Neeraj Grover was a television executive working for Synergy Adlabs, a Mumbai based production house.
[1] He was found dead in May 2008, a crime for which actress Maria Susairaj and her boyfriend Lieutenant Emile Jerome Mathew were arrested.
Maria Susairaj was a new and small-time South Indian film actress and Lieutenant Emil Jerome Mathew was her boyfriend.
Neeraj Grover was helping Susairaj to establish a foothold in the television industry and had also arranged few auditions for her.
[1] Susairaj, when questioned police claimed that though Grover had met her on Tuesday night, he left at 12 A.M. to meet some friends for a party in Andheri.
When Susairaj told Mathew that Grover had come over to help her, Jerome asked Maria not to allow Neeraj to stay overnight.
[6] Around 11:00 am the same day, Susairaj went to a nearby mall and purchased bags, air freshener, curtains, bed sheets & knife.
While many media outlets reported that Grover's body had been chopped into 300 pieces, the judge in the case would later state that this was "...far from the facts on record", and that such a description had caused "confusion" and had "outraged the general public".
[4] Some circumstances leading police to arrest Mathew and Susairaj included the following: Maria Susairaj, along with Jerome Mathew, on her way to Manor in a friend's borrowed car (to dispose of Grover's body) accidentally answered a call on Grover's mobile while she was pulling it out of her denim pocket to see who the caller was.
[6] Susairaj had initially told police that she borrowed a Hyundai Santro from Mathew's friend "Jitesh" for going out shopping.
Susairaj then admitted to the police that she lied for personal reasons and it was then she revealed the true name of the car owner: Kiran Shreyas.
[4] The knife, which was thrown into a garbage chute, was not recovered for several days despite police searching the house several times.
[3] Various outlets of the national press of India reported public outrage on what was considered a light verdict given the accused had chopped the body into hundreds of pieces after murder.
Times Now called her the "Lady Macbeth of the Grover case ... (who) has gone an extreme length to feed her ambition even if it means putting her jilted lover in the dock and moreover taking the life of an innocent.