New Delhi: “I can see her feet in the divan.”
At around 5:15 am on 20 July, 2007, Kalpana Gavare shrieked as she discovered her daughter Snehal’s body stuffed inside a box bed in their house, more than 12 hours after she’d gone missing.
Both of Snehal’s hands were tied behind her back and she had a white cloth around her mouth. According to the post-mortem report, the 21-year-old had died of asphyxia caused by smothering. Police registered a murder case — but 15 years later, the investigation is still on, though they’ve found no new leads or suspects in the past seven years.
At the time of the murder, Snehal had been an engineering student at Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel College of Engineering in Mumbai’s Andheri.
According to police documents and court records accessed by ThePrint, the police have since explored several angles and questioned many people close to Snehal, including her parents and then boyfriend, Hiren Rathod. They’ve also followed several leads in the case — a blank message from Snehal’s phone around the time she died, her phone, which was recovered from a stationery shop, a brain fingerprinting test, and a missing attendance register.
Nothing has led to closure in the case.
Rathod, who had left for his master’s degree in the United States a year after the incident, was arrested in the case when he came back for his father’s funeral in April 2010. However, unable to gather enough evidence against him, the police have since tried to close the case against him twice, only to be told by the court that the “investigation is unsatisfactory and there is scope for further investigation”.
And so, the search for the person who tied up Snehal, gagged her, murdered her in broad daylight in her own house, and stuffed her body inside the box bed, is still on with no end in sight.
Chappals, a glass of water, a blank message
The Gavare family lived in the Ninad Cooperative Housing Society in Dombivli at the time of the incident, according to the complaint registered by Snehal’s father in the case. They were the picture of the quintessential happy family — at least on the surface.
The father, Hindurao Gavare, worked as an assistant accountant at the Abhyudaya Co-operative Bank at the time and the mother, Kalpana, worked as a schoolteacher. Their elder daughter, Sheetal, was then studying in London.
19 July, 2007, began as an ordinary day for Hindurao. He went to work and came back home at around 7pm, as on any other day. However, this was the moment when his world turned upside down.
According to the police complaint registered by Hindurao, his wife then told him that when she returned home around 6pm, she noticed that Snehal wasn’t home, but that the door to the hall was latched, her chappals (slippers) were at home, and that there was a glass of water in the hall. According to the complaint, written in Marathi, Kalpana also claimed that she received a blank message from Snehal at 3:28pm.
However, when they couldn’t locate Snehal and her phone remained switched off, the parents initially lodged a missing person complaint at the Dombivli police station on the same day at around 10:35pm.
Exhausted, they returned home around 2:30 am and stayed awake through the night. The mother remained in the bedroom with another teacher from her school, while the father was in the hall with a friend of his.
Around 5:15am, Hindurao and his friend purportedly heard a loud scream from the bedroom — Kalpana had spotted Snehal’s feet inside the box bed. The father then removed the mattress and the ply to discover Snehal’s body, according to the murder complaint filed by the family. ThePrint has seen a copy of this complaint.
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The missing attendance register
In his statement in Marathi to the police on 20 July, Rathod told the police that when Snehal was admitted to the Andheri college, he was a second year student there. They met in September 2004, and fell in love in August 2005. He told the police that he used to visit Snehal’s house often and that her mother knew about their relationship.
He also told the police about fighting with Snehal a week before her death, over him going to a party and meeting a friend who Snehal didn’t approve of. While they reached an agreement, he claimed to have told Snehal that they wouldn’t be able to meet each other for a week because he’d be busy with work.
Rathod also claimed in his statement that his phone hadn’t been working properly for two days before Snehal’s death. While he had his phone on 19 July, 2007, he claimed that he had kept it switched off throughout the day, because the phone’s battery wasn’t working properly and that he was switching it on only to make calls. He claimed to have received news of Snehal being missing only around 8:30 pm, when he returned home. ThePrint has seen his statement.
From July 2007 to July 2008, Rathod was working as a management trainee at the Voltas company in Mumbai, as mentioned in a later statement. According to police and court records accessed by ThePrint, Rathod had claimed that on the date of the incident, he was with his friends — other management trainees — at his workplace, between 9 am and 5:30 pm. However, the investigating officer could never recover the attendance register for that particular date, the records mentioned.
On 30 July 2008, Rathod left for the US, to pursue a two-year master’s programme at Clemson University, South Carolina, according to a statement he gave to the police in 2010.
The happy family
Days after her body was found, the police recovered Snehal’s phone on 2 August, 2007 from a person identified as Mansukh Shivaji Patil in police records. A 33-year-old stationary shop owner in Mumbai’s Kandivali at the time, Patil had told the police that on 31 July, 2007, a man came to the shop and sold him the mobile phone. On enquiry, the man had apparently told Patil that he had “found” the phone. Patil claimed he then paid the man Rs. 3,500 for the phone.
The family was shown the sketch of the seller of the mobile phone and told his description, but according to a police document, the family couldn’t identify the seller from the sketch.
The investigation in the case meanwhile gradually revealed chinks in the Gavare’s “happy family” image. According to reports, Snehal’s elder sister, Sheetal had earlier registered a police complaint against her father, for allegedly beating her. When Hindurao’s psychological profiling was conducted in March 2008, the report claimed it was found he suspected his wife of having an extramarital affair with their relative, Anil Jawalekar, leading to “problems” in their marriage.
“He was found to be distressed about the fact that there is a coalition among the mother and the two daughters to the extent of his elder daughter filing a case against him,” the report stated.
‘Deceptive’
Between 2007 and 2008, four people — Hiren Rathod, Hindurao Gavare, Kalpana Gavare and Anil Jawalekar — were put through psychological profiling and polygraph examinations, according to the profiling records.
Rathod was also put through Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature Profiling (BEOSP), also known as brain fingerprinting, added the records. BEOSP is a method of interrogation, in which the possibility of a person’s participation in an alleged crime is investigated by studying their brain’s response to visuals or audio clips related to it, to check if any neurons in their brain are triggered. The test results are then studied to determine the participation of the accused in a crime.
The records, submitted on 2 July, 2008 by the Directorate of Forensic Science Laboratories in Kalina, Mumbai, said that Rathod had “significant conflicts with her in the recent past over Snehal’s tendency to be dominant in the relationship”, and that “she was suspicious and would ask her friends to keep a watch on him”.
The report also said that Rathod was found to be “deceptive” while answering “no” to questions relating to him having an involvement in Snehal’s murder, him having been present when Snehal was attacked, him having smothered and killed Snehal, and him having kept Snehal’s body inside the box bed. ThePrint has accessed the records.
The records added that on BEOSP, he was found to have “experiential knowledge on a number of significant probes that depict him to have gone to Snehal’s house, attacking and murdering her, putting her body inside the bed box and carrying her chain and mobile phone”. It, therefore, concluded that Rathod’s psychological evaluation “is indicative of his involvement in the murder of Snehal Gavare”.
As for the others, the records said that Kalpana and Jawalekar were found to be ‘truthful’ when they answered “no” to being involved in Snehal’s murder, while Hindurao’s responses were inconclusive. Kalpana’s personal history, however, revealed “marital discord”, and that the couple were living separately at the time the records were filed.
An arrest
The police filed an ‘A’ summary report, which was accepted by a court in Kalyan, Maharashtra, in February 2010. An ‘A’ summary report means the case is classified as genuine, but not detected, i.e. the investigation has not led to the collection of enough evidence. The case was then transferred from the Dombivli police to the Kalyan crime branch.
However, the probe seemed to pick up shortly afterwards when Rathod returned to India on 7 April, 2010, after his father passed away. He then voluntarily appeared before the Kalyan court and filed an application for conducting his narco analysis test on 9 April, 2010, the court noted in a September 2015 order.
On 20 April, 2010, Rathod was arrested and produced before the court, according to police and court documents accessed by ThePrint. He was then remanded to police custody till 27 April, and was taken into judicial custody after that. While the court granted permission to conduct narco analysis on him on 4 May, he was released on bail by a court in Kalyan on 26 May, 2010. However, before the narco analysis could be conducted, Rathod filed an application before the court for withdrawal of consent for the test.
A few months later, on 24 January, 2011, the investigating officer filed a report under Section 169 (release of accused when evidence deficient) of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPc). This report, seen by ThePrint, said the police had questioned Rathod, his friends, and his employers, as well as Snehal’s family members and neighbors. However, “no useful information was found regarding his (Rathod’s) involvement in the crime”. It then said the evidence wasn’t strong enough to present a chargesheet against him, and so, Rathod should be released under Section 169 of the CrPC.
However, the Kalyan court did not accept the report and directed further investigation under Section 156(3) of the CrPC, which allows the magistrate to order such an investigation by the police, on 31 January, 2011.
‘Scope for further investigation’
After conducting further investigation, the investigating officers once again filed an application to release the accused from the crime under Section 169 of CrPC in March 2014. This application, also seen by ThePrint, said the police tried getting the attendance register for the month of July 2007 from Rathod’s company at least twice — once on 3 July, 2012, and again on 24 September, 2013. However, the police were told the company couldn’t trace the attendance register for that month, despite making all efforts to do so, claimed the application.
The application added that the police also spoke to three of Rathod’s co-trainees, who claimed he was with them when the incident occurred. It then reiterated the stand that the evidence wasn’t strong enough to present a chargesheet against him, and so, Rathod should be released.
While hearing this second application, the court had asked Snehal’s father to file his response. According to the court order, seen by ThePrint, Hindurao initially took objection to closing the file, saying that he deserved to know the name of the “actual culprit”. However, the order noted that he had failed to file his detailed objection to the application.
In its order dated 30 September, 2015, the court noted that non-recovery of the attendance register for the date of Snehal’s murder “creates doubt regarding involvement of the accused in the offence”. The court also took note of his BEOSP test report result. It then asked the investigating officer to conduct a further probe into Rathod’s role in the alleged offence, and observed, “The overall effect of all these facts and circumstances is that investigation is unsatisfactory and there is scope for further investigation”.
However, sources in the Kalyan crime branch told ThePrint that since then, they’ve found no new leads and have no new suspects in the case. But police officers familiar with the case confirmed that the search for Snehal’s alleged murderer is still on, in accordance with the court order, and the file hasn’t yet been closed.
This article has been updated with additional information.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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