September 23, 2024 • 41 mins
For this episode of Wicked Words, we travel to India, where some of the world’s most complicated, most compelling true crime stories come from. This story is one of those. It’s about a female grifter, turned killer, who seduced men for money, but murdered one…out of fear. The book we’re talking about is called Swipe Right to Kill. The author is Anirban Bhattacharyya.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
The criminals as well as the victim now they are
not who they pretend to be to the outside world,
and they have dangerous alter egos.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:49):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. For this episode of Wicked Words,
we travel to India, where some of the world's most complicated,
(01:10):
most compelling true crime stories come from. This story is
one of those. It's about a female grifter turned killer
who seduced men for money but murdered one out of fear.
The book we're talking about is called Swipe Right to Kill.
The author is a nearbon poticharia. When you are at
(01:33):
a dinner party or talking to someone and someone says,
tell me about your book, what's it about. What are
the major themes that you pull from this story?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
So this at the heart is a story about aspirations, ambitions,
deception and greet It is about yearning for something that
is way out of one's league. Now, much like Icarus
and the Sun if you remember the story, dreaming and
having an ambition is good, but when it involves crime,
then it becomes dangerous territory. It's the story of the
(02:06):
shudest corn woman of India who used technology and the
lure of sex to corn over all your breath one
thousand men.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
How is that possible? I don't know how you have
that much time?
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah? Yeah, And she did it over over a period
of I think three years. So you know she used
to use, you know, leure of sex to corner of
a thousand men and then murdered one of them with
the help of her boyfriend and an accomplice. So the
book is also the way I see it. It's also
what fate. You know, whatever is meant to happen will
happen if you bout watch.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Your back introduce me to the victim. What was he like,
and you know, start building this profile of what he
wanted people to see, and then of course we find
out it's pretty different as we move through the story.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
The name of the victim is Dushian Sarma. You know,
he was he was a very middle class boy who
was married and had an infant child born and brought
up in a very traditional Indian kind of a million
and a family set up, you know, still living with
parents and with his wife and child in a city
(03:16):
called Jeppur, which is one of the biggest tourist spots
of India. At home, he was this person who would
pray every day. You know, he would wake up and
he would do his prayers, and he had a regular
nine to five job. He would go, you know for
his work and then come back on time. He was
a shy boy, but the wife remembers that on the
(03:38):
day that they got engaged, suddenly he turned into this
Bollywood hero and went down on his knees and you know,
sort of proposed to her and she was really obviously,
you know, blown off her feet. When he's at home,
Dushia was very shy, very conservative, very very loving, very
caring person. But what the family they did not know
(04:01):
was Dushan had an alter ego, and Dushan discovered the
joys of online dating and social media. Somebody told him
about Tinder, and he realized that here was this world
which was way beyond his own grasp, so to speak,
and yet he could now aspire to have it. The
(04:23):
exciting part was it didn't come with any responsibilities. He
could do what he want and be silent about it.
You know, what the family doesn't know is good news,
So he continued, So if you went to his social
media profiles, here's this guy with like ray bands and
and you know, colorful shirts, and he's like a like
(04:44):
a hero on social media. And then you cut to
him back home, he's this guy, you know, with a
with a pillock on his brow and he's praying to
God and all of that. So there was two parallel
lives was being led by Dushan and he sort of
was enjoying this, playing this game of hide and seek,
(05:04):
and then he made a very crucial mistake and that's
when things went south.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Now, how many women do we know that he had
encountered before he met the woman Priya Seth Right, is
that how I say her name?
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Okay, do we know how many people he had met
before he needs her?
Speaker 2 (05:26):
One of his friends made a comment to the police
saying that, oh, you know, he has girlfriends, but there
is no specific number that we know. It could be
two and she could have been the third, but that's
just an illusion. But is she the first? Note? Otherwise
(05:47):
the friend would not have made that comment.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
And his parents, whom he lived with, and his wife
nobody had a clue about any of this.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
No. Wow, He kept his two lives very, very separate.
So even now when the case unfolded, the wife was
still in denial, saying that, oh, you know, you guys
don't know him. Well, he couldn't have done all of this.
So he used to work in a mining company in
Jeopor itself. He was an office executive. The business land
(06:18):
tag is something he used for his alter ego online.
So he said that his profession as a businessman is
a very rich businessman from Delhi and that was the line.
But apart from that, I mean he used to work
in Jeipur. He was in a mining company. He used
to monitor sales even the day when he left the house.
(06:40):
He told his parents that he was going to work
because the cops had caught some So there was illegal
mining going on of stones and riverbedstones and the cops
were doing these busts in Jeipur at that point of time.
So he borrowed his dad's car and said, listen, I'm
going out with because the cops have caught one of
(07:01):
my trucks. I need to negotiate with them. And then
he vanished.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
So he used to come back home every day and
he used to never step out once he entered the house,
so that day was an exception and his parents as
well as his wife said, you know, why are you
going out now? So then he had to invent this
excuse that, you know, the h the truck has been
caught by the cops. And it was also the night
(07:26):
when Tria had promised that they would consume their relationship.
She had used that as a carrot, you know the
donkey and the carrot story, right, so sex was the carrot.
They had never you know, sort of slept together in
all the while, so they just meet at cafes in
a whisper sweet nothings and then go back home. So
that night was the night when Pria said, Okay, tonight's
(07:50):
the night.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Well, let's talk about this. He encounters her. This happens
in twenty eighteen. What I remember, he encounters her in
February and he dies in May. I am amazed. I
did not think this would happen in this long period.
When you read a stat like a thousand men in
(08:11):
three ish years, How did she have time? This is
the kind of a long game here. This is not
a you know, I hang out with this guy for
a couple of weeks and draw them in. This seems
like this is quite a commitment. That's just that's a
lot of time to commit to all those men.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
So he was an accidental victim. He was at the
wrong place at the wrong time. They were looking for
a target. They were looking for a target because they
had they had debt to sort of wipe away. So
the story is told through three parallel perspectives, the criminals,
the victim, and subsequently that of the cops. So I'm
(08:48):
going to lay out the story from one perspective here
or else it'll get confusing. So this is the story
as seen from the mastermind pre Asset. Pre Asset was
a college dropout from a very small town India to
the big city of Gayport and was dazzled by the
fast life, you know, the glitz and the glamor. The
(09:08):
equivalent would be if someone went from say Marfa, Texas
or Deadwood to New York City or LA and get
stunned by the life there. She was a great student
in high school. Her father was a very well respected teacher,
and Priya was a celebrity in the community because she
was so good in studies and sports and all of that.
(09:30):
She was like a big fish, but in a very
small pond. But she had dreams and aspirations. Pria did
not want to be stuck in this small town. She
yearned for the big life. So when she joined college
in the big city of Giport, she was made cognizant
of a life that was way beyond her means and grasp,
(09:51):
and she wanted to have it at all costs. Her
grades fell as she began smoking, drinking to parties, and
blowing up the stipend and the money that her dad
used to send her, you know, to pay rent and
for her living expenses every month. Priya wanted to live
like the rich girls she saw at college, you know,
(10:13):
who had the cars and the clamor and the designer clothes,
but she couldn't afford right. So one day she responded
to a classified in the newspaper that promised a job
without any qualifications required, and it turned out to be
a gang that ran escort services employing college girls. So
(10:34):
she refused at first, but greed and ambition took over
as she realized that here was the shortcut that could
get her the good life. And so she started working
as an escort and she started earning good money, which
led her to now start owning the things that she
always was yearning for. The perfumes, the clothes. She used
(10:55):
to take trips and go for holidays, you know, flying
business class to Dring only you know, a mineral water.
Little things that gave this girl from a very small
town with image that here she had arrived. But greed
got the better of her and she wanted more, you know.
She started posting now about her own escort agency on
(11:18):
social media and escort websites. She was working for somebody
now She went online, posting her phone number on all
escort websites and saying that she had this huge array
of girls to choose from, as if she was the
one who owned the company. So when the customer made
(11:39):
a booking, she would tell them to meet in the
lobby of a hotel or a public space. There the
customer would handle over the money and she would tell them,
hang on, I'm sending the girl to you, and then
promptly vanish with the cash. And she also tried to
blackmail one of her ex boyfriends, threatening to put a
false case of TV on him domestic violence and then
(12:03):
told him that she was pregnant and all of that.
So she was on a roll. And the customer, obviously,
even after being blocked, would not complain to the police
because he would be a married man afraid to expose
his own infidelity to the family and the police. And
this chink in the armor is what Pria exploited with
(12:24):
over a thousand men.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Is sex work in India illegal, Yes, So everybody's taking
a risk here and so it's very I'm assuming profitable
for her to try to blackmail some of these men
who were married.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Yes, So sometimes she four to five customers a day,
each of whom would pay her three hundred dollars.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
She's giving out her personal information. How are they not
able to track her down or is she using burner
phones or.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah, So she would continuously make new profiles on Tinder.
She would throw away the sim cut as soon as
the job was done. Destroy the sim cut, take a
new one. So there's an ex boyfriend of us who
she was living in with, and the boyfriend realized that, hey,
this girl's a little too clinging and wanted to break
the relationship off. She started blackmailing him, saying, listen, if
(13:13):
you break up with me, I'm going to go to
the cops and tell them that you beat me up.
And listen, I'm also pregnant with your child. She said,
if you break up with me, I'll throw acid on
your sister's face. This harassment went on til the boyfriend
recorded these threats and then took it to the cops
and she was exposed. She was arrested, but within I
(13:34):
think two or three days, she was out. She and
another boyfriend tried to break into an ATAM machine and
they were caught, and again she was arrested, and even
then they let her go on Tinder. While she's doing
all of this, she meets a boy called Dick shan't
Camera on Tinder and supposedly they fall in love and
(13:57):
then they move in together. And this is something which
real sort of attracted me to. The story was here,
here are three individuals who want things that are way
beyond their means and grasp right. She wanted the good life.
Dushian wanted a girlfriend and know sex outside of marriage,
and Camera had dreams of becoming a hero. He wanted
(14:21):
to be an actor, and so he had previously ventured
to Mumbai, which is to be Bombay, to work in
the Indian film industry. Predictably, he had no talent nor
a godfather and soon raked up a debt of thirty
thousand dollars and so when the when the debtor started
calling up for the money, he ran away to Jaipur
(14:41):
to stay with a friend and that's when he sort
of met Priya online. So Bria not only got a boyfriend,
but one that came with his own debt. And then
Camra would continuously whine every day about how he needed
to pay off the debt or else he would be
in serious trouble. So meanwhile, Priya continued to hood wing.
(15:02):
So in spite of having a boyfriend, she would go
out to good wing these men and come back with
the earnings. Camara decided to stay on after he came
to know the truth because her money gave him the
good life. She was buying the you know, the the
cigarettes and the booze and the drugs. It was like
(15:23):
a He was a freeloader. And during this time is
when Priya meets a rich businessman called Dushank on Tinder
and she and her boyfriend hatch a plan to hold
him hostage in exchange for ransom, as this money would
help Camara erase his debt and also get some extra
bacon for Priya. On a designated day, she leos dushianth
(15:47):
into the apartment, where her boyfriend and an accomplice beat
him up and then demand ransom, only to discover that
Dushanth is not who he is and that is when
things go crazy. The brilliant Priya the mastermind, gives this
story or this image to camera and CAMRA's friend saying, hey, listen,
(16:09):
will kidnap him. Weited the money and then we'll let
him go. She knew it from the start that she
would have to kill it otherwise he would escape and
then he would report her to the cops. This is
something she kept to herself, even in the testimonial that
Camarra gave. It came as a surprise to them as well.
Now Camra could be lying and they had the intention
(16:29):
of killing him anyways. So what happened is they got in,
they said, okay, we're going to ask money. Dushian panicked
and said, hey, listen, I am not who you think
I am. They started checking his cards from his wallet,
so you know, the social Security number, card, all of that,
and they said, you're not Vivan, because Vivan is the
(16:51):
name that he had given, saying, no, where is Vivan,
And he said, there is no Vivan. This is me Dushan,
who was pretending to be Vivan, and they just panicked.
Because you've got to understand Priya as a character was
always she was an entitled brat because she was so
(17:12):
good in her studies and all of that. Everybody sort
of tampered her. As a kid. She was the celebrity
in her little town and her little community. So when
she came into this big, bad world, she was a nobody.
Nobody paid her attention. Like it's like saying, oh, I'm
a gold medalist in Deadwood and then you suddenly turn
(17:32):
up at the National Games and you're nowhere there. So
she was used to getting things and now she felt
that Dushian had outsmarted her. So Ego took a huge hit.
She said, I'm going to just get rid of So
they started beating the shit out of him. They put
a plastic bag over his head, they tried to suffocate him,
(17:54):
all of that, tortured him. They spent that one night thinking, oh,
now what should we do. So next month is when
they made the call to the father saying we want
the money. So he begged his father to save his life.
And they wanted ten lacks. How much would ten las be,
so about twelve thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
So they were asking for twelve thousand dollars in this
area is a significant amount of money, so not.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
In the area, but for the family that they were,
they were very, very middle class and life savings and
all of that. The father then went and broke his
fixed deposit which he had in the bank for three lacks,
which is four thousand US dollars, and he broke that
and he transferred the money. And because there was some
(18:42):
paperwork pending in Dushell's account, the bank manager couldn't do
the transfer. That God delayed. In the meantime, the kidnapp
was panicked, saying that now that we've asked for the money,
the dad probably will go to the cops and then
we'll get caught, so we might as well kill him.
And they kill him. The father called back from the
(19:05):
bank saying, hey, listen, I want to talk to my
son because his paperwork is pending and I need to
have a social Security card. And he's dead. So these
guys don't know what to do. So they pull out
from his phone and they send it because he had
it on the phone, and click a photograph, send it
across and he's already dead, and the father doesn't know,
(19:26):
and the father is running from pillar to post to
make the you know, the ansom money. These are little
things that really got me, you know that, the two
parallel stories that are happening, where you know, the father
doesn't know what's happening to the son at that same time,
and then they go and they buy a suitcase. By
(19:48):
then they kill him. The whole house is a mess.
So what they do first is they try to strangle
him and he doesn't die. They try to put a
pillow on top of his face. He doesn't die. So
then she gets the kitchen knife and stabs so gives
it to the boyfriend. The boyfriend tells and move back.
(20:09):
Then they do the stabbing. There were ten wounds on
his face and neck. He was already unconscious, so he
probably didn't know he was being killed. I mean his
body went into shock.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Let me ask you just about the psychology of Priya
and these two accomplices. So you know, when I read
the section about his injuries both before and after he
was murdered, the torture, the different methods, it just seems like,
I mean, America, we would call it overkill. It seems
like so much anger from I don't know if it
(20:43):
was all three of them or specifically Priya. I was
confused by the rage that she felt, but I guess disappointment.
I don't know what that would be.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
So, yeah, you're right, there was a lot of rage,
a lot of rage because Pria felt outsmarted. And this
also meant Dushel couldn't pay off his debt. So he
had already built this picture in his head saying, oh,
I'm going to pay off my debt and I'm going
to be debt free, and then everything just turned around.
(21:14):
So there was a huge amount of rage that was there.
I saw the photographs of Dushelt's copse when they found
it in the suitcase, and it's it's tragic when you
when you see his face and then you see what
they've done to him, it's it's horrible.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Did they receive the money as they were trying to
figure out how to dispose of his body? Because you
mentioned a suitcase and you also mentioned that his father
had started the process of wiring money out right.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
You've got to understand Pria's mental accumul I think that's
the right world. She's a smart cookie. Like if you've okay,
you've taken me hostage, right, and you call up my
family and say, listen, I need ten thousand dollars and
say my father tells you, you know, I can't give
that money to you. We don't have that much money,
(22:05):
you would probably say, oh shit, they are poor. What
did she catch on to the sentence was we don't
have that much money, therefore, how much money can you
give me? She turned that entire thinging she read it
to that situation of that little sentence saying we can't
give you that much money. So which means that they
(22:27):
had some amount of money, so she was wanting to
get her hand on that amount as well. Wow, so
they got rid of the body she got. They get
a text message on Dushan's phone saying transfer has been done,
and then this switch off and the father's left bewildered,
thinking I've just made the transfer. Before disconnecting, she abused
(22:51):
the father saying give me the rest of the money
by the evening or we'll kill in. You know, I'm disconnected,
And then of course the cops got into it by
the time, and then the sort of the chase began.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
So they called the police win as soon as they
receive the first ransom call okay, and the police are
encouraging them to go through with this and do the
money and all of that, or what's the game plan
for the police.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
So Duscian's father gets the phone call, rushes up to
the bank. A cousin of Duscian's goes to the police
station to laudge the complaint. The cops speaks to the
father on the phone saying I need more details. The
father says, don't bother me now, I need to transfer
the money to to save my son. I will speak
(23:42):
to you in detail when I'm done with this. In
the meantime, the cops put Ducian's phone on track. They
start in a sort of following the call records and
all of that. They start getting the call data records
from the previous day. So what happens is when the
cops sort of say, okay, I'm going to put Alex's
(24:03):
phone on track, which means that all calls like as
soon as it's used. Then the cops know, right because
they're they're the IMEI numbers. So even if you change
your SIM card, the IMEI number of your phone remains
the same. So that's the identification.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Oh it's interesting, I had not. I didn't know that.
So you learn stuff all the time from your book.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Okay, how to get away from the cops.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Or not in this case.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Not in this case. So the phone is put on track,
they get the previous day's call records. The cops start
talking to the friends and to the numbers that dushan
Hat called up, and they start sort of getting closer
and closer, sort of piecing the puzzle together. One of
the friends say, oh, you know, I heard that he
(24:51):
used to have he has a girlfriend in this area.
And the cops sort of says okay, And then when
Priya and her boyfriend make an ATM withdrawal from that
same area, the bank gives alert to the cops, so
they know, oh shit, that guy said the girlfriend is
in that area. The bank ATM is in that area,
(25:14):
which means they are nearby. Let's go, and they go
to the area now in the morning. When they went
to sort of dispose the body, they also bought a
false a fake registration plate for the car they were
by the way. They were using Dushan's own car, so
(25:35):
they dumped the body in his own car, took it around.
They filled gas at one point of time because they
realized that the gas was getting over, they stopped at
a patrol pump. We call it patrol pump in in there,
you can. We call it gas.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Station gas station. Yeah, we're good.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yeah, for the American audience, it's gas station. So they
halted at a gas station and bang opposite the gas
station was this guy who made you know, number for
cars in the fancy number plates and all of that.
So they bought a fake number plate from him, thinking that, oh,
we'll replace the number plate the real number plate on
(26:12):
Tusian's cars with the cops won't be able to catch us. Now,
that's one of the things that sort of they screw
up on and which then sort of leads the cops
to find them. So it was again they panicked in
a sense, once they had gotten rid of the body.
By the way, these guys had no clue that the
(26:33):
cops had found the body because they weren't watching news
or anything. So they were in the house and one
of them said, in panic, we'll get caught sitting in
the house because the cops will come and find us here,
not realizing that the cops had no clue. There was nothing.
There was nothing to actually pinpoint the house in which
(26:55):
they were staying. There was a dead man. There was
roughly one guy who had said, oh, this was the area,
but we're talking thousands of houses, right, one hundred thousand
houses in that area. There was no way the cops
could actually pinpoint to their location. They could have stayed
(27:16):
hidden for the next one week, and they could have
withdrawn money from different ATMs from across the city so
that their location is not compromise. Now I'm thinking like
a criminal, Yeah you are, but that's what I thought
you know, how stupid of them, because they panicked and
they came out of the house and got into the
car and sat. So there was a major railway station
(27:42):
ten minutes from where they lived. One of the plans
was to drive to the station, get onto any train
and get the hell out of Jaipurt. But they didn't.
The boyfriend had said, oh, I'm going to change the
license plate of the car, slept off, and next day
the cops. The only clue that the cops had was
(28:06):
the number plate of the car. That was the only
definitive clue that they had, right and ATM where they
withdrew from. The money from there already left from there,
so there was no way they could reach there on time.
But they knew that this was the number plate, and informant,
the police informant, you know, you have these informers like
(28:28):
Sherlock Holmes had, you know, his Baker Street gang, right,
So informers sort of called up the cop and said, hey, listen,
we've spotted a car with the same registration number in
this area. And again that area, which is called Bajaj
Nagger sort of tallied saying, oh, the girlfriend was in
(28:49):
Bajar Nagger. Atm wouldraw in Bajar Nagger. Car cited in
Bajar Nagger. They are there, and so the cops rushed
over there and the cars sitting on the side of
the road and they could figure two or three people
sitting inside. They surrounded the car, they knocked, rolled the
(29:10):
window down, and immediately the investigating officer he put his
hand in the keys so that they couldn't run, and said,
you know whose car is this? And they said, oh,
you know, it belongs to a friend of mine. So
they said cost So where is your friend? They said, oh,
you know, we had a fight and all of that,
(29:31):
and then one of them broke down and said, we
are the people who you're looking for.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
She made a poor choice and accomplices. I'm assuming she
had gotten away with so much up until now, I
mean years of grifting and and extorting and threatening and
getting out of it. So the police bring them to
the station and does anybody turn on each other?
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Course, there you go. I mean, the more people you
have in a conspiracy, the better that you ants is
going to be. They're going to turn on each other.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
So when the police arrest them, at that point of time,
the cop who's arrested them only know about this one case,
which is the murder. And they confess and all of that,
and of course, the boyfriend said, it's Pria who sort
of made them do it. Priah says, no, no, it's
my boyfriend who forced me to do it. And then
the third friend says, oh, no, no, I was innocent.
(30:24):
It was them, those two who forced me to take part.
So they start, obviously, they started blaming each other. And
at that point of time, all they knew was that
this murder had been committed. So then they went back
to the house. Immediately they saw the house and they
knew it was filled with blood. They had tried to
(30:45):
clean it, but the mattress was soaked with blood. It
was red in color, and blood had seat through the
mattress and got into the wooden bed on the floor,
and in the wash basin and all of that, and
then in the sink wash basin for India, sink for America.
When this news hit air on television channels saying oh,
(31:08):
this this is the girl that's been caught with the murder,
different police stations started calling the cop ops saying, hey, listen,
we've got a case against her. Oh right, I'd say, Oh,
she tried to blackmail her boyfriend. Oh, she's the one
who's tried to break into the atm. Oh she was
the one who's been calling people on Tinder. So suddenly
(31:31):
the provenance you know, sort of came through, you know,
it just fell. And that's when the cops realized that
they were not just dealing with a murderer, but an
extraordinary criminal.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Wow, what is her reaction? I mean, really, So.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
There was a female journalist who got access to her,
I think about a month after she was arrested. She said,
I was doing social work. I was not calling people.
I was doing social work because I was punishing married
men who wanted to stray. Okay, so I was doing
social work.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
That's a smart argument.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
So her what sense of justice? In her head? She
had the savior complex, right, and of course she thought
she was superior to everybody else, and so this is
how she justified it in her head, and she saw
no wrong. You know, at one point of time in
the video you will see in which I talk about
the body language of Ria said during that interview, So
(32:32):
the journalist asks her, oh, what you know that knife
which you used on Dushan, where did you get it from?
And she slips saying, oh, I should have used that
knife for my ex boyfriend and killed him too. You
know the fact that she thinks she can get away
with it because she has gotten away all these times
(32:53):
and she wasn't going to get away this time. So yeah,
So when you study that video and it's in you
see her body language and she smiles to the camera
as if she is not bothered.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Yeah, you know, she says. Oh.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
She starts up the interview saying, oh, when I look
at cameras these days, I feel like breaking, you know,
as if she's like a you know, celebrity talking to
a paparazzi. So yeah, then that's what happened. And she
got caught along with her boyfriend, and immediately the three
of them had three separate lawyers. Each one hired their
(33:29):
own lawyer. They didn't want her her punishment to come
on to you know them as well.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
I don't know what the statistics are in India. In
the United States, I've read that criminal cases probably eighty
to ninety percent are settled with plea deals. Is that
the case in India also, or do they tend to
take these to trial.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
No, no, no, no, okay, no trying, absolute trial, absolutely
try And this is a rarest of rare case. Cold
blooded murder. Twenty twenty three November is when the final
conviction happened. Okay, So we're talking about five years, So
the legal process is a little slow in India. We
(34:11):
have lots of pending cases in court, so it took
five years for them to sort of come around. They
had lots of hearings in between. And also what happened
is in India it is you're innocent until you're proven guilty.
So the cops have to build a watertight case.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
And they did in this case. Right, there's a lot.
So ultimately, what ends up happening to the three of them,
I know they have three different trials or three different attorneys.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
So life imprisonment, okay.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
No hope for parole with any of them, no, okay.
What was Priya's reaction when the sentence was handed down.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
On the day the final sentence happened, I don't think
she'd come to court. I think only one of them
had come to court, but I'm quite sure she would
have said, well I don't deserve this. She would have
cooked up some story in her head to justify her
own actions and made herself feel the victim.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
This must have been, you know, I mean, it's obvious
with Duchan's family, how horrifying that must have been, this
whole experience. But her family, I was just thinking about.
You know, you said her father was sending her a
stipend to pay for bills and stuff, he sent her
to university, you know, all this, and it just must
have been devastating for her family. Also, did she have
(35:23):
any kind of support from them.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
So her father's a teacher, professor, a very well respected man, awful,
and he had dreams for this daughter. And it wasn't
that she wasn't smart. She was not a fabulous student.
She was an A grade student. So the father obviously
had sort of chalked out a future for her, had
seen it happen, had manifested that when she went to college,
(35:49):
he was supporting her. She started failing in college, and
then she got into that company, and that's when the
father sort of came to know about her shenanigans and
stopped paying the stipend and sot disolder, saying till you
get your you know things right, I'm not going to
give you the money or support you, which again would
(36:10):
have helped her to play the victim card again in
her own head. Right, Oh my god, you know the
world is against me. Her sister was the only one
she was in touch with her younger sister, and at
one point of time, Tria had mentioned to the sister saying,
I'm going to marry Dickshan Kamra because I love him.
The sister had said he's not the right guy for you,
(36:32):
and again she felt spited, saying, oh, you guys are
always against me. You never want my kind of a
conversation in the basta. I think during the trial, I
don't know whether her parents came and would have come
for the initial but I don't think they wanted to
be involved, and her father, being very righteous man, would
(36:52):
have said let the law take its course.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Did Camera or the other accomplice show any remorse or
anything throughout this? None of them had remorse.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
So again CAMRA's father again is another teacher, I think
luxious mother. By the time all of this happened, his
father passed away and she had sent Luxure, which is
the third guy, which is Comra's childhood friend, to college
with her life savings, thinking that once he gets educated,
he's going to get a job and he's going to
(37:23):
be the support system for the family because she's a
single mom. And here he was got embroiled in a murder,
so you know, now she's helpless. Remorse. I guess there
would have been some remorse, but it's too late now.
Like in my book, when I was writing it, I
came to a point where I said, Okay, Now, if
(37:44):
I was the criminal, I had these two routes to take.
Which is I would I'd said. At one point of time,
Lucian tells the kidnappers saying, listen, if my dad can't
get you the money, let me go and meet my
friends and I will collect the money from them and
come back to you. So they mistrust him, saying, oh,
(38:05):
you're going to run away. If I was preer, I
would have said, okay, Dick, shan't go with this guy.
He's got the car, go get the money, come back.
I wouldn't have resorted to murder. And again, they don't
know the law, so I guess I think it's for kidnapping.
It's seven years. They could have been caught serf seven
years and that's it. They didn't need to kill him.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
What happens with Duchant's wife and infant child is everything
okay with them now.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
They've come to terms with it, And also the November conviction,
the final conviction, has sort of given them a sense
of justice. They have been put away for life and
they will not be able to come out. But you
never sort of get over the loss of a loved one,
and especially when it's in circumstances as this. There's so
(38:59):
many questions you want to ask, why to begin with
a wife put us? Why?
Speaker 1 (39:04):
What are the lessons learned from this? And how did
this story impact you?
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Never trust anything that you see online. What's your back always?
And if it is too good to be true, it
probably is. The story impacted me because hers is a
wopped mind and I had to live in her head
for a year, so it really impacted me. I belong
to gen X and we grew up in such simpler times.
(39:30):
You know. The advent of technology has also brought with
it dangers and the people who are exploiting it for
the wrong reasons and with devious intentions, and so this
book becomes a very important read, especially for young adults
who spend hours online. At the end of the book
is an extended portion that wants people about the dangers
of online social interaction, fate profiles and how they can
(39:54):
identify them, and what to guard yourself during online dating
and also when it grabs, do its to meeting people
in the real world.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(40:38):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More
Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words pod m
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
The criminals as well as the victim now they are
not who they pretend to be to the outside world,
and they have dangerous alter egos.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:49):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. For this episode of Wicked Words,
we travel to India, where some of the world's most complicated,
(01:10):
most compelling true crime stories come from. This story is
one of those. It's about a female grifter turned killer
who seduced men for money but murdered one out of fear.
The book we're talking about is called Swipe Right to Kill.
The author is a nearbon poticharia. When you are at
(01:33):
a dinner party or talking to someone and someone says,
tell me about your book, what's it about. What are
the major themes that you pull from this story?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
So this at the heart is a story about aspirations, ambitions,
deception and greet It is about yearning for something that
is way out of one's league. Now, much like Icarus
and the Sun if you remember the story, dreaming and
having an ambition is good, but when it involves crime,
then it becomes dangerous territory. It's the story of the
(02:06):
shudest corn woman of India who used technology and the
lure of sex to corn over all your breath one
thousand men.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
How is that possible? I don't know how you have
that much time?
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah? Yeah, And she did it over over a period
of I think three years. So you know she used
to use, you know, leure of sex to corner of
a thousand men and then murdered one of them with
the help of her boyfriend and an accomplice. So the
book is also the way I see it. It's also
what fate. You know, whatever is meant to happen will
happen if you bout watch.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Your back introduce me to the victim. What was he like,
and you know, start building this profile of what he
wanted people to see, and then of course we find
out it's pretty different as we move through the story.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
The name of the victim is Dushian Sarma. You know,
he was he was a very middle class boy who
was married and had an infant child born and brought
up in a very traditional Indian kind of a million
and a family set up, you know, still living with
parents and with his wife and child in a city
(03:16):
called Jeppur, which is one of the biggest tourist spots
of India. At home, he was this person who would
pray every day. You know, he would wake up and
he would do his prayers, and he had a regular
nine to five job. He would go, you know for
his work and then come back on time. He was
a shy boy, but the wife remembers that on the
(03:38):
day that they got engaged, suddenly he turned into this
Bollywood hero and went down on his knees and you know,
sort of proposed to her and she was really obviously,
you know, blown off her feet. When he's at home,
Dushia was very shy, very conservative, very very loving, very
caring person. But what the family they did not know
(04:01):
was Dushan had an alter ego, and Dushan discovered the
joys of online dating and social media. Somebody told him
about Tinder, and he realized that here was this world
which was way beyond his own grasp, so to speak,
and yet he could now aspire to have it. The
(04:23):
exciting part was it didn't come with any responsibilities. He
could do what he want and be silent about it.
You know, what the family doesn't know is good news,
So he continued, So if you went to his social
media profiles, here's this guy with like ray bands and
and you know, colorful shirts, and he's like a like
(04:44):
a hero on social media. And then you cut to
him back home, he's this guy, you know, with a
with a pillock on his brow and he's praying to
God and all of that. So there was two parallel
lives was being led by Dushan and he sort of
was enjoying this, playing this game of hide and seek,
(05:04):
and then he made a very crucial mistake and that's
when things went south.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Now, how many women do we know that he had
encountered before he met the woman Priya Seth Right, is
that how I say her name?
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Okay, do we know how many people he had met
before he needs her?
Speaker 2 (05:26):
One of his friends made a comment to the police
saying that, oh, you know, he has girlfriends, but there
is no specific number that we know. It could be
two and she could have been the third, but that's
just an illusion. But is she the first? Note? Otherwise
(05:47):
the friend would not have made that comment.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
And his parents, whom he lived with, and his wife
nobody had a clue about any of this.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
No. Wow, He kept his two lives very, very separate.
So even now when the case unfolded, the wife was
still in denial, saying that, oh, you know, you guys
don't know him. Well, he couldn't have done all of this.
So he used to work in a mining company in
Jeopor itself. He was an office executive. The business land
(06:18):
tag is something he used for his alter ego online.
So he said that his profession as a businessman is
a very rich businessman from Delhi and that was the line.
But apart from that, I mean he used to work
in Jeipur. He was in a mining company. He used
to monitor sales even the day when he left the house.
(06:40):
He told his parents that he was going to work
because the cops had caught some So there was illegal
mining going on of stones and riverbedstones and the cops
were doing these busts in Jeipur at that point of time.
So he borrowed his dad's car and said, listen, I'm
going out with because the cops have caught one of
(07:01):
my trucks. I need to negotiate with them. And then
he vanished.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
So he used to come back home every day and
he used to never step out once he entered the house,
so that day was an exception and his parents as
well as his wife said, you know, why are you
going out now? So then he had to invent this
excuse that, you know, the h the truck has been
caught by the cops. And it was also the night
(07:26):
when Tria had promised that they would consume their relationship.
She had used that as a carrot, you know the
donkey and the carrot story, right, so sex was the carrot.
They had never you know, sort of slept together in
all the while, so they just meet at cafes in
a whisper sweet nothings and then go back home. So
that night was the night when Pria said, Okay, tonight's
(07:50):
the night.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Well, let's talk about this. He encounters her. This happens
in twenty eighteen. What I remember, he encounters her in
February and he dies in May. I am amazed. I
did not think this would happen in this long period.
When you read a stat like a thousand men in
(08:11):
three ish years, How did she have time? This is
the kind of a long game here. This is not
a you know, I hang out with this guy for
a couple of weeks and draw them in. This seems
like this is quite a commitment. That's just that's a
lot of time to commit to all those men.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
So he was an accidental victim. He was at the
wrong place at the wrong time. They were looking for
a target. They were looking for a target because they
had they had debt to sort of wipe away. So
the story is told through three parallel perspectives, the criminals,
the victim, and subsequently that of the cops. So I'm
(08:48):
going to lay out the story from one perspective here
or else it'll get confusing. So this is the story
as seen from the mastermind pre Asset. Pre Asset was
a college dropout from a very small town India to
the big city of Gayport and was dazzled by the
fast life, you know, the glitz and the glamor. The
(09:08):
equivalent would be if someone went from say Marfa, Texas
or Deadwood to New York City or LA and get
stunned by the life there. She was a great student
in high school. Her father was a very well respected teacher,
and Priya was a celebrity in the community because she
was so good in studies and sports and all of that.
(09:30):
She was like a big fish, but in a very
small pond. But she had dreams and aspirations. Pria did
not want to be stuck in this small town. She
yearned for the big life. So when she joined college
in the big city of Giport, she was made cognizant
of a life that was way beyond her means and grasp,
(09:51):
and she wanted to have it at all costs. Her
grades fell as she began smoking, drinking to parties, and
blowing up the stipend and the money that her dad
used to send her, you know, to pay rent and
for her living expenses every month. Priya wanted to live
like the rich girls she saw at college, you know,
(10:13):
who had the cars and the clamor and the designer clothes,
but she couldn't afford right. So one day she responded
to a classified in the newspaper that promised a job
without any qualifications required, and it turned out to be
a gang that ran escort services employing college girls. So
(10:34):
she refused at first, but greed and ambition took over
as she realized that here was the shortcut that could
get her the good life. And so she started working
as an escort and she started earning good money, which
led her to now start owning the things that she
always was yearning for. The perfumes, the clothes. She used
(10:55):
to take trips and go for holidays, you know, flying
business class to Dring only you know, a mineral water.
Little things that gave this girl from a very small
town with image that here she had arrived. But greed
got the better of her and she wanted more, you know.
She started posting now about her own escort agency on
(11:18):
social media and escort websites. She was working for somebody
now She went online, posting her phone number on all
escort websites and saying that she had this huge array
of girls to choose from, as if she was the
one who owned the company. So when the customer made
(11:39):
a booking, she would tell them to meet in the
lobby of a hotel or a public space. There the
customer would handle over the money and she would tell them,
hang on, I'm sending the girl to you, and then
promptly vanish with the cash. And she also tried to
blackmail one of her ex boyfriends, threatening to put a
false case of TV on him domestic violence and then
(12:03):
told him that she was pregnant and all of that.
So she was on a roll. And the customer, obviously,
even after being blocked, would not complain to the police
because he would be a married man afraid to expose
his own infidelity to the family and the police. And
this chink in the armor is what Pria exploited with
(12:24):
over a thousand men.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Is sex work in India illegal, Yes, So everybody's taking
a risk here and so it's very I'm assuming profitable
for her to try to blackmail some of these men
who were married.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Yes, So sometimes she four to five customers a day,
each of whom would pay her three hundred dollars.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
She's giving out her personal information. How are they not
able to track her down or is she using burner
phones or.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah, So she would continuously make new profiles on Tinder.
She would throw away the sim cut as soon as
the job was done. Destroy the sim cut, take a
new one. So there's an ex boyfriend of us who
she was living in with, and the boyfriend realized that, hey,
this girl's a little too clinging and wanted to break
the relationship off. She started blackmailing him, saying, listen, if
(13:13):
you break up with me, I'm going to go to
the cops and tell them that you beat me up.
And listen, I'm also pregnant with your child. She said,
if you break up with me, I'll throw acid on
your sister's face. This harassment went on til the boyfriend
recorded these threats and then took it to the cops
and she was exposed. She was arrested, but within I
(13:34):
think two or three days, she was out. She and
another boyfriend tried to break into an ATAM machine and
they were caught, and again she was arrested, and even
then they let her go on Tinder. While she's doing
all of this, she meets a boy called Dick shan't
Camera on Tinder and supposedly they fall in love and
(13:57):
then they move in together. And this is something which
real sort of attracted me to. The story was here,
here are three individuals who want things that are way
beyond their means and grasp right. She wanted the good life.
Dushian wanted a girlfriend and know sex outside of marriage,
and Camera had dreams of becoming a hero. He wanted
(14:21):
to be an actor, and so he had previously ventured
to Mumbai, which is to be Bombay, to work in
the Indian film industry. Predictably, he had no talent nor
a godfather and soon raked up a debt of thirty
thousand dollars and so when the when the debtor started
calling up for the money, he ran away to Jaipur
(14:41):
to stay with a friend and that's when he sort
of met Priya online. So Bria not only got a boyfriend,
but one that came with his own debt. And then
Camra would continuously whine every day about how he needed
to pay off the debt or else he would be
in serious trouble. So meanwhile, Priya continued to hood wing.
(15:02):
So in spite of having a boyfriend, she would go
out to good wing these men and come back with
the earnings. Camara decided to stay on after he came
to know the truth because her money gave him the
good life. She was buying the you know, the the
cigarettes and the booze and the drugs. It was like
(15:23):
a He was a freeloader. And during this time is
when Priya meets a rich businessman called Dushank on Tinder
and she and her boyfriend hatch a plan to hold
him hostage in exchange for ransom, as this money would
help Camara erase his debt and also get some extra
bacon for Priya. On a designated day, she leos dushianth
(15:47):
into the apartment, where her boyfriend and an accomplice beat
him up and then demand ransom, only to discover that
Dushanth is not who he is and that is when
things go crazy. The brilliant Priya the mastermind, gives this
story or this image to camera and CAMRA's friend saying, hey, listen,
(16:09):
will kidnap him. Weited the money and then we'll let
him go. She knew it from the start that she
would have to kill it otherwise he would escape and
then he would report her to the cops. This is
something she kept to herself, even in the testimonial that
Camarra gave. It came as a surprise to them as well.
Now Camra could be lying and they had the intention
(16:29):
of killing him anyways. So what happened is they got in,
they said, okay, we're going to ask money. Dushian panicked
and said, hey, listen, I am not who you think
I am. They started checking his cards from his wallet,
so you know, the social Security number, card, all of that,
and they said, you're not Vivan, because Vivan is the
(16:51):
name that he had given, saying, no, where is Vivan,
And he said, there is no Vivan. This is me Dushan,
who was pretending to be Vivan, and they just panicked.
Because you've got to understand Priya as a character was
always she was an entitled brat because she was so
(17:12):
good in her studies and all of that. Everybody sort
of tampered her. As a kid. She was the celebrity
in her little town and her little community. So when
she came into this big, bad world, she was a nobody.
Nobody paid her attention. Like it's like saying, oh, I'm
a gold medalist in Deadwood and then you suddenly turn
(17:32):
up at the National Games and you're nowhere there. So
she was used to getting things and now she felt
that Dushian had outsmarted her. So Ego took a huge hit.
She said, I'm going to just get rid of So
they started beating the shit out of him. They put
a plastic bag over his head, they tried to suffocate him,
(17:54):
all of that, tortured him. They spent that one night thinking, oh,
now what should we do. So next month is when
they made the call to the father saying we want
the money. So he begged his father to save his life.
And they wanted ten lacks. How much would ten las be,
so about twelve thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
So they were asking for twelve thousand dollars in this
area is a significant amount of money, so not.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
In the area, but for the family that they were,
they were very, very middle class and life savings and
all of that. The father then went and broke his
fixed deposit which he had in the bank for three lacks,
which is four thousand US dollars, and he broke that
and he transferred the money. And because there was some
(18:42):
paperwork pending in Dushell's account, the bank manager couldn't do
the transfer. That God delayed. In the meantime, the kidnapp
was panicked, saying that now that we've asked for the money,
the dad probably will go to the cops and then
we'll get caught, so we might as well kill him.
And they kill him. The father called back from the
(19:05):
bank saying, hey, listen, I want to talk to my
son because his paperwork is pending and I need to
have a social Security card. And he's dead. So these
guys don't know what to do. So they pull out
from his phone and they send it because he had
it on the phone, and click a photograph, send it
across and he's already dead, and the father doesn't know,
(19:26):
and the father is running from pillar to post to
make the you know, the ansom money. These are little
things that really got me, you know that, the two
parallel stories that are happening, where you know, the father
doesn't know what's happening to the son at that same time,
and then they go and they buy a suitcase. By
(19:48):
then they kill him. The whole house is a mess.
So what they do first is they try to strangle
him and he doesn't die. They try to put a
pillow on top of his face. He doesn't die. So
then she gets the kitchen knife and stabs so gives
it to the boyfriend. The boyfriend tells and move back.
(20:09):
Then they do the stabbing. There were ten wounds on
his face and neck. He was already unconscious, so he
probably didn't know he was being killed. I mean his
body went into shock.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Let me ask you just about the psychology of Priya
and these two accomplices. So you know, when I read
the section about his injuries both before and after he
was murdered, the torture, the different methods, it just seems like,
I mean, America, we would call it overkill. It seems
like so much anger from I don't know if it
(20:43):
was all three of them or specifically Priya. I was
confused by the rage that she felt, but I guess disappointment.
I don't know what that would be.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
So, yeah, you're right, there was a lot of rage,
a lot of rage because Pria felt outsmarted. And this
also meant Dushel couldn't pay off his debt. So he
had already built this picture in his head saying, oh,
I'm going to pay off my debt and I'm going
to be debt free, and then everything just turned around.
(21:14):
So there was a huge amount of rage that was there.
I saw the photographs of Dushelt's copse when they found
it in the suitcase, and it's it's tragic when you
when you see his face and then you see what
they've done to him, it's it's horrible.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Did they receive the money as they were trying to
figure out how to dispose of his body? Because you
mentioned a suitcase and you also mentioned that his father
had started the process of wiring money out right.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
You've got to understand Pria's mental accumul I think that's
the right world. She's a smart cookie. Like if you've okay,
you've taken me hostage, right, and you call up my
family and say, listen, I need ten thousand dollars and
say my father tells you, you know, I can't give
that money to you. We don't have that much money,
(22:05):
you would probably say, oh shit, they are poor. What
did she catch on to the sentence was we don't
have that much money, therefore, how much money can you
give me? She turned that entire thinging she read it
to that situation of that little sentence saying we can't
give you that much money. So which means that they
(22:27):
had some amount of money, so she was wanting to
get her hand on that amount as well. Wow, so
they got rid of the body she got. They get
a text message on Dushan's phone saying transfer has been done,
and then this switch off and the father's left bewildered,
thinking I've just made the transfer. Before disconnecting, she abused
(22:51):
the father saying give me the rest of the money
by the evening or we'll kill in. You know, I'm disconnected,
And then of course the cops got into it by
the time, and then the sort of the chase began.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
So they called the police win as soon as they
receive the first ransom call okay, and the police are
encouraging them to go through with this and do the
money and all of that, or what's the game plan
for the police.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
So Duscian's father gets the phone call, rushes up to
the bank. A cousin of Duscian's goes to the police
station to laudge the complaint. The cops speaks to the
father on the phone saying I need more details. The
father says, don't bother me now, I need to transfer
the money to to save my son. I will speak
(23:42):
to you in detail when I'm done with this. In
the meantime, the cops put Ducian's phone on track. They
start in a sort of following the call records and
all of that. They start getting the call data records
from the previous day. So what happens is when the
cops sort of say, okay, I'm going to put Alex's
(24:03):
phone on track, which means that all calls like as
soon as it's used. Then the cops know, right because
they're they're the IMEI numbers. So even if you change
your SIM card, the IMEI number of your phone remains
the same. So that's the identification.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Oh it's interesting, I had not. I didn't know that.
So you learn stuff all the time from your book.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Okay, how to get away from the cops.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Or not in this case.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Not in this case. So the phone is put on track,
they get the previous day's call records. The cops start
talking to the friends and to the numbers that dushan
Hat called up, and they start sort of getting closer
and closer, sort of piecing the puzzle together. One of
the friends say, oh, you know, I heard that he
(24:51):
used to have he has a girlfriend in this area.
And the cops sort of says okay, And then when
Priya and her boyfriend make an ATM withdrawal from that
same area, the bank gives alert to the cops, so
they know, oh shit, that guy said the girlfriend is
in that area. The bank ATM is in that area,
(25:14):
which means they are nearby. Let's go, and they go
to the area now in the morning. When they went
to sort of dispose the body, they also bought a
false a fake registration plate for the car they were
by the way. They were using Dushan's own car, so
(25:35):
they dumped the body in his own car, took it around.
They filled gas at one point of time because they
realized that the gas was getting over, they stopped at
a patrol pump. We call it patrol pump in in there,
you can. We call it gas.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Station gas station. Yeah, we're good.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yeah, for the American audience, it's gas station. So they
halted at a gas station and bang opposite the gas
station was this guy who made you know, number for
cars in the fancy number plates and all of that.
So they bought a fake number plate from him, thinking that, oh,
we'll replace the number plate the real number plate on
(26:12):
Tusian's cars with the cops won't be able to catch us. Now,
that's one of the things that sort of they screw
up on and which then sort of leads the cops
to find them. So it was again they panicked in
a sense, once they had gotten rid of the body.
By the way, these guys had no clue that the
(26:33):
cops had found the body because they weren't watching news
or anything. So they were in the house and one
of them said, in panic, we'll get caught sitting in
the house because the cops will come and find us here,
not realizing that the cops had no clue. There was nothing.
There was nothing to actually pinpoint the house in which
(26:55):
they were staying. There was a dead man. There was
roughly one guy who had said, oh, this was the area,
but we're talking thousands of houses, right, one hundred thousand
houses in that area. There was no way the cops
could actually pinpoint to their location. They could have stayed
(27:16):
hidden for the next one week, and they could have
withdrawn money from different ATMs from across the city so
that their location is not compromise. Now I'm thinking like
a criminal, Yeah you are, but that's what I thought
you know, how stupid of them, because they panicked and
they came out of the house and got into the
car and sat. So there was a major railway station
(27:42):
ten minutes from where they lived. One of the plans
was to drive to the station, get onto any train
and get the hell out of Jaipurt. But they didn't.
The boyfriend had said, oh, I'm going to change the
license plate of the car, slept off, and next day
the cops. The only clue that the cops had was
(28:06):
the number plate of the car. That was the only
definitive clue that they had, right and ATM where they
withdrew from. The money from there already left from there,
so there was no way they could reach there on time.
But they knew that this was the number plate, and informant,
the police informant, you know, you have these informers like
(28:28):
Sherlock Holmes had, you know, his Baker Street gang, right,
So informers sort of called up the cop and said, hey, listen,
we've spotted a car with the same registration number in
this area. And again that area, which is called Bajaj
Nagger sort of tallied saying, oh, the girlfriend was in
(28:49):
Bajar Nagger. Atm wouldraw in Bajar Nagger. Car cited in
Bajar Nagger. They are there, and so the cops rushed
over there and the cars sitting on the side of
the road and they could figure two or three people
sitting inside. They surrounded the car, they knocked, rolled the
(29:10):
window down, and immediately the investigating officer he put his
hand in the keys so that they couldn't run, and said,
you know whose car is this? And they said, oh,
you know, it belongs to a friend of mine. So
they said cost So where is your friend? They said, oh,
you know, we had a fight and all of that,
(29:31):
and then one of them broke down and said, we
are the people who you're looking for.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
She made a poor choice and accomplices. I'm assuming she
had gotten away with so much up until now, I
mean years of grifting and and extorting and threatening and
getting out of it. So the police bring them to
the station and does anybody turn on each other?
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Course, there you go. I mean, the more people you
have in a conspiracy, the better that you ants is
going to be. They're going to turn on each other.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
So when the police arrest them, at that point of time,
the cop who's arrested them only know about this one case,
which is the murder. And they confess and all of that,
and of course, the boyfriend said, it's Pria who sort
of made them do it. Priah says, no, no, it's
my boyfriend who forced me to do it. And then
the third friend says, oh, no, no, I was innocent.
(30:24):
It was them, those two who forced me to take part.
So they start, obviously, they started blaming each other. And
at that point of time, all they knew was that
this murder had been committed. So then they went back
to the house. Immediately they saw the house and they
knew it was filled with blood. They had tried to
(30:45):
clean it, but the mattress was soaked with blood. It
was red in color, and blood had seat through the
mattress and got into the wooden bed on the floor,
and in the wash basin and all of that, and
then in the sink wash basin for India, sink for America.
When this news hit air on television channels saying oh,
(31:08):
this this is the girl that's been caught with the murder,
different police stations started calling the cop ops saying, hey, listen,
we've got a case against her. Oh right, I'd say, Oh,
she tried to blackmail her boyfriend. Oh, she's the one
who's tried to break into the atm. Oh she was
the one who's been calling people on Tinder. So suddenly
(31:31):
the provenance you know, sort of came through, you know,
it just fell. And that's when the cops realized that
they were not just dealing with a murderer, but an
extraordinary criminal.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Wow, what is her reaction? I mean, really, So.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
There was a female journalist who got access to her,
I think about a month after she was arrested. She said,
I was doing social work. I was not calling people.
I was doing social work because I was punishing married
men who wanted to stray. Okay, so I was doing
social work.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
That's a smart argument.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
So her what sense of justice? In her head? She
had the savior complex, right, and of course she thought
she was superior to everybody else, and so this is
how she justified it in her head, and she saw
no wrong. You know, at one point of time in
the video you will see in which I talk about
the body language of Ria said during that interview, So
(32:32):
the journalist asks her, oh, what you know that knife
which you used on Dushan, where did you get it from?
And she slips saying, oh, I should have used that
knife for my ex boyfriend and killed him too. You
know the fact that she thinks she can get away
with it because she has gotten away all these times
(32:53):
and she wasn't going to get away this time. So yeah,
So when you study that video and it's in you
see her body language and she smiles to the camera
as if she is not bothered.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Yeah, you know, she says. Oh.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
She starts up the interview saying, oh, when I look
at cameras these days, I feel like breaking, you know,
as if she's like a you know, celebrity talking to
a paparazzi. So yeah, then that's what happened. And she
got caught along with her boyfriend, and immediately the three
of them had three separate lawyers. Each one hired their
(33:29):
own lawyer. They didn't want her her punishment to come
on to you know them as well.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
I don't know what the statistics are in India. In
the United States, I've read that criminal cases probably eighty
to ninety percent are settled with plea deals. Is that
the case in India also, or do they tend to
take these to trial.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
No, no, no, no, okay, no trying, absolute trial, absolutely
try And this is a rarest of rare case. Cold
blooded murder. Twenty twenty three November is when the final
conviction happened. Okay, So we're talking about five years, So
the legal process is a little slow in India. We
(34:11):
have lots of pending cases in court, so it took
five years for them to sort of come around. They
had lots of hearings in between. And also what happened
is in India it is you're innocent until you're proven guilty.
So the cops have to build a watertight case.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
And they did in this case. Right, there's a lot.
So ultimately, what ends up happening to the three of them,
I know they have three different trials or three different attorneys.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
So life imprisonment, okay.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
No hope for parole with any of them, no, okay.
What was Priya's reaction when the sentence was handed down.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
On the day the final sentence happened, I don't think
she'd come to court. I think only one of them
had come to court, but I'm quite sure she would
have said, well I don't deserve this. She would have
cooked up some story in her head to justify her
own actions and made herself feel the victim.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
This must have been, you know, I mean, it's obvious
with Duchan's family, how horrifying that must have been, this
whole experience. But her family, I was just thinking about.
You know, you said her father was sending her a
stipend to pay for bills and stuff, he sent her
to university, you know, all this, and it just must
have been devastating for her family. Also, did she have
(35:23):
any kind of support from them.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
So her father's a teacher, professor, a very well respected man, awful,
and he had dreams for this daughter. And it wasn't
that she wasn't smart. She was not a fabulous student.
She was an A grade student. So the father obviously
had sort of chalked out a future for her, had
seen it happen, had manifested that when she went to college,
(35:49):
he was supporting her. She started failing in college, and
then she got into that company, and that's when the
father sort of came to know about her shenanigans and
stopped paying the stipend and sot disolder, saying till you
get your you know things right, I'm not going to
give you the money or support you, which again would
(36:10):
have helped her to play the victim card again in
her own head. Right, Oh my god, you know the
world is against me. Her sister was the only one
she was in touch with her younger sister, and at
one point of time, Tria had mentioned to the sister saying,
I'm going to marry Dickshan Kamra because I love him.
The sister had said he's not the right guy for you,
(36:32):
and again she felt spited, saying, oh, you guys are
always against me. You never want my kind of a
conversation in the basta. I think during the trial, I
don't know whether her parents came and would have come
for the initial but I don't think they wanted to
be involved, and her father, being very righteous man, would
(36:52):
have said let the law take its course.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Did Camera or the other accomplice show any remorse or
anything throughout this? None of them had remorse.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
So again CAMRA's father again is another teacher, I think
luxious mother. By the time all of this happened, his
father passed away and she had sent Luxure, which is
the third guy, which is Comra's childhood friend, to college
with her life savings, thinking that once he gets educated,
he's going to get a job and he's going to
(37:23):
be the support system for the family because she's a
single mom. And here he was got embroiled in a murder,
so you know, now she's helpless. Remorse. I guess there
would have been some remorse, but it's too late now.
Like in my book, when I was writing it, I
came to a point where I said, Okay, Now, if
(37:44):
I was the criminal, I had these two routes to take.
Which is I would I'd said. At one point of time,
Lucian tells the kidnappers saying, listen, if my dad can't
get you the money, let me go and meet my
friends and I will collect the money from them and
come back to you. So they mistrust him, saying, oh,
(38:05):
you're going to run away. If I was preer, I
would have said, okay, Dick, shan't go with this guy.
He's got the car, go get the money, come back.
I wouldn't have resorted to murder. And again, they don't
know the law, so I guess I think it's for kidnapping.
It's seven years. They could have been caught serf seven
years and that's it. They didn't need to kill him.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
What happens with Duchant's wife and infant child is everything
okay with them now.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
They've come to terms with it, And also the November conviction,
the final conviction, has sort of given them a sense
of justice. They have been put away for life and
they will not be able to come out. But you
never sort of get over the loss of a loved one,
and especially when it's in circumstances as this. There's so
(38:59):
many questions you want to ask, why to begin with
a wife put us? Why?
Speaker 1 (39:04):
What are the lessons learned from this? And how did
this story impact you?
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Never trust anything that you see online. What's your back always?
And if it is too good to be true, it
probably is. The story impacted me because hers is a
wopped mind and I had to live in her head
for a year, so it really impacted me. I belong
to gen X and we grew up in such simpler times.
(39:30):
You know. The advent of technology has also brought with
it dangers and the people who are exploiting it for
the wrong reasons and with devious intentions, and so this
book becomes a very important read, especially for young adults
who spend hours online. At the end of the book
is an extended portion that wants people about the dangers
of online social interaction, fate profiles and how they can
(39:54):
identify them, and what to guard yourself during online dating
and also when it grabs, do its to meeting people
in the real world.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(40:38):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More
Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words pod m
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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