Driver who ferried Suchana Seth shares trip details – from traffic jam to Goa cop’s call to finding police station

Royjohn D’Souza, a cab driver from North Goa’s Anjuna, was instrumental in her arrest. Speaking to The Indian Express, he said that around 11 pm on January 7, he got a call from the reception of Hotel Sol Banyan Grande in Candolim, asking him to ferry Seth “urgently” to Bengaluru.

He was told to reach the hotel at 12.30 am, and a fare of Rs 30,000 was agreed upon.

“My co-driver and I reached the parking area. She said she was travelling alone and told me to put a red trolley bag in the boot. The suitcase was unusually heavy, but I didn’t think much of it,” he said.

The cab left from Candolim around 12.30 am and reached Chorla Ghat — on the Goa-Karnataka border — at 2 am. There, a truck had overturned, creating a bottleneck and a four-hour jam, he said.

“I told her we could be stuck here for four to six hours. The traffic was not moving at all. Since I was told that she had to reach Bengaluru for some urgent work, I offered to drop her at the airport using an alternate route, and told her that a flight may be a better option. But she insisted that she wanted to go by road, irrespective of how long it took… I found that odd, considering she was in a hurry, but then I was getting paid…,” he said.

During the journey, Seth was completely silent, barring one time when she asked if he wanted to drink water, he said. For the next few hours, he continued to drive non-stop, till he got a call from a Calangute police inspector around 11 am.

“The police inspector asked me if the passenger I was ferrying was alone or if a child was with her. The officer was talking in Konkani, and I figured that she could not understand our conversation. I told him she was alone. He said police had found bloodstains in her hotel room and they had a suspicion about her. Then, I passed the phone to her and said that someone wanted to speak to her. The officer spoke to her for a couple of minutes. She mentioned an address. Besides that, she didn’t react much and did not seem to be in any sort of panic,” D’Souza said.

After confirming that the address mentioned by Seth, about the whereabouts of her son, was fake, the police inspector called the driver a few minutes later, this time directing him to “immediately drive to the nearest police station”.

“The police said their suspicion was very strong. At the time, we were on the expressway, and I could only see villages… all the signboards were in Kannada, so I didn’t know where to go. I discreetly Googled the nearest police station and, somehow, the map showed one at a distance of 150 km. That would have been too far. So, I told her that my co-driver and I need to use a washroom, and stopped the car,” he said.

Along the roadside, the duo found a restaurant, where the watchman informed them that Aimangala police station in Karnataka’s Chitradurga district was just 500 metres away. “I verified from the watchman if it was a police outpost or a big police station since the matter was sensitive. I called Goa police and kept them on standby on the call, and drove via a service road on the highway to the police station,” he said.

D’Souza said Seth asked him why he had stopped the car outside the police station. “I made up an excuse, and handed my phone to the in-charge of the police station at Aimangala. The police officers of both the states then coordinated and, in the next 10 minutes, the police checked the luggage and found the body of her son. I didn’t have time to process what was happening and just did what the police asked. She did not show any emotion while the police were conducting the check,” he said.

“I didn’t imagine this could ever happen. I was just happy to get a late night ride,” he said, adding that he was yet to be paid.