A property dealer murdered his wife, then drove up to Mussoorie with the body and threw it off a cliff.
The incident occurred on December 3. But Lalit Jain (37) went to the police to file a missing complaint about his wife Silky only a week later.
The couple had got married in 2010 and were about to celebrate their seventh anniversary around Christmas. They lived in Pitampura and didn’t have children.
Silky had left her job two years after marriage to devote all of her time to her husband and his family. But since she became a homemaker, her in-laws taunted her for not contributing financially to the family, Silky’s family said. Then gradually, they started thrashing her too, the family claimed.
Of late, the couple had been fighting over petty issues and some of these fights were really nasty. Police said the in-laws plotted to kill her and make her sudden disappearance appear as elopement. Earlier this month, the plot was hatched at a park.
The in-laws allegedly held Silky tight as Lalit strangulated her. He then used a hammer to disfigure her face. All of this happened around 3pm on December 3.
At night, the body was stuffed in a gunny bag and shoved under the rear seat of Jain’s car. Jain, his brother Kamal, and a relative Nayan thought they would drop the body off at a place where nobody would spot it ever. They drove up to Mussoorie and reached there early on December 4. There, they threw the body off from a height of 700 feet.
They returned to Delhi and kept quiet. They dry-cleaned the car and white-washed the house. All this while, whenever Silky’s parents tried to get in touch with her, Jain gave them all kinds of reasons why they couldn’t.
On December 11, Jain went to the police wailing and filed a missing complaint. But when the police confronted him and his family members about the cellphone locations and other contradictions in their versions, they gave in and confessed.
The body was found near Cart McKinsey Road around 6am on Friday. Jain, his father, brother, sister-in-law and her brother were arrested on Friday.