In yet another instance of infidelity giving way to criminality, a woman, married for 16 years and mother to four children, killed her husband with the help of her lover.
The chilling incident, reported from Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly district, is about a 25-year-old Rekha who allegedly laced her husband Kehar Singh’s tea with rat poison on a quiet Sunday night. Not long after, she called her lover, Pintu, to the house. Together, the pair strangled Singh with a rope. Then, in a bid to stage the perfect cover-up, they used the same rope to hang his body from the ceiling, hoping to pass it off as a suicide.
By morning, Rekha’s staged cries echoed through the neighbourhood, rousing neighbours who rushed in and took down the body. But the act was short-lived.
“The post-mortem report indicated death by strangulation,” said Mukesh Chandra Mishra, Additional Superintendent of Police (North). “We have filed a murder case against the woman and her lover based on the complaint by the victim’s brother.”
The motive? Rekha’s year-long affair with Pintu, a relationship that had sparked frequent arguments in the house. According to the police, Rekha had even asked for a divorce, but Kehar refused. That’s when she allegedly decided to bump him off.
Initially dodging questions during interrogation, Rekha later confessed to the murder. Police are now awaiting the viscera report to confirm the poisoning.
But this isn’t an isolated incident of love turning lethal and marriage turning into a cause of death in Uttar Pradesh.
Just days earlier, another woman and her paramour in Meerut allegedly murdered her husband and tried to use a snake to cover their tracks. After killing the man, they left a snake near his body, hoping the venomous creature would be blamed. The plan fell apart when forensic evidence pointed squarely to homicide.
And the brutality doesn’t stop there.
In perhaps the most gruesome case yet, Saurabh Shukla was allegedly murdered by his wife, Muskaan Rastogi, and her lover. In a scene straight out of a Bollywood film, they chopped up his body, stuffed the pieces into a drum, and sealed it with cement in an attempt to bury the evidence.
