Techie who chopped wife into 70 pieces convicted

DEHRADUN: Seven years after software engineer Rajesh Gulati smothered his 36-year-old wife and then used an electric saw to chop her body into 70 pieces, stashing the parts in a deep freezer for two months, a local court has held him guilty of murder, bringing closure to a case that was counted among the most heinous killings in Uttarakhand.
Soon after additional district judge Vinod Kumar held him guilty under section 302 (murder) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence) of the IPC, Rajesh, with his face betraying little emotion, was escorted out of the court by policemen.The quantum of sentence will be announced on Friday.
The brutal murder which sent shockwaves in Dehradun dates back to 2010. After an argument on the night of October 17, Rajesh, then 37, killed his wife Anupama in their two-room rented house at Prakash Nagar in Dehradun Cantonment. As the trial continued, many gruesome details of the case emerged.
Rajesh and Anupama had moved to the US after getting married in 1999. But soon after their return to Dehradun in 2008, their relationship started getting strained. The couple would often fight, with Anupama charging Rajesh of having an extramarital affair with a woman from Kolkata. On October 17, they got into another argument and Rajesh slapped his wife following which she hit her head on the wall and fell unconscious. Scared that she would wake up and file a police complaint, the techie stuffed her nose and mouth with cotton before using a pillow to smother her.
Leaving nothing to chance, Rajesh bought an electric saw from the market and chopped up his wife’s body into 70 pieces. He then filled up polythene bags with the body parts and stored them in a deep freezer which also he bought from the market.
To keep his crime from being uncovered, he kept throwing away the polythene bags, one at a time, at various locations on the outskirts of the city. Some of the bags he dumped along the Mussoorie-Dehradun route were recovered by police during the course of investigation.
Rajesh kept up the pretense of normalcy for nearly two months, even telling his children, twins aged four, that their mother had gone to Delhi until one day Anupama’s brother Sujan Kumar Pradhan landed at his doorstep having not heard from his sister in a long time.
Pradhan got suspicious when Rajesh could not tell him about his sister’s whereabouts and also refused to let him enter the house. Pradhan then filed a missing complaint at the Cantonment Police station. Police subsequently raided Rajesh’s house and recovered severed parts of the body, including Anupama's head, from the deep freezer.