The Mehta Murder
In the spring of 2018, a man was found dead in his study in a South Delhi farmhouse.
The man was Rajiv Mehta, fifty-eight years old, Chairman and Managing Director of Mehta Infrastructure and Construction Limited, MICL, a company worth several thousand crores of rupees, with contracts spanning highways, metro rail extensions, and commercial real estate across six states. He was found by his personal secretary at seven in the morning, slumped in his leather chair, a half-drunk glass of whisky on the desk and no visible sign of trauma.
The initial assumption was cardiac arrest. The family physician was called. A death certificate was about to be issued when the man’s younger brother, Suresh Mehta, who had been in a bitter and very public legal dispute with Rajiv over the company’s succession, arrived and made a scene.
“This is not natural,” he had apparently shouted in the farmhouse driveway, which was unhelpful but turned out to be correct.
The post-mortem, conducted at AIIMS, threw up a finding that changed everything, traces of a digitalis glycoside compound in the blood, a chemical derived from the foxglove plant, used historically in cardiac medication but capable, in the wrong dose or combination, of causing fatal arrhythmia. The victim had a known heart condition and was on medication. The question was whether the digitalis he had ingested was his own medication taken correctly, or something else, given to him in exactly the concentration needed to make a healthy heart event look exactly like a natural one.
The case was sensitive on multiple levels. Rajiv Mehta had friends in high places, ministers, bureaucrats, a Supreme Court judge who had been to his daughter’s wedding. Three of his company’s contracts were under investigation by a parliamentary committee. His family included a brother who had motive, a wife who had been conducting what several witnesses described as an ‘unusual friendship’ with a younger man, an adult son who owed the company four crores in personal expenses, and a business partner who had recently been eased out of his directorship.
The Delhi Police, recognising the political dynamite in every corner of the case, requested that the CBI take over. The CBI agreed. A Special Investigation Team was constituted. The team would include CBI officers, a financial crimes specialist, and given the critical nature of the forensic evidence, an independent forensic pathologist of impeccable credentials.
Deputy Inspector General Radha Verma was assigned to lead the SIT.
The forensic specialist on the case was Dr. Shyla Krishnamurthy.
Neither knew the other was on the list until the first briefing.