2008 Noida double murder case
Puneesh Rai Tandon, a neighbour who lived one floor below the Talwars, asked the Jalvayu Vihar security guard Virendra Singh to inform the police.
[9] In Talwars' defence, their compounder Vikas Sethi told the court that he had received the permission to clean the house from the police personnel and a lady constable present on the crime scene.
[9] K K Gautam, while deposing at the CBI court later in 2012, stated that Chaudhury had requested him to get any references to a sexual assault removed from the post-mortem report, but he refused to oblige.
[32] The UP police did not cordon off the crime scene immediately, and many people, including the media, were freely roaming in the apartment without any permission when the forensic team arrived to gather evidence.
In May 2008, the forensic scientists remarked that the wounds displayed a "clinical precision and careful thought", as they were inflicted at the right spot to cut the windpipe and dissect the vital left common carotid artery which supplies oxygenated blood to the brain.
In 2013, CBI told the court that according to the faculty at the Talwars' alma mater Maulana Azad Medical College, their dental students were taught surgery.
[44] The 2008 post-mortem report written by Dr. Sunil Dohre marked Aarushi's genital area as "nothing abnormal detected", thus ruling out a sexual assault, but also noted the presence of a "whitish discharge" at her vagina.
He also stated that her vaginal orifice was "unduly large", the mouth of her cervix was visible and the whitish discharge was confined to the vagina, when it should have spread to the "entire area".
[61] In September 2012, the defence claimed that the maid Bharati Mandal was a tutored witness, as she told the court Jo samjhaya gaya wahi bayan de rahi hu ("I am saying whatever I was explained.")
[5][9] In 2013, the SP Mahesh Kumar Mishra told the court that, on 16 May 2008, Rajesh Talwar claimed that he had locked Aarushi's room from outside at 11:30 pm on the previous night.
Rajesh was working in his Hauz Khas clinic at the time, while Nupur was in another area of Noida (Fortis Hospital), as indicated by her mobile phone records.
Kusum and Ram Bhool were taken into custody for questioning, but the CBI determined that they had no role in the murders: they were not aware that the phone belonged to Aarushi, and had no mala fide intention in keeping it.
She claimed when Hemraj visited Nepal in December 2007, he had described Rajesh as a short-tempered person who rebuked him for trivial things and even chased him to beat him up.
On 22 May, Meerut inspector-general Gurdarshan Singh speculated about a scenario where Hemraj was the main target of the killing, but stated that no arrests will be made without evidence:[92][93] On 23 May, Rajesh and Nupur were taken to the Police Lines area, where they were split up.
[102] On 6 July, an English daily Mail Today reported that the Talwars spent the night of the murders at a high-society party in a posh South Delhi hotel, quoting CBI sources.
[18] Immediately after his release, Vijay Mandal alleged that the CBI had used physical force and threats against him, and at times, praised him to coax him into turning an approver against Thadarai and Rajkumar.
[6] The defence pointed out that this is irrelevant to the case: the golf set had two clubs numbered 5 - the iron found in the loft, and the one that the CBI suspected to be the murder weapon, which was a wood.
On 21 July, Rajesh Talwar asked the court to pass a restraint order against the "unethical and misleading information" being published by the print media outlets.
Besides, the CBI argued, that the cuts on the victims' necks were "surgical" and could have been only made by professional trained experts, and the blunt injury appeared to have been caused by a golf club.
The CBI also repeated the points earlier made by the police, such as force-less entry into Aarushi's room, Rajesh's alleged diversionary tactics, avoidance in providing the terrace key, refusal to identify the dead body as that of Hemraj, attempts to remove references to sexual assault in the post-mortem report etc.
In addition, the CBI argued that an outsider would not have bothered to dress up the crime scene or hide body of Hemraj by dragging it and covering it with a cooler panel.
[158] The CBI court also rejected the Talwars' plea to summon Anuj Arya and Nalini Singh to prove that the three men were present in Hemraj's room on the night.
[159] The journalist Avirook Sen alleged that this was a crude pressure tactic against the Talwars, since they were forced to respond to the mails purportedly coming from someone named "Hemraj".
[168] The Talwar family called the verdict a miscarriage of justice, and alleged that the points proving innocence of Rajesh and Nupur[169] were not produced by the CBI before the court.
[177] A book analyzing the trial court verdict titled 'The Killing of Aarushi and the Murder of Justice' critiques the judgment as well as the quality of evidence that was tendered in the case.
The speculations about a sexual relationship between a teenage girl and her male servant provided material for yellow journalism, as did the allegations about the extra-marital affair of Aarushi's father.
[87] In 2012, while lodged in the Dasna Jail, Nupur Talwar expressed her wish to write a book on the case, titled Mystery behind Aarushi's murder - A Tale of Unfortunate Mother.
Nupur Talwar requested the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) to stop Balaji Telefilms from airing the show, saying that the production house was trying to earn TRPs by exploiting a tragedy.
[189] Resembling in treatment Akira Kurosawa's 1950 Japanese film Rashomon, Talvar depicts three contradictory accounts of the case, including the parents' version.
[196][197][198][199][200] In November 2017 a Star World original production in association with HBO Asia released a crime documentary mini series called The Talwars: Behind Closed Doors.
