Mumbai: A hair strand and a few drops of Kirti Vyas – the Bblunt salon employee who was killed by her colleagues in 2018 – led the police to the killers despite them pulling out all stops for not being caught.
On Monday, the woman head of the salon (name withheld after court order) and her paramour Sidhhesh S Tamhankar were convicted of killing Vyas in the car and hiding her body in the vehicle's trunk before dumping it in a Mahul creek. Even after years, the body has not been found and it's assumed that it might have drifted into the sea.
The duo's relationship affected Tamhankar’s work. On February 14, 2018, Vyas had issued a show cause notice to him, asking to respond by March 16, 2018; the day when the victim was last seen alive. At 9am, the duo had picked up Vyas from outside her society when she was leaving for work.
The prosecution claimed that Tamhankar stayed at Bhoiwada, the woman convict lived in Santacruz, while their workplace was in Andheri. There was no reason for the two to be near Vyas’s society at Bharat Nagar, Grant Road, the prosecution added.
It further said that when the victim didn't reach home in the evening, her mother called her office and was befuddled to know that she didn't came for the day. After a frantic search, the kin lodged a missing person’s report at the D B Marg police station.
The prosecution said that Tamhankar was involved in Vyas' search, still he didn't tell her family that he and the woman had met the victim outside her residence and picked her up on pretext of dropping her at the office.
This was one of the major incriminating circumstances against the two, the prosecution underlined. Next day, the family got the CCTV footage from the society and submitted it to the police. Out of fear, on March 17, 2018, Tamhankar called a colleague, Satyajeet Thakur, and revealed to him that he and the woman had met Vyas.
He told Thakur that they had gone on a drive in the morning and later they met Vyas and offered to drop her. He claimed that they dropped her between Grant Road and Mumbai Central, adding that he did not want to reveal it to the police to hide their affair.
Later, when the police began to check the CCTV footage to ascertain Tamhankar's claim of dropping Vyas, they found that the car had not stopped at the said spot. To look for clues, the police dispatched the car for forensic examination at Kalina. The experts came across two blood stains; one on the left mat of the seat next to the driver and another on the trunk mat.
Besides, hair strands stuck to the roof of the front left seat and hair from the mat below it were discovered as well. The DNA extracted from the trunk's mat matched with Vyas’ parents, confirming that the duo had murdered her in the car.
