New Delhi: A woman’s decomposing body on the bed, a bloodstained handkerchief, half-cooked Maggi, and cans of beer. This is what the police saw as they barged into Piyush Dhanotiya’s rented room in Indore’s Dwarakpuri on 14 February. They later uncovered chats between Dhanotiya and the woman, with whom he was in a “relationship”, which revealed that he exhibited “excessive possessive and jealous” behaviour.
“He was being possessive. He didn’t like her speaking to other men. This was not the first time the girl had visited the boy,” Manish Mishra, station house officer (SHO) of Indore’s Dwarakpuri police station and investigating officer (IO) in the case, told ThePrint.
Police also found that after he murdered the 24-year-old woman, Dhanotiya sent a text from her phone to her sister saying she would not return home that night.
When Indore police arrested Dhanotiya from Mumbai’s Andheri, the first thing he muttered was, “Sir, I made a mistake. I killed my girlfriend. I should be sentenced to death.”
The same remorse was missing Wednesday when he, surrounded by cameras and policemen, said almost with a faint smile on his face, “Chhodo yaar, jo ho gaya, ho gaya. Chhod do, kya karoge jaanke?”
(Let it be. What’s done is done. Just drop it. What will you gain by knowing?)
Originally from Madhya Pradesh’s Mandasur district, Dhanotiya had been in a relationship with the woman, his MBA batchmate, since last September.
The police said they also recovered a letter from Dhanotiya’s bag which read, “I have killed my girlfriend. Mujhe faansi ki saza milni chahye.”
(I should be handed the death sentence)
“In the letter, he also wrote that they had been affected by the evil eye (nazar lag gayi thi)—that their friends were jealous of them,” said SHO Mishra.
Explaining the sequence of events, the police officer added that the woman met Dhanotiya at his rented room on 10 February. The two reportedly got into an argument, which turned violent. Police said Dhanotiya stabbed and strangled her to death before escaping to Mumbai by boarding the first train he could catch.
When the woman did not return home that night, her family filed a missing person complaint and began searching for her. Her body was discovered after one of Dhanotiya’s neighbours alerted the police to a foul smell coming from his locked room on 14 February.
“The room was locked, and the girl’s body had started decomposing when we broke in,” said SHO Mishra.
Dhanotiya was arrested from Mumbai on the morning of 15 February. “We were in civil clothes and following him. When we chased him, he thought we were trying to loot him. He ran towards the police station, but we caught him,” SHO Mishra said.
On Wednesday, Dhanotiya was escorted into a jeep from the court premises. When reporters asked him why he killed the woman, he responded, “I will tell you the reason properly…calmly. The time will come for that.”
The ‘misleading’ text
It was late at night on 10 February when the woman’s sister received a text: “Tell papa I won’t come tonight.”
But it wasn’t the woman who sent it. It was sent by Dhanotiya after he had murdered her.
Earlier that morning, the woman’s father had dropped her at the collectorate where she had to get her Aadhaar card and other documents updated. From there, she went to meet Dhanotiya. She had told her younger sister that she would be late because she was attending a birthday party.
The next morning, on 11 February, her father received a call from her college asking him to come in. At the campus, he was told that explicit videos of his daughter had been posted in a college WhatsApp group from her phone. “College authorities informed him that the videos were uploaded from her number and later removed,” said a relative of the girl, adding that family had no inkling of woman’s relationship with the boy.
After meeting the professors, the family went to the police station and filed a missing person complaint. That same evening, the explicit videos were sent to family members and relatives from the woman’s phone.
Police said they visited both the collectorate and college as part of the investigation. The search continued until they received a call alerting them to a foul smell from a rented house in Dwarakpuri. That’s when the police called the woman’s father and asked him to reach the spot. The father, it is learnt, recognised the woman from her socks.
Police said Dhanotiya and the girl were in a “cordial relationship” but the chats revealed instances in which the boy exhibited “excessive possessive and jealous” behaviour. “He was jealous that she spoke to other men. She was in touch with a former boyfriend and that made him angry too,” said another senior police officer familiar with the probe.
The police said Dhanotiya consumed a few beers and recorded their intimate moments before strangling the woman with a rope. “He also tried to attack her with the knife but it broke and injured his own hand,” the senior police officer added.
The police added that they are awaiting forensic reports to confirm whether necrophilia was involved.
An FIR has been registered against Dhanotiya under section 103 (punishment for murder) of BNS. “More sections will be added after we get the post mortem report,” SHO Mishra said. The woman’s family has demanded death penalty for Dhanotiya.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)