked,with furniture upturned,cupboards open and their contents strewn on the floor. In a far corner of the kitchen,Bhanumati was found lying in a pool of blood with multiple stab wounds.

Officers from the Sion police station,where the case was registered,contacted Bhanumati’s husband Amrutlal,a gold merchant who lived in Dubai,and visited Mumbai once a year. Gold and cash worth Rs 2.55 lakh was missing from the home. Maya,as shocked as any of the neighbours,could provide the police with no clues. The case was closed in a few months with the local police or the Crime Branch making no headway.

Bhanumati’s unsolved murder was one of the many cases that the Crime Branch took a fresh look at in July this year while clearing their backlog. In the years that passed,Amrutlal had sold the apartment,and Maya was not seen in the building again.

“We started all over again,looking at who the potential suspects could be and who Bhanumati had last been in contact with. It seemed obvious to begin with the domestic help,” said Vinayak Vast,senior inspector,Crime Branch Unit 4.

Maya and her husband Tanaji had moved out from their home in Tadwadi in Chunabhatti. When Vast’s team went to Tadwadi,they found Tanaji’s elder brother who worked with a pest control firm.

The police also stumbled upon a friend of Tanaji’s,Chandrakant,who had been drinking with him and another friend Sambhaji Shelar on the night before the murder. “He claimed that Tanaji had told him that he and Sambhaji had killed Bhanumati,” Vast said. He told the police that Sambhaji had moved to Goregaon.

“We didn’t want to question him directly,because we knew he would tip off his brother. So we called him to our office on another pretext and noted the contact details of his family. Once we had the phone numbers of Tanaji and Maya,we started tracing them,” Vast said.