New Delhi: In season 2 of the American show Dexter, the eponymous protagonist conducts an internal monologue while he’s interacting with a lawyer he doesn’t quite trust. He wonders, “Do I see sheets of plastic in your future?”
The dialogue and the show caught the country’s attention earlier this week when 28-year-old Aftab Poonawalla confessed to murdering his live-in partner, Shraddha Walkar, 26, in May. He then chopped her body into 35 pieces and stored them in a newly-purchased fridge, before setting out at night to dispose of the parts carried in multiple polybags.
The modus operandi, Poonawalla admitted to Delhi Police, was inspired by ‘Dexter‘, a popular American vigilante crime show that ran from 2006 to 2013. Michael C. Hall played Dexter Morgan — a blood splatter analyst for the Miami Police Department by day, a vigilante serial killer by night — who picked his victims based on their crimes and meted out his own justice by killing them before hacking their bodies into smaller pieces, making it easier for him to dispose and to cover his tracks.
This is where the similarity between Dexter and Poonawalla ends. The fictional character sees himself as a one-man judge, jury and executioner — but only for those who have committed crimes that tend to go unpunished.
This is not the first time the show has influenced criminal activity. In 2010, a 21-year-old Swedish woman stabbed her 49-year-old father to death. When questioned by the police, she compared herself to Dexter and said that whenever her father called her on the phone, an image of the character played by Hall would surface. The press dubbed her “The Dexter Killer” or “Dexter-kvinnan (The Dexter Lady).”
In 2011, 28-year-old Shamrez Khan in Oslo paid Hvard Nyflt to kill Faiza Ashraf, a Norwegian-Pakistani woman. Nyflt asserted that after watching Dexter, he was motivated to “end evil” by wanting to kill Khan in front of Faiza. The “Faiza-case”, as it was called, received a lot of media interest in Norway and was one of the earliest instances of non-gang-related contract killings in Norwegian history.
Watch and repeat
For most part of the show, Dexter used his “Kill Tools” to cut his victim’s body into pieces in a “Kill Room” that was covered in plastic. His tools consist of knives, a surgical power saw, and a bag of surgical tools called a “Messermeister” that combines tools from other craft specialties, such as a rachiotomy saw, a meat cleaver, a bespoke knife, and more. He would then dispose of the parts in black biodegradable garbage bags. Poonawalla too allegedly used a single saw to hack Walker’s body into 35 pieces, before putting them into black plastic bags, which he set off to dispose over a period of time in the Mehrauli urban forest.
The double life
The accused hid the crime for several months before Walkar’s estranged father, Vikas Walker, lodged an FIR with the Mumbai Police to report his daughter’s disappearance. Till then, Poonawalla had claimed that Shraddha had left him; he even interacted with her friends online, posing as her. Not long after committing the murder, he resumed being active on the same dating app on which he met Shraddha. Before the Delhi Police showed up to question him, Poonawalla had also brought home another woman while some of Shraddha’s dismembered body parts were still in the fridge.
One is reminded of what Dexter says in Season 1, “I am a very neat monster.”
Also read: Shraddha murder case: Aftab’s family flees to unknown location, now untraceable