Killer hides identity behind beard, police outsmart him

Over a year after he killed his wife at their home in outer Delhi, a 48-year-old man was arrested at Kotdwar in Uttarakhand.

 Apart from hopping from state to state in a bid to avoid arrest, he had also disguised himself as an ascetic to avoid identification. When Hemant Chaturvedi was finally nabbed on Sunday, he was found with a full-grown beard that made him look very different from his old self, a senior police officer told Deccan Herald.

Hemant was married to Kaumudi Chaturvedi in 1988, but there was marital discord between the couple. Kaumudi, a teacher at a private school in Rohini, had also registered a complaint of cruelty, harassment and dowry demands registered against her husband.

On February 25, 2013, she was found dead at her flat in outer Delhi’s Begumpur. “She had been hit on her head with a heavy object and her throat had been slashed,” said K P S Malhotra, Assistant Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch).

Based on the statement of the victim’s brother, a case was registered against Hemant. He was found absconding and a reward of Rs 50,000 was declared for his arrest.

“We had been working for long to arrest Hemant. We had deployed several sources and his family was under surveillance all these days,” Malhotra said. Any incident of death or celebration in his family, that could draw him to his home, was under surveillance, he added.

Hemant appeared to have broken all ties with his family. But after his arrest, he allegedly confessed to being in touch with his brother, though never over the phone.Since Hemant was a BSc Honours, he found it not very difficult to find jobs in the different towns and cities he stayed at during his absconding days. 

He changed his hideouts and stayed in UP, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Goa. He mostly stayed in solitude and grew facial hair and donned orange robes to avoid being identified.