Accused’s wife helped cops unravel Ratlam woman murder

Indore: The brave intervention of Aarti, wife of the accused Kamlesh Patel, who is hearing and speech impaired, helped the cops unravel the murder of Ratlam woman Meera Ben, whose body parts were found in two trains in Indore and Rishikesh. The case began when the last known location of a deceased woman was traced to a small house in a slum at Dewas Gate in Ujjain. The police detained Kamlesh Patel, a 60-year-old man from Uttar Pradesh who had been residing in Heera Mill Ki Chawl for 15 years, but he refused to provide any details, leaving investigation at a standstill.The breakthrough came when Aarti, Kamlesh's wife, arrived at the police station in search of her husband. While she could not speak, her enaction of how Kamlesh first attempted to rape the woman and then smothered her and cut her up gave police the detailed idea of what had happened. Police took help from sign language expert Gyanendra Purohit and his wife Monika Purohit and they reached Ujjain from Indore and went to the house where the incident took place along with senior police officials where Purohit interacted in gestures with the woman and found out during detailed discussion that she was from a village in Orissa. Kamlesh had paid money to her family members to forcefully marry her and bring her to Ujjain. She had four children from another man. “The woman showed us injuries and bruises all over her body and a stick in the house. She told us that the accused used to thrash her brutally every day and misbehaved with her,” said Purohit. With the assistance of sign language experts, Aarti, initially shocked and terrified, managed to convey the gruesome details of the murder that had left the police stumped. Her enactions vividly described how Kamlesh first attempted to rape the woman, then smothered her, and subsequently dismembered her body. “She gestured how she slept on one side of the bed facing the wall while Meera had slept on the other side and the accused attempted to rape her. When she raised an alarm, Kamlesh smothered her and she saw it. As Aarti tried to stop Kamlesh from committing the crime, he threatened to murder her in a similar way,” said Purohit.Aarti said as she went to relieve herself around 3:00 am on June 8, the accused locked the room from inside. On return when he did not open the door, she peeped from the ventilation shaft and found him chopping the body to pieces. She tried to open the door but the accused did not let her in. The woman kept sitting outside the room for four and half hours as the accused dismembered the body and packed it in different bags. Aarti also showed Purohit the blood marks on the walls near the wash area which had splattered as he cut the body with the big butcher’s knife. Forensics experts were called to the spot and the evidence was collected.