Vadodara’s near-perfect murder

The murders of Shrihari Vinod, 65, and his wife Sneha, 63, have left this well-off neighbourhood in shock. It’s not just the school notice that went unseen. The drying potted plants in the courtyard, a two-wheeler that lay gathering dust and a two-seater swing in disuse didn’t draw any attention either.

Hundreds gathered when the decomposed bodies were finally brought out after policemen broke the door open following a missing person’s complaint. Shrihari’s corpse was discovered on the floor and Sneha’s on the bed in their bedroom. Both had almost been reduced to bones.

The girl, who has since been found to be 12 weeks pregnant, and her 21-year-old alleged boyfriend Sapan Purane have been arrested. Purane, unemployed and enrolled for a Masters in Commerce, has also been charged with rape as the girl is a minor.

Since the girl is believed to have discovered her pregnancy around the time the murders took place, the police are exploring if that was the trigger. According to the police, the two have admitted to the killings but said that the reason wasn’t the pregnancy. In her statement in which she “confessed” to having plotted the murders along with Purane, she reportedly said getting rid of her parents was “the only way” the two of them could marry.

Police Commissioner E Radhakrishnaiah says, “Our investigation is water-tight as both have confessed and helped police reconstruct the sequence of events. Her pregnancy does not alter the case.”

Shrihari and Sneha had adopted the 16-year-old when she was two months old, after almost 18 years of a childless marriage, from an adoption home in Maharashtra.

Neighbours recall the couple as being very private. Shrihari, who had been a bank executive, took retirement around 12 years ago, while his wife, an LIC employee, was working till three years ago.

Their house, called ‘Snehashri’ — a combination of their names — is located at the end of a row of bungalows along the main road in Tirupati Society, and they weren’t seen much even around the society complex.

A neighbour who refused to be identified says, “We did notice that the house was locked, but we thought the family had gone out for a vacation.” While he saw the girl entering the house a couple of times, he says they thought she had stayed behind as she had school.

There’s an uneasy consensus on why nobody stopped the girl to ask about her parents — she was “unpopular”, say the neighbours. One talks of having seen her standing on the first-floor verandah of her house with a phone “tightly held to her ears” and “gesturing to a boy standing across the road”. “We believe he was Purane. I had been seeing him every night for the last one year,” says the neighbour.

Schoolmates say she was “unsocial”, “detached” and “disinterested in studies”. A teacher at Ambe Vidyalaya says, “I taught her in Class IX and she hardly participated in the lessons. She was irregular with assignments. Most of us thought she was a slow learner. At one parent-teacher meet, we told her mother to send her for extra classes.”

The letter from the principal pasted on the Vinods’ house warned that the girl’s name would be struck off the school rolls permanently in seven days if there was no intimation from the parents.

Investigating officer N M Ghod says they have also found that studies were an issue. “During interrogation, she said she was tortured by the Vinods. She told us that when she spoke to them about marrying Purane, they opposed it as they wanted her to study. When they finally agreed to meet Purane, they rejected him at once and told her to stop meeting him. She and Purane then hatched the murder plan,” says Ghod.

The girl has shown no remorse since her arrest, he says.

A 15-year-old classmate is the only one who admits to any kind of interaction with her. Confessing her parents had warned her against speaking about the girl, she says: “Since she rarely spoke, we were not close but she would ask me to share notes when she missed classes. I found her very disoriented from reality, often talking about love stories and romantic movies. She lived in her own world.”

In statements to the police, the girl has allegedly confessed that on the night of August 3, as part of a plan Purane and she hatched, she laced her parents’ food with a drug. After they had passed out, she called Purane to the house. Purane told police they gagged Shrihari and Sneha, and the daughter then killed them, stabbing them repeatedly in the abdomen — Sneha first, followed by Shrihari.

Before leaving, the girl and Purane allegedly changed into clean clothes, dumping their blood-stained ones in a bathroom and hiding the knife used for the stabbing in a showcase. They rode a motorcycle to Vaishnodevi Society, about 10 minutes away, where Purane lived in a rented three-room flat.

After that night, every alternate day, the two rode back to Tirupati Society with cans of acid to allegedly pour over the bodies so that they would disintegrate as the smell would have drawn attention. They reportedly told the police they intended to do this till the bodies melted. For a few days, they “confessed”, they also left the airconditioner in the Vinods’ bedroom on so that the bodies wouldn’t rot in the heat.
The acid was allegedly supplied by Purane’s friend Aryan, who was arrested last week.

Their plan worked for two months, till October 12, when the girl went to collect monthly rent from a tenant of the Vinods at Dandia Bazaar in Vadodara, claiming she was doing it on behalf of her father. He refused to give her the money and instead contacted Shrihari’s brother and sister-in-law Swati Vinod.

On October 14, after having tried repeatedly to get in touch with the Vinods, Swati called the police and lodged a missing person’s complaint. The same night, the police came to their house in Tirupati Society, broke the door down and discovered the bodies.

Swati admits it is difficult to answer why they didn’t realise for so long that something could be wrong with Shrihari and Sneha. “All that has been said about our family disagreements is true, but I too haven’t slept since the night the bodies were discovered,” she says.
It was around 12 years ago that Shrihari and Sneha had moved out, along with their five-year-old daughter, from the family home in Dandia Bazaar that they all shared. Ghod says that after that, the two families hardly kept in touch.

A member of the society in which the couple stayed says, “We never saw any relatives or friends visit them.”

A family that lives in the row adjacent to the Vinods tries hard to defend why the murders remained unspotted. “The couple and the girl kept to themselves, and never interacted with anyone. They never even used the common road,” says a member.

‘Snehashri’, renovated recently by the Vinods, is hard to miss now, standing desolate and locked. The only legal heir is the daughter.