Aarushi (9 page)

***

In the Aarushi–Hemraj case, Kaul’s groundwork had been done by the UP policeman Gurdarshan Singh. The media had already been given a sniff of sex; it was more a question of serving a spiced-up version of what Singh had said at the time.

Within two weeks of Javed Ahmed, Neelabh Kishore and A.G.L. Kaul taking over, the first steps for coming up with a ‘new’ theory were taken. The process was formally started on 25 September 2009, with an email from Ahmed to the director of the Forensic Science Laboratory, Gandhinagar. The email made a specific request that Dr M.S. Dahiya, then a deputy director at the lab, be asked to conduct a ‘crime scene reconstruction’.

Why Dahiya? On the professional front, there was his work on the 2002 Godhra train burning incident to be considered. Dahiya’s services (or, more accurately, the services of forensic scientists) were requested two months after the incident, in which 59 Hindu activists were burnt alive in a compartment of the Sabarmati Express. By the time Dahiya and Co. reached the scene, almost all physical evidence had been seriously compromised. So Dahiya conducted a crime scene reconstruction, simulating the throwing of fuel from outside the train carriage using water. He argued that this wasn’t how the train was set alight.

What he suggested instead became controversial: that the fire was started inside the compartment, by miscreants who had boarded the train. Some people interpreted Dahiya’s report to mean the culprits were already on board. Although there have been convictions in the Godhra case—and in the cases of the riots that followed the incident—the issue has never quite been settled. A crime scene reconstruction is, after all, just a theory.

The Aarushi case required a theory, and Kaul turned to Dahiya. Within days of the first contact with Dahiya, things began moving at a frenetic pace. Within a fortnight, the whole complexion of the investigation would change, even though the available material remained exactly the same. Not much could be done about the material. But what about people? People, as it turned out, could change.

I put myself in Kaul’s shoes and considered the challenge before him as he took over the investigation. At times it appeared that his brief was to look at new angles and wrap up the case. But here was a set of documents—the servants’ scientific test results—that suggested the earlier investigation may have been in the right direction. If they stood the test of further investigation, they could also point to the direction the investigation could take.

Within two days of his taking over as investigating officer, the CBI claimed it had recovered Aarushi’s cellphone with the help of the Delhi police. It was also around this time that Hemraj’s cellphone was found to be ‘active’ in Punjab. Arun Kumar’s team had gone on the basis of the narco and other tests on the servants who admitted to knowing how the phones were disposed of, but they had failed to recover anything. Kaul had made one recovery, and didn’t pursue the ‘active in Punjab’ lead at all. But with the recovery of Aarushi’s phone the servants’ narco revelations—which said they had destroyed the phones—stood discredited. It could now be argued that the tests weren’t dependable. They were simply kept on file, and away from the courts and the media.

The servants’ narco reports out of the way, Kaul turned to what he could try and cull out from the scientific tests done on the Talwars during Arun Kumar’s time. Rajesh and Nupur had undergone multiple polygraph tests and the reports indicated their innocence. There was also the January 2009 brain-mapping and polygraph reports from FSL Gandhinagar.

These reports too were very clear. In her comprehensive forensic analysis report, Dr Vaya wrote that there was ‘no indication suggesting that they either directly or indirectly participated in the murder of Aarushi or Hemraj’. The lab’s findings only indicated ‘that both of them are victims of the circumstances of the ghastly murders of Aarushi and Hemraj’.

This was not how Kaul saw it at all. He enlisted Dr Dahiya’s help in reinterpreting the reports. Between them, they prepared an unofficial two-page summary with their own version, picking out indicators of the Talwars having hidden Aarushi’s cellphone and of Rajesh striking Hemraj on the head.

The previous year, Dr Vaya and her team of scientists had been so convinced by the tests they had conducted on Rajesh and Nupur that they found narco analysis unnecessary. Kaul and Dahiya now went to her with their own interpretation—and argued the case for subjecting the Talwars to narco tests.

Dr Vaya was incensed. She pointed out to them that specific findings in these kinds of tests couldn’t be cherry-picked to suit a hypothesis. That conclusions could only be drawn from comprehensive analysis that supports a logical sequence of events. She also told them that the tests on the servants both in her lab and in others consistently pointed to their involvement. If the Nupur and Rajesh reports suggested they had hidden Aarushi’s phone, the same indications were there in the tests conducted on the servants. Surely, argued Dr Vaya, all of them could not have hidden Aarushi’s phone. Finally, she let Kaul and Dahiya know that neither of them were behavioural scientists. This was her area of expertise, not theirs.

Kaul and Dahiya did not want to stand down. They insisted on narco analysis being done on the Talwars. Dr Vaya told them that she had no problems conducting the tests as long as there was consent, and a court order. Kaul set about getting both, but that would take some months.

To establish that there was a new, viable line of investigation two things needed attention: the weapon(s) and the motive. The khukri was now out, but a scalpel seemed suspicious enough when wielded by a surgeon—even a dentist. For the motive, Kaul and Dahiya could fall back on Gurdarshan Singh’s earlier statements. But this would require leavening and kneading the dough again. The central theme in the new theory relied heavily on the personal details of the Talwars: their profession, lifestyle, their relationship with their daughter—and, crucially, her relationships with boys.

To accomplish this, Kaul turned his attention to, and there isn’t a more delicate way to put this, Aarushi’s vagina. He returned to the post-mortem report, and to Dr Sunil Dohare, the man who had conducted it. In his post-mortem report, Dr Dohare had detected nothing abnormal with regard to Aarushi’s genitals. He had mentioned a whitish discharge from both the uterus and the vagina, but this wasn’t unusual in girls Aarushi’s age.

Dohare had sat on an eight-man AIIMS expert committee which submitted its report in September 2008. Dr Naresh Raj, the doctor who conducted Hemraj’s post-mortem, was also on the committee. The AIIMS committee deliberated over the facts for a good two months and submitted what it described as its ‘considered opinion’, an opinion endorsed on every page by Dr Dohare and Dr Raj. There was ‘nothing abnormal detected’ with regard to Aarushi’s sexual organs.

But a month later, in October 2008, the CBI recorded a second statement from Dr Dohare. (His first, after the post-mortem, was recorded a few months earlier.) On the bottom of the first page was the line: ‘During post-mortem examination I observed that the vaginal cavity of the deceased was dilated.’ This was not a finding but an observation. Perhaps Dohare was explaining why he obtained vaginal swabs. Had it been anything more, the doctor was surely bound to record it in his report. He hadn’t, but Kaul seized upon the line.

On 30 September 2009, five days after Dahiya was requested to come on board, Dohare was summoned to the CBI’s camp office in Ghaziabad. Dohare’s statement—his third—that day was nothing short of startling. He picked up from where he had left off a year earlier, and told Kaul: ‘On external examination, the vaginal opening was found prominently wide open. Vaginal cavity and cervix was clearly visible . . . Hymen was ruptured and healed (old).’

Surely this was significant enough to mention in the post-mortem report? Or at least to bring up in the deliberations of the expert committee? Kaul pre-empted these questions by asking them himself.

Kaul: During your examination you have found certain peculiar facts about the private parts of the body but the same have not been mentioned in the PM report. Why?

Dohare: Comments about the private parts of the body were not mentioned in the PM report as the findings were non-specific and were very strange.

It is worth mentioning that Dr Dohare had never conducted an autopsy on a female before Aarushi’s body came to his table. That was the explanation he later gave for not recording a word about the ‘very strange’ things he had seen in his post-mortem report. And with each statement he gave, the orifice seemed to expand. It had started by being ‘dilated’, now it was ‘wide open’, so wide that the cervix was visible. In a fourth statement that Kaul recorded in May 2010, Dohare would become even more explicit about what he had seen two years earlier.

But his September 2009 statement was significant for one other reason. It was the first time that he mentioned Aarushi’s ruptured (and healed) hymen. Aarushi’s Facebook and Orkut accounts, and her cellphone records, showed she was in touch with a number of boys. Dohare’s belated revelation about her ruptured hymen put a different spin on it altogether. It didn’t matter to the vast majority of those who were told this story that hymens can rupture for reasons other than the loss of virginity. The leavening that was required for Gurdarshan Singh’s claims that the girl was ‘characterless’ was now complete. Aarushi was sexually active—so wasn’t it possible that she was sleeping with the servant? There was no difference between what Gurdarshan Singh said and what Kaul alleged—they were both insinuations. All Kaul did was use a doctor’s opinion to support the insinuation. He thus completed the circle—and made a thirteen-year-old girl the villain of the case.

The status of Aarushi’s hymen, as described by Dohare in September 2009, was quite specific and not very strange. So why didn’t he include it in the post-mortem report? One reasonable explanation can be found if we ask ourselves the corollary: Why did Dohare choose to speak now?

The CBI had been in a panic over the alleged swapping of Aarushi’s vaginal slides. The previous team had taken a lot of criticism for it, and the new one desperately sought explanations. In this regard, Dohare had come dangerously close to incriminating himself. He had admitted that he hadn’t even bothered to mark the slides.

Right after Kaul was finished with Dohare, the investigating officer sent one of his underlings to record more statements—of the two sweepers who were in the room when Dohare was conducting his autopsy.

They had been interviewed a year earlier and had talked about the slides and the assistance they provided during post-mortems. Now, hours after Kaul had spoken to Dohare, they added a new paragraph to what they had said earlier. The operative part of it was: Aarushi’s vagina was very wide open, and neither of them had seen such a thing before. Sweepers have no medical qualification to give an opinion in this instance. Yet the CBI obtained their statements.

***

On 9 October, Dahiya travelled to Delhi to inspect the crime scene. According to him, there wasn’t much to inspect: the house had been painted (with the CBI’s permission) and put up for rent. Upon inspecting the roof, Dahiya gave Kaul his only concrete suggestion.

This was to do a simulation experiment involving a body being dragged by two people. Under Kaul’s instructions, this ‘scientific experiment’ was eventually conducted, but the low level of any actual science was evident from the props used, such as diluted Shalimar paint (red), which had none of the physical or chemical properties of blood except perhaps its colour. But this would only be conducted in December 2010, when the CBI’s closure report was being filed. For now, the ‘evidence gaps’ in Kaul’s and Dahiya’s theory had to be filled.

Aarushi’s post-mortem doctor had given an opinion, however belated, that Aarushi may have been engaged in sex with Hemraj. Dr Talwar appeared to have a motive. He was a father who felt enraged and was compelled to take his daughter’s life in the defence of family honour.

The CBI had begun to close in on a motive but what about the execution of the crime? For this, Kaul and Dahiya reminded themselves that Rajesh Talwar wasn’t just a father. He was also a doctor. Somebody, one would assume, who would be precise in the use of a surgical instrument.

Kaul then turned his attention to the paediatrician Dr Naresh Raj, the man who had conducted Hemraj’s autopsy. Both Dohare and Raj had earlier suggested that the khukri (recovered from Krishna’s house and sent to them for examination) may have caused the fatal blunt injuries, but the weapon’s cutting edge wasn’t sharp enough, so the possibility of it causing the slits to the throat was remote.

Kaul summoned Dr Raj to his office in Delhi and recorded a brief, telling, statement. On 12 October 2009, Dr Raj told Kaul that the injury to Hemraj’s neck was caused by a ‘very sharp edged light instrument’. Kaul wanted something more specific, so he asked Raj what inference he could draw from the fact that the cuts to the neck of both victims were identical. Raj said: ‘The identical position of the injury and the skill with which the cut was made clearly point towards a surgically trained person.’

At the time, the CBI had just one suspect. Dr Rajesh Talwar. And although he was a dentist, he did have some surgical training, didn’t he? It was a neat fit. The pieces of the new theory were falling in place, and there were ‘experts’ willing to testify on different aspects of it.

But one question remained. Dr Raj, like Dr Dohare, had mentioned none of this to earlier investigators. He was also on the AIIMS panel which was specifically asked to answer the same questions. He had said nothing. So why now?

There is one more thing worth mentioning here. Kaul never seized any of Dr Talwar’s surgical instruments. Throughout the investigation and the trial the prosecution insisted that a scalpel was used, but Kaul had never actually ever seen the kind of scalpels dentists use. He admitted that he hadn’t even bothered to buy one for the sake of curiosity. The question of having any expert examine even a likeness of the weapon never arose. As far as Kaul was concerned, the suggestion of surgical skill was enough.

In November, a month after Dr Raj’s new testimony, Kaul summoned Richa Saxena. That is when she firmly told Kaul that there had been no foul play with the slides of the vaginal swabs, and that she was willing to go through a lie detector or any other test if required.

***

While the issue of the cuts to the neck had now been ‘settled’ by Kaul and Dahiya, there was a small problem. According to the examiners, the victims’ necks had been slit either after they were dead or while they were dying. The blunt injuries that smashed their skulls had caused death. So even if a sharp, light weapon was used in the course of the murders, it wasn’t the murder weapon.

The post-mortem doctors and the AIIMS committee had so far said that the culprit had wielded a khukri, whose blunt side could have been used. But with the servants out of the frame of suspicion, so was the khukri. Rajesh Talwar’s feelings as a father and training as a doctor had fit into Kaul and Dahiya’s thesis. What else was Rajesh Talwar? He was a golfer, of course.

The Talwars’ practice was flourishing, and one of the markers of a successful professional in middle-class India is membership of a golf club. Dr Talwar was a novice, but he did own a set of golf clubs—or, as the CBI preferred to call them, golf sticks. The head of a golf club is, of course, heavy and blunt.

In July 2008, the Talwars’ driver Umesh Sharma had given investigators a detailed statement about what he recalled in the days leading up to the murder and its immediate aftermath. Umesh had said that two golf clubs were always in Dr Talwar’s Hyundai Santro, and that four or five months before the incident, when he took the car for servicing, he had removed the clubs and several other items from the boot. All these things, he said, he had kept in Hemraj’s room.

In the first pictures that the police took of Hemraj’s room, however, only one golf club could be seen. That the room was in a mess at the time, with the police force turning everything over, and that the other club may simply have been out of the frame, was not something Kaul wanted to consider. He and Dahiya had found their heavy, blunt object.

On 13 October, Dahiya was formally asked to write his crime scene reconstruction report. He sent it in on 26 October. It is marked ‘Document 79’ and is the defining document of the case. Three days after Dahiya’s report, the CBI demanded that the Talwars hand over Rajesh’s golf kit. They did so readily, on 30 October 2009.

Going through the record, a pattern seemed to emerge of the roles of Kaul and Dahiya.

25 Sept 2009: The CBI requests the CFSL for the services not of ‘a scientist’, but of Dahiya.

30 Sept: Dohare modifies his statement to say the vagina was wide open and the cervix was clearly visible, implying that there had been sexual intercourse which someone had tried to erase evidence of. The statements of two sweepers are taken, who also attest to vaginal dilation.

9 Oct: Dahiya is taken to the crime scene, where he does his mental reconstruction. Afterwards, he has detailed discussions with Kaul in his office.

12 Oct: Naresh Raj submits a report in which he says the slit across the throat was caused by a surgical instrument.

13 Oct: CBI sends a formal questionnaire to Dahiya.

26 Oct: Dahiya files his report.

***

The prosecution relied heavily on Document 79. This could be summed up in four words: father, doctor, golfer, murderer. This was the prosecution’s case in the trial court in June 2012.

Dahiya’s document is a masterpiece in several ways. It reveals things about Dahiya the man. Two of his traits he shared with Kaul. The first was the belief that before you even start investigations, you must get a story in place; the facts could be made to follow. The second was the ability to be the authority on subjects that were clearly beyond his area of expertise. A third, more complex, facet of Dahiya’s personality also came through. His belief systems—rooted in the culture of North India’s Jats.

The Jats governed by their khap panchayats are widely regarded as a conservative community engaging in honour killing. Does everyone in the community believe in these practices? Certainly not. But is it easier for them to believe that others might kill for honour? Most likely, yes.

In Document 79, it is possible that Dahiya was projecting a belief system, a moral code, on to the Talwar family. A colleague of Dahiya’s at FSL Gandhinagar told me that he was ‘unable to shake that aspect off and think beyond. This is who he is.’ Here is Dahiya on ‘honour’ and ‘psychology’:

All these circumstances indicate the possibility of someone interested in the honour of the deceased girl and/or her family being active on this count. As far as human psychology is concerned, finding one’s adolescent daughter in the company of a domestic servant at the dead of night in her bedroom is a grave provocation that can lead to an emotional upsurge beyond human control and beyond rationality . . . Though no conclusive evidence to that effect can be obtained from photographs and other limited facts, an intensive probe in that direction is certainly warranted.

And:

The common/similar nature and dimensions of the injuries inflicted on both the deceased establish the common origin of their assassin(s). This similarity also goes to
prove
[emphasis added] that they were the victims of similar anger or grievance against them.

And:

. . . Those keenly interested in the virtuosity and honour of Ms Aarushi and the Talwar family could be behind this incident that appears to have its roots somewhere in an improper/immoral conduct of either or both the deceased.

Dahiya made other striking claims. He had been provided photographs of Aarushi’s room, on the basis of which he notes with supreme confidence that ‘two distinct impact splatters on the wall behind the headrest of Ms Aarushi also goes to
prove
[emphasis added] the contention of Mr Hemraj having been caused head injuries in the room of Aarushi itself’. (‘Impact splatter’ is a term of bloodstain pattern analysis. Here Dahiya is saying he saw two distinct patterns of blood splatter on the wall and his conclusion is that the splatters arise from two different people.)

A serious contradiction naturally followed. Dahiya was at pains to explain how the culprits had wiped all bloodstains and chance fingerprints, utilizing the ‘well-lit’ conditions inside the house. Somehow, though, they had forgotten the blood splattered on the bedroom wall. And somehow, no trace of Hemraj’s blood was found when forensic labs tested samples of it.

Hemraj and Aarushi were murdered in the same room, on the same bed, according to Dahiya, but the murderers were able to wipe all traces of the servant’s blood from the room while leaving untouched all of Aarushi’s. Science will have some trouble explaining this feat, and Dahiya offers no help.

The fact is that Hemraj’s blood/DNA/semen or traces of any other biological fluid were never found in Aarushi’s room—and dozens of forensic samples were collected. Those who offered the simple explanation that no such evidence was found perhaps because it wasn’t there, possibly because Hemraj wasn’t killed in Aarushi’s room, were dismissed as being biased or irrational. It was far more plausible that the murderers distinguished between blood groups and wiped one set clean—after all they were doctors.

***

As any student of science knows, a really small change in initial conditions can lead to colossal divergences in results. In this case, the premise Dr Dahiya relied on was false. His starting point was the ‘fact’ that Hemraj’s blood was found in Aarushi’s room.

From there, sitting in his office in Gujarat, he dreamt up the scenario that read like a judgement rather than a ‘crime scene analysis’, Document 79’s actual title.

The ‘fact’ that Hemraj’s blood was found in Aarushi’s room can be traced to an error in a 2008 letter written by a CBI SP called Dhankar, which listed the seizures of items from Aarushi’s and Hemraj’s rooms. Dhankar included a bloodstained pillow cover and pillow belonging to Hemraj as recovered from the teenager’s room whereas these items were actually recovered from Hemraj’s room, not Aarushi’s.

A year after Dahiya’s analysis, this error was corrected thrice: the CBI’s closure report said no blood of Hemraj was found in Aarushi’s room; in a submission to the Supreme Court, the agency specifically mentioned that the two items were seized from Hemraj’s room; and in court, the original tag attached to the pillow cover was displayed.

In his analysis, Dahiya takes off from the point where Hemraj is in Aarushi’s room at a clearly inappropriate time: around midnight. ‘It has been attempted to be projected that Mr Hemraj was assaulted and killed on the rooftop,’ he writes. ‘. . . The presence of the blood of Mr Hemraj on the pillow in the bedroom of Ms Aarushi, however, negates that plea conclusively.’

I spoke to Dahiya about his ‘premise’ in July 2012. He told me that he had only gone by what was ‘provided’ to him, in between lots of ‘I cannot remember’s. He was listed as a witness and I asked him whether he would clarify in court that he had been given faulty information. He then ended the conversation with that most reliable excuse: the matter was sub judice.

***

Document 79 was also conclusive about the weapons used. The throats of the victims were alleged to have been cut by a sharp surgical instrument of the kind Rajesh Talwar may have possessed.

With the motive and one weapon sorted by the Dahiya–Dohare–Raj triad, what remained was settling on the blunt murder weapon that actually delivered the death blows. Apart from the Talwars’ driver Umesh Sharma’s early statement that he had kept two clubs in Hemraj’s room several months before the murders, there was no mention of the golf clubs by any investigator before Dahiya arrived on the scene.

On 13 October, the CBI sent a questionnaire to Dahiya in which he was specifically asked whether the triangular-shaped injuries on the heads of the victims could have been caused by a golf club. The golf clubs had not yet been seized, so the question of sending them for forensic testing did not arise. And even thereafter, neither post-mortem doctor was ever shown the clubs to ascertain whether the dimensions of the wounds on the victims matched those of the alleged weapon.

Dahiya, sitting in Gandhinagar, didn’t get to see them either. Nor had he ever investigated a case where a golf club was a murder weapon. He would later say that he based his thesis on information supplied to him by Kaul—that the injuries were ‘triangular shaped’—and not on the opinion of an expert who had actually inspected the clubs. Nevertheless, the golf club as a murder weapon was born.

Dahiya duly wrote out Kaul’s question, sans a question mark, as a finding: ‘The triangular-shaped head injury suggests that the weapon of assault must have been a golf club.’ Between sending Dahiya his simple question and the Gandhinagar man’s reply, Kaul attempted some investigation on the golf clubs. On 16 October, he summoned the Talwars’ driver Umesh to his office. Umesh came back weeping, and with a burst eardrum, babbling that Kaul kept asking him where he had hidden the murder weapon, how much money he had been paid, and so on. Kaul recorded a statement in English that day (Umesh spoke no English) and confirmed with Umesh that he had kept two golf clubs in Hemraj’s room. Asked if he could identify them, Umesh said he was not sure, but that he may be able to if he was shown the clubs.