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At 4am on August 28 2015, a phone rang inside the home of a man who lived in a little town in rural India.
It was the police calling and they needed this man to get up immediately and lead them to a very particular spot in a nearby forest.
The man didn't need to ask any questions.
He knew what this was about.
Two hours later, he was walking down a sloped, muddy path in those woods with a horde of police officers right behind him.
When he reached the bottom of a hill, he stopped, looked around for a moment and then, when he saw the mango tree, he knew he was in the right spot.
He raised his hand and pointed there.
He said dig there.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast, because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on monday and once on thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, please offer to house sit for the Amazon Music Follow button and then immediately list their place on Airbnb.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
It begins here.
From the director of It comes It.
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Sheena Bora walked through the big iron gates of St.
Xavier's College in Mumbai India, and looked up in awe at the grand cathedral-like buildings that rose up all around her.
It was July 2006 and it was Sheena's first day of college.
The 19-year-old had worked hard all through high school, even taking extra classes in the evenings, to make sure she remained at the top of her class.
Her favorite subjects were math and science, and so at St.
Xavier's, she had decided to major in economics, which is a subject that includes elements of both math and science.
On this July day, Sheena wore leggings under a flowing deep blue top that covered her shoulders, in keeping with St.
Xavier's strict dress code.
But even dressed modestly, Sheena was very beautiful.
She had long dark hair, big brown eyes, and a wide sweet smile.
But she was shy and nervous and she didn't know anyone at the school yet.
So to avoid any awkward interactions with new people, she intentionally walked quickly and kept her eyes looking straight ahead.
As she hustled deeper into the sprawling campus, Sheena passed through a garden with palm and mango and papaya trees, and then she walked under a graceful stone arch engraved with the name of the school.
Just past that archway, Sheena checked in at the security desk and then she turned right and walked toward the middle of the campus, which was an open plaza centered on a gothic chapel with tall green stained glass windows.
When she reached the place, Sheena stopped to look around.
It was packed with students laughing and shouting, and for a second she was overcome with amazement at where her life had taken her.
Until just a few months earlier, Sheena had had little hope for her future.
She was a poor girl from a crowded city called Guwahati, located almost 2000 miles to the east of her new college.
Her family counted every rupee, which is Indian money, and some nights dinner was just rice.
But now, here she was at one of the very best colleges in India.
St.
Xavier's had everything state-of-the-art computer labs, a library with more than a million books, and it even had its own museum.
The school admitted only about a thousand undergraduate students each year, and now Sheena was one of those lucky few.
Sheena took one more look at all the people in the plaza and then started walking again.
She crossed to the other side of the plaza and walked inside of a stone four-story building.
After going upstairs to the second floor, sheena turned down a long white hallway and when she reached the end of it, she saw a sign hanging over a door on the left-hand side that read multimedia room.
This was where her first class was scheduled to be.
Sheena opened the door and stepped inside, but it was empty.
She was the first person to arrive.
The room was huge, with high ceilings, brand new desks and a big video screen down in front for the teacher to use.
Sheena sat down at a desk in the front row.
She pulled a notebook and pen out of her bag and then, after tucking the bag back under her seat, Sheena began to wait.
After a few minutes, Sheena heard the door open behind her and she turned around and saw other students starting to file inside.
The room eventually filled up with more than 100 people with almost every desk taken.
Then, after all the students had arrived, the professor came in walking quickly and swinging a briefcase.
He walked down the middle aisle until he reached the front of the class where he put his briefcase down on the table.
He wrote his name on the whiteboard, Then he turned to face the class.
A few minutes after that, Sheena was furiously scribbling notes down and listening to her classmates ask and answer questions about economic theory.
Sheena smiled.
She loved college already.
But even though her initial impression of college was a good one, Sheena knew it was going to take some time to get adjusted to her new life in Mumbai.
It was already so much different than the life she had always known in Guwahati.
But over the following days and weeks Sheena would get more comfortable with her surroundings and she would even muster the courage to start casual conversations with her new classmates.
And it would turn out, despite her shy demeanor, Sheena's classmates were very much drawn to her.
Sheena was a good listener, she was kind, and she worked incredibly hard.
And in time Sheena would have a little core group of friends that she shared notes with and ate lunch with at the campus cafe.
And it wasn't just students that took a liking to Sheena.
Her professors liked her as well.
Sheena always went above and beyond on every assignment she was given.
One time when a class required data about a little rural town, Sheena actually traveled the 250 miles to the town to find the data herself, instead of using old information posted online.
But despite how well-liked Sheena was, there was something very odd about her that her classmates and her professors noticed about her almost immediately.
And that was all the mysterious phone calls she got.
Sheena would be sitting in one of her classes, in her regular spot right up front, diligently taking notes and completely focused on the subject matter, and then her phone would vibrate.
She'd reach down, rummage through her bag under her feet and check to see who was calling, and there was one name that, if she saw it on her screen, would change Sheena's entire demeanor.
She would instantly pack up her things, nod a quick silent apology to her professor and then rush out of the classroom without telling anyone what was going on.
When her friends asked her about these calls, Sheena would just say that it was her older sister Indrani, who was calling her and that Indrani was just overprotective and sometimes needed Sheena to come home right away.
Sheena's friends didn't really understand this, but when they tried to fish for more information, Sheena would just start acting uncomfortable and try to change the subject.
In fact, Sheena never really talked about her family or personal life at all.
Her friends could sense it was a painful topic, and they were right.
What Sheena didn't share widely was that before she had come to Mumbai, her life was very troubled, and not just because her family did not have much money.
When Sheena and her little brother Mikael were just babies, their mother abandoned them.
Sheena's mother had always dreamed of fame and riches, and so when she got the opportunity to go to a big city to study, she took it, leaving her kids behind.
And so Sheena and her brother had grown up in a little house, in a narrow alleyway, with their grandparents.
The grandparents had tried their best, but it was very hard.
Mikael had mental health issues, and Sheena was always sad because she missed her mother terribly.
Sheena would write about her mother in her diary.
Some days, she would wonder about why her mother had not come back.
Did she not love her children?
Other days, Sheena would find herself dreaming of doing exactly what her mother had done leaving and going to college in a big city.
And it was Indrani, the overprotective older sister who always called in the middle of Sheena's classes, who had made Sheena's college dream come true.
Indrani was about 15 years older than Sheena.
She had left Guwahati years earlier, determined to make a better life for herself, and with her charm and fierce work ethic, she had done it.
She was glamorous and beautiful and just recently married to a man named Peter Mukharjee, who ran India's most successful TV network and who had been named one of India's 50 most powerful people.
Indrani was a socialite, a businesswoman, and a media tycoon.
Some people even called her the first lady of Indian television.
But no matter how famous and wealthy Indrani got, she never forgot about her little brother and sister back in Guwahati.
And so finally, in 2006, Indrani came back to Guwahati and pulled her younger siblings out of poverty and away from their little house in the alley.
Indrani sent Mikhail to a school in the south of India and then to treatment for his mental health issues, and then she brought Sheena back west with her to Mumbai to go to school at St.
Xavier's.
So now, when Sheena's phone rang and she saw it was Indrani calling her, no matter where she was or what she was doing, she would always stop and answer that call.
She felt like she owed that to her older sister for all she had done for her.
When Sheena had first arrived in Mumbai, she lived for a while with Indrani and Indrani's husband Peter, in their penthouse apartment in a luxury building in South Mumbai.
But by late 2007, about one year into her time at St.
Xavier's Sheena had found a place of her own, a pretty little flat near her school, in a neighborhood called Kalaba, right on the Arabian Sea.
And while Monday through Friday Sheena stayed at school or her flat and focused exclusively on her schoolwork, she still found time every weekend to go visit with Indrani and Peter at their penthouse.
And it was during one of those weekend visits that Sheena met the man who would forever change the course of her life.
It was a quiet Sunday afternoon toward the end of 2007, during Mumbai's monsoon season, when it rains almost continually for months.
Sheena was sitting on her sister's couch reading a book when, from behind her, she heard the door to the penthouse open, and then she heard a young man's deep voice calling out a greeting to Indrani and Peter.
Sheena folded the page of her book, laid it on her lap, and turned around.
And there standing in the doorway greeting Indrani and Peter with hugs, was one of the most handsome men Sheena had ever seen.
He was tall and athletic with dark eyes, high cheekbones, and slicked back jet black hair.
He also had a faint British accent.
To Sheena, he looked and sounded just like a movie star.
His name was Rahul Mukherjee and he was Peter's son from a previous marriage.
Rahul had been living in the United Kingdom, But after getting dumped by his longtime girlfriend, who was upset that Rahul could not keep a steady job, Rahul had decided to return to Mumbai and try to make it in Bollywood.
Bollywood is India's film industry.
Rahul's plan was to live with Indrani and Peter in their penthouse until he could get established in show business, at which point he would move out on his own.
Suddenly feeling a bit flustered, Sheena stood up and made her way over to the door to greet Rahul.
When she got to the door, Rahul was bent over taking off his shoes.
But when he stood back up and laid eyes on Sheena for the first time, he smiled a big, wide smile and Sheena smiled right back.
From that very first interaction, there was a clear spark between Sheena and Rahul.
Sheena started arriving at her sister's penthouse for her weekend visits earlier in the day and leaving later.
Rahul, who normally liked to go out and party, always made sure he was home when he knew Sheena was coming by.
They both loved Bollywood movies, and so they started watching them together in the afternoons.
But although Sheena and Rahul obviously liked each other, they were careful not to let their attraction blossom into anything more than just a platonic friendship.
They knew that Sheena's sister Indrani and Rahul's father Peter would frown on the two of them having any kind of romantic relationship.
First of all though, they weren't related by blood and didn't meet until they were both adults, Rahul was still Indrani's stepson, which meant Sheena was technically Rahul's aunt, even though Rahul was actually four years older than Sheena.
But even beyond the very awkward family dynamics, Sheena and Rahul were just two drastically different people.
Rahul had grown up rich in England.
He went to the best boarding schools in the United Kingdom and he had never gone hungry a day in his life.
He also had a bit of a wild streak in him.
As a teenager, he got arrested for growing marijuana, and as an adult, he barely worked, choosing instead to live the high life using his parents' money.
As for Sheena, she was hardworking, quiet, and came from nothing.
Even at St.
Xavier's, which had strict rules about how students could dress and behave.
Sheena was considered to be very modest.
In short, Sheena and Rahul were total opposites.
And so for the first six months that Rahul and Sheena knew each other, they kept a respectful distance between them.
But then one weekend afternoon in 2008, when Sheena and Rahul were alone in Indrani's penthouse, something happened.
They sat down to watch another Bollywood movie, but this time, instead of sitting separately like usual, they curled up next to each other on the couch and pulled a blanket across their laps.
And then, as the movie played, Sheena and Rahul leaned into each other and kissed.
After that first kiss, Sheena and Rahul knew they could not keep pretending they didn't have romantic feelings for each other.
And so they decided they would just have to date publicly and accept the fact that Indrani and Peter would most likely not be happy.
And Sheena and Rahul were right about that.
The young couple very quickly moved into an apartment together located about 20 minutes to the north of Indrani's penthouse.
And pretty much the second they finished moving their things into this new apartment, the fighting began between the two couples.
Or more specifically, Rahul began fighting with Indrani.
Even though Indrani was Rahul's stepmother, he never liked her and certainly never loved her.
His own parents' marriage had broken up because his father Peter, cheated on his mother constantly with younger women who clearly were only interested in Peter for his money.
And so Rahul had always viewed Indrani as nothing more than just another one of those types of women.
And so, very quickly after Rahul and Sheena had moved out, Rahul and Indrani began getting into these horrible yelling matches every time they saw each other.
At one point, Indrani even tried to ban Peter from seeing Rahul.
However, Peter would sneak out and see his son behind Indrani's back and make sure he had enough money.
As Rahul and Indrani fought more and more, Sheena started to distance herself from Indrani and the rest of her family.
Sheena also began adopting some of Rahul's worst habits, like blowing off responsibilities to stay out late and party, and at least one time people saw Sheena and Rahul snorting cocaine together in a nightclub.
But despite all the drama around their relationship, Sheena and Rahul remained a couple.
Xavier's, and she had managed to get a full-time job with Mumbai's metro train system.
But despite Sheena and Rahul believing that at this point, their lives were going more or less the way they wanted them to be going, they were in for a shock.
One fateful night was about to kick off a chain of events that would not only totally upend their lives, but it would also rock the country of India.
That fateful night was October 26, 2011.
It was the same day as the most important holiday of the year in India Diwali, or the Festival of Lights.
On Diwali, Indian people celebrate the triumph of light over darkness and good over evil.
In Mumbai, the whole city seemed like it was glowing.
Lights hung from all the trees and up and down the streets and in front of every home.
That night, as fireworks exploded across the sky, Rahul dropped down on one knee inside of the apartment he and Sheena shared and asked Sheena to marry him.
For her whole life.
All Sheena really wanted was for someone to love her, and now she finally had that.
Sheena was overjoyed and started crying happy tears and said yes.
Little did she know this decision would haunt her.
Now that Sheena was engaged to Rahul, she felt like she needed to make an effort to try to repair her relationship with Indrani.
So Sheena wrote Indrani an email telling her she was sorry that they had fought so much over the years, and she said that life was just too short for them to be holding grudges.
And Indrani, for her part, was reconsidering too.
She and Peter were just tired of the constant conflicts with the young couple.
And so, on March 10th 2012, Indrani sent a response email to Sheena, and in this message, she told Sheena that she would always love her, no matter how angry they got with each other.
It wasn't long after sending that reply email that Indrani got a response from Sheena.
And when Indrani read what Sheena wrote, she instantly felt this rush of fear and anxiety come over her.
And so Indrani picked up her laptop and ran to find Peter.
Once the couple was staring at the screen together, they both read Sheena's email in stunned silence.
In the message Sheena made it very clear that things had soured with Rahul and now she desperately wanted out of the relationship.
But she said she couldn't do it alone and needed Indrani's help.
Over the next few weeks, all Indrani thought about was her little sister Sheena, and how to save her from Rahul.
Indrani checked in on Sheena regularly by email and text.
At one point, she even offered to buy Sheena a diamond ring in hopes that might cheer her up.
She also told Sheena that whenever she was open to it, Indrani was more than happy to get her set up in her very own three-bedroom apartment.
And while Indrani wished Sheena would agree to that, she knew this was a very sensitive situation, and so whatever Indrani did to help Sheena, it would need to be when Sheena agreed to let her do it.
And so Indrani waited.
On April 24th 2012, a little more than a month after Sheena first asked for Indrani's help.
In that email, Sheena told Rahul that she was going out to meet her sister Indrani, for dinner.
Sheena asked Rahul to drop her off on Linking Road in Bandra, which is a famous shopping area in a fancy suburb of Mumbai known for the huge and colorful variety of clothes and shoes and fashion accessories sold by street vendors.
Rahul knew that Sheena was talking to her sister again, but because he was still on very bad terms with Indrani, he had actually tried to put a stop to it.
But Sheena seemed desperate to make things right with her sister.
So as much as Rahul disapproved, he did not try to convince Sheena not to go out and see Indrani for this dinner date.
And so at around 6pm that evening, Rahul somewhat begrudgingly gave Sheena a ride from their flat to Linking Road.
By 630pm they had arrived at the bustling shopping center and Rahul had pulled his car into a parking space.
Sheena leaned over from the passenger seat and gave Rahul a kiss, and then opened her door and got out of the car.
Rahul watched as Sheena started to walk into the crowd of shoppers, but then he saw her turn around to face him again.
She was wearing a maroon top jeans, dangly earrings and her engagement ring, and she was carrying a purse.
She smiled and told Rahul one more time that she loved him and that she would see him later.
Then she pulled her purse strap up over her shoulder, turned around again and started walking into the crowd.
Rahul could see where she was going.
In the middle of the crowd was this fancy silver sedan where Indrani was sitting in the back seat.
Rahul could see there was a man he didn't know leaning against the outside of the car smoking a cigarette, and Rahul figured that was Andrani's driver.
He watched as Sheena arrived at the side of the car and bent down to look in the window and wave hello.
Then Sheena pulled open the back left door, climbed inside, and shut the door behind her.
At this point the smoking man dropped his cigarette, put it out with the heel of his shoe, then climbed into the driver's side of the car.
Rahul watched the silver sedan back up and then start to drive away, and after a few moments he had lost sight of it in the big crowd.
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A few hours later, back at the flat he and Sheena shared, Rahul's phone buzzed.
He picked it up and found a message from Sheena that said she was going to stay overnight with Indrani and she would see him in the morning.
Rahul frowned at this message.
He was already unhappy that Sheena and Indrani were rekindling their relationship and he didn't like the idea of the two of them getting so close again so fast.
He was also starting to feel suspicious that Indrani might try to break up the couple's engagement.
The next morning when Rahul woke up, he called Sheena, but she didn't answer.
A little while later though, she sent him a text message that said she would be home soon, so he relaxed and started going about his day.
But, about 45 minutes later, Rahul's phone buzzed again.
He was standing in his kitchen making himself something to eat, and when he grabbed his phone off the counter and read this new message Sheena had sent him, his chest suddenly tightened and his face started getting hot.
He dropped the knife he was holding and left his food on the counter, and then, while furiously texting a response to Sheena, he ran out of the flat and got into his car.
Seconds later, he was peeling out of his parking spot and careening down the road.
The text message that Sheena had sent Rahul that upset him so much was very simple.
She had met someone else, and so she was breaking up with Rahul.
She didn't respond to anything else Rahul texted her.
As Rahul sped south towards Indrani's penthouse.
Sheena and Indrani were on the road too, driving south out of Mumbai.
They sat shoulder to shoulder in the back seat of Indrani's car.
Their hair and makeup were perfect, and there were two suitcases packed in the trunk.
Sheena's head rested on Indrani's shoulder.
A few minutes later, Rahul arrived at Indrani's penthouse apartment, parked crookedly in a spot outside, and then got out of his car and slammed the door.
He walked quickly towards the front door of the building, which was manned by a security guard.
The guard knew Rahul and usually just said hello and waved him inside, but today he acted differently.
Indrani had told the guard, along with the rest of her staff, that there might be some commotion soon and that they were not to let anyone into the penthouse, especially not Rahul.
So when Rahul tried to walk past the guard, the guard stepped out from behind his desk, stood in front of Rahul and shook his head, telling Rahul he was sorry but he just couldn't go any further.
Rahul stopped short.
At first he was just confused, but his confusion quickly turned to anger.
He knew Indrani had to be behind this.
Rahul told the guard that he was just here to get his fiancée, but the guard continued to say I'm sorry, you can't come in.
And so, with a very quick step to his left, Rahul darted around the guard and ran into the building.
Rahul was able to get into the elevator car and shut the doors before the guard could catch up to him.
Rahul rode the elevator up to the fifth floor, which was the floor of the building where Indrani and Peter lived.
But when Rahul opened the door to their penthouse, it was quiet and empty inside.
Starting to panic, Rahul rushed back outside into the elevator and rode down just one floor to the second flat that Peter and Andrani owned.
But when he let himself inside of that residence, the only person inside was a confused maid who said no one had been in there all day.
Rahul stormed out, rode the elevator back down to the first floor and walked back over to the guard who was back at his post, and immediately Rahul began demanding that the guard tell him who had been in the building and when.
When the guard refused to answer, Rahul began screaming that the man needed to give him the guestbook right now that would show him when visitors arrived and left.
But again, the guard refused.
As Rahul got more and more angry with this guard, the guard finally just began threatening to call the police, at which point Rahul threw up his hands in disgust, spun around and marched straight through the small crowd of onlookers on the sidewalk who had stopped to watch the fight to get to his car.
Rahul got into the driver's seat, slammed the door, gunned the engine and screeched out into the street.
Rahul drove to the nearest police station and practically shouted the whole strange story at the officer at the desk.
He said his stepmother was hiding his fiance and someone had to accompany him back to her penthouse building to help him get some answers.
Two constables would return with Rahul to Andrani's penthouse building, But when they got there, they spoke to the same security guard that had been fighting with Rahul, and this security guard assured them that Rahul's fiancé was just fine.
The only issue here was Rahul.
At this, the constables decided there had been no crime committed and told Rahul they were leaving.
Rahul followed them back to the station, where he still attempted to file a missing person report with them, But they told him to just calm down and stop worrying.
Sheena was not his wife, and clearly she had left on her own.
She was not missing.
The officers told Rahul that if he really wanted to file a missing person report, he should go to a different police station to see if they would do that for him.
Furious that he was not being taken seriously, Rahul left the station and climbed back into his car.
Once inside he called Sheena and Drani and Peter over and over and over again, but none of them answered.
So Rahul did what the officers had just suggested.
He drove to a different police station, one that was closer to his own apartment, and he went inside to try to explain what was going on.
But these police officers had a very similar reaction to Rahul's story, and they too refused to take a police report on what they believed was just a messy breakup.
Rahul didn't know what else to do, so he drove home and spent the day calling around to see if anyone knew anything about where Sheena was or who she was with or what she was doing.
But no one he spoke to knew anything.
Finally though, that evening, Rahul got his father Peter on the phone.
Rahul didn't know it, but Indrani had been keeping Peter fully updated on her plan to get Sheena not just out of her relationship with Rahul but out of the country altogether to start a new life in America, and Peter had been supportive.
Even though Peter had tried to accept Sheena and Rahul's engagement, he just couldn't.
He hated the level of conflict that their relationship brought into the family, and so he was kind of relieved that that relationship was now going to end with Indrani's plan.
On the phone.
Peter could hear how worked up his son was, and so he hesitated to be too direct about what had really happened with Sheena, to avoid making Rahul even more upset.
But after Rahul pressed, Peter did tell him that Sheena really had left of her own accord and truly she did not want him or anyone else to be in touch with her right now.
He told his son that if he really wanted to talk more about Sheena, he should just come visit him.
Peter, in the beach town south of Mumbai where he was staying.
But Rahul was not interested in visiting his father.
Instead, the next day, Rahul went to yet another police station to try to get their help in figuring out what happened to Sheena.
But again, those officers refused to help.
But this did not stop Rahul.
He wound up calling his mother, who was living in a resort town to the north at the time, And he told her that Indrani must be hiding Sheena or something like that.
He just knew it.
There was something wrong.
And Rahul's mother, who was very sympathetic to her son, flew to Mumbai.
And once she was there, she and Rahul would go to the police and together they would try to convince them to file a report.
And this time the police would finally relent and they would file a report.
However, they did nothing else.
They just wrote this report and then forgot about it.
But even though the police were not taking him seriously, Rahul was still very much convinced that there was just something off about this whole Sheena situation.
He just didn't buy it that Sheena had suddenly left him to be with someone else.
And then, a few weeks later, Peter would tell Rahul that Sheena had finally called him.
Peter would tell his son that Sheena had actually left and gone to America and she had arrived, she was safe, she was okay and again, she just wanted to be left alone.
But this news did not create closure for Rahul.
It only upset him more because he didn't believe it.
Peter tried to calm his son down, but Rahul just was not listening.
He became more and more aggressive towards Peter and Indrani, who he believed were hiding something from him.
To Indrani.
Rahul's behavior was simply obsessive and proof that she had made the right decision to step in and help her younger sister get away from him.
And Indrani had seen this kind of dangerous, obsessive behavior from Rahul before.
A few years earlier, in 2009, not long after Sheena and Rahul had first moved in together and when Sheena's friends began to notice changes in Sheena's behavior, Indrani had tried to separate Sheena and Rahul.
Indrani had been worried about Sheena's mental health and she had gone to their flat and persuaded Sheena to come with her back to their hometown of Guwahati.
And once they got there, Andrani had gotten Sheena set up in a flat of her own and gotten her to see some doctors who put Sheena on medication to combat her depression.
But just as Indrani believed Sheena was starting to stabilize, Rahul had suddenly showed up at Sheena's new apartment in Guwahati to take Sheena back to Mumbai.
Indrani tried to get Sheena to stay, but ultimately Sheena would go back with Rahul.
And it was shortly after their return to Mumbai that Sheena's friends would see her and Rahul snorting cocaine at a nightclub.
So now, after Andrani had finally gotten Sheena out of the country altogether, away from Rahul, she was determined not to let Rahul ruin this again.
So anytime Rahul called Indrani and Peter continued to share no information about Sheena's new life and they would not give up her new contact information.
And they remained steadfast in their decision even after one very emotional call in June of 2012, when Rahul said that this whole situation with Sheena had left him so brokenhearted and hopeless that it felt like he was going to die.
As for Sheena, she seemed to be doing well.
As the months went on, she started slowly opening back up again.
She sent emails to some friends telling them she was happy and safe and attending college to get her master's degree in business.
She emailed her brother Mikhail, asking him to take care of some paperwork issues she had left unfinished in Mumbai.
Mikhail had actually been in Mumbai in April of 2012, but he had suddenly fallen ill on the same night.
Indrani and Sheena had met for dinner and returned home to Guwahati without seeing Sheena.
He hadn't known she was leaving the country.
But the siblings had sort of drifted apart since Sheena had come to Mumbai.
So Mikhail just handled the paperwork and didn't pry into her personal life or her breakup with Rahul.
The one person Sheena did not reach out to after she left India was Rahul.
She just was not ready yet.
And finally, after four months of phone calls and searching and fighting with Peter and Indrani, Rahul seemed to accept Sheena's decision.
He moved out of Mumbai and back in with his mother in a city in northern India in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains.
The neighbors soon noticed that Rahul seemed reclusive and strange.
He didn't have a job and he didn't really come outside much, except to go to a nearby forest.
He also seemed to be drinking a lot and using drugs.
But from Indrani and Peter's perspective, this was actually an improvement.
At least Rahul was finally leaving Sheena, and them, alone.
But in March of 2013, almost a year after Sheena left for America, she sent Peter a troubling email.
In this email, Sheena told Peter that Rahul had been scheming to break up his marriage to Indrani and that she herself had gone along with his plan because she loved Rahul.
Sheena said that she felt terrible guilt over this because she owed Indrani so much.
But now that she was living on her own and was able to reflect on everything without Rahul's bad influence, it was time to come clean about this.
Sheena told Peter in her email that ever since Peter's divorce from Rahul's mother, Rahul and his mother had held a deep grudge against Peter.
Sheena's email ended with a warning to Peter.
Watch your back around Rahul.
He wants to destroy you.
By 2015, three years after Sheena left for America, things with Rahul and Sheena and Peter and Indrani seemed to have finally calmed down.
Peter had heeded Sheena's warning about Rahul and he had been careful around his son, but Rahul had mostly withdrawn anyway and spent most of his time in the forest near his mother's home.
And Peter's marriage to Indrani was now stronger than ever, because they weren't fighting anymore about Sheena and Rahul.
Sheena still sent occasional emails to Indrani keeping her updated about her life in America, but she had never gotten back in touch with Rahul, which to Indrani and Peter seemed to be for the best.
And Indrani and Sheena's brother, Mikhail, was finally doing well too.
He had a good job with an airline and a nice life in Guwahati.
All in all, things seemed pretty good.
But everything was about to change.
On August 21, 2015, the police in Mumbai made what should have been a very minor arrest.
Officers were performing a routine patrol when they stopped a driver.
It was Indrani's driver, the same one who drove that silver car.
Sheena was.
In the last time Rahul saw Sheena.
The police searched Indrani's driver's car and found an illegal pistol, so they arrested him.
But the driver really did not want to go to prison, and so he told the police that he had a story they might be interested in hearing.
But he said he would only tell it if they agreed not to prosecute him.
And when the police heard what the driver's story was about, they agreed right away.
So they put Andrani's driver in an interview room with detectives and the man just started talking.
And what he had to say would change everything that everyone thought they knew about Sheena.
When the detectives finally left the interview room, where the driver had just poured out his whole story over the course of a couple hours, they knew exactly what they needed.
Just one single piece of paper, an old police report that some uninterested police officer wrote years ago and stuck in a drawer and forgot about.
Detectives searched for this report for days.
They emptied filing cabinets that nobody had opened for years.
They cleaned out empty desks.
They tore apart closets.
Nobody had ever followed up on this report after the day it was written, and it wasn't even clear that anybody had actually saved it.
But then detectives did find it and on this police report was the name that detectives were looking for.
At 4 am on August 28 2015, three years after Sheena left for America and seven days after Indrani's driver told police in Mumbai his story.
The phone rang at the home of a man named Ganesh Patil.
It was the Mumbai police calling.
They told Ganesh they needed him to get out of bed right now and meet them in the forest.
Ganesh was a 39-year-old father of two who lived in a tiny rural village about 50 miles outside of Mumbai.
He worked three jobs to support his family.
He decorated tents with flowers for weddings.
He pulled a rickshaw and he served as a kind of informal deputy for police.
Basically, he helped the police when they had some specific local issue they needed to solve.
The village where Ganesh lived was located in a district called Raigad.
Raigad includes about 35 tiny little villages, but it's mostly forest, very dense forest.
And in this forest, not only is it easy to get turned around and lost, it's also just plain dangerous.
There are fast-moving rivers and deep gorges that seem to appear out of nowhere.
And on top of that, this forest is known as quote Mumbai's dumping ground, because people go there to commit suicide and bury bodies of people they have murdered.
And because the entire district has only two police officers, the vast majority of crimes in this area don't get investigated.
So even when bodies are discovered in this forest, police just pay the villagers to bury the bodies where they were found.
When the police called Ganesh early that morning, they asked him to lead them right now to a particular spot in that forest.
It was at the bottom of a hill where mangoes grow.
Ganesh did not ask any questions.
He knew what this was about.
By 6 a.m. that morning, Ganesh was walking down a muddy sloping path through the forest.
In the past, when he came here to gather mangoes, he was alone.
But now he was being followed by a horde of police officers who were all carrying shovels and bright lights.
No one spoke as they walked.
All Ganesh could hear were the sounds of birds and rustling leaves and the trudging of lots of boots and the clanging of metal equipment.
Ganesh finally got to the bottom of a hill near some mango trees, and he came to a stop.
He looked around for a moment and then he pointed out in front of him at this area where the vegetation was just a little bit thinner, and he said there, dig there.
The police behind him surged forward with their equipment and started hacking at the ground.
Ganesh just stood there and watched in silence.
A few minutes later, the police had found what they were looking for.
The following is what really happened on April 24th, 2012, which was Sheena's last day in Mumbai.
It has been reconstructed from the evidence and confessions that police gathered, starting when Indrani's driver said he wanted to talk.
On April 24th, Rahul dropped Sheena off on Linking Road at about 6.30pm.
After she got out of the car, Sheena told him that she loved him and would see him later on, and then she turned and walked toward the fancy silver sedan where Indrani was waiting with her driver.
But when Sheena got into the backseat of that car, it wasn't just Indrani and her driver.
There was a third person who was in the car in the front passenger seat.
Sheena was a little taken aback and hesitated just for a second, but then climbed into the car and shut the door behind her.
Moments later, the driver had climbed into the car, and they were on the move.
As they drove along Indrani, who was sitting next to Sheena in the back seat, handed Sheena a glass that contained a sparkly liquid.
Sheena was always polite, so she took the glass, said thank you, and took a sip.
It was champagne.
As the car rolled along, Sheena looked out the window.
The colorful outdoor stores of Bandra whizzed past and then disappeared behind them as the driver steered the car west towards an area of Bandra called Polly Hill, which is very wealthy and has beautiful twisting roads and a handful of isolated cul-de-sacs.
Sheena was excited.
Indrani had said they were going to buy her a diamond ring.
But as the car zoomed along, Sheena started to feel a strange warmth spreading through her body, and her head was starting to feel just a little bit foggy.
Sheena blinked her eyes and shook her head, but the feeling didn't go away.
At first, Sheena was confused.
She opened her mouth to ask the driver to turn up the air conditioner, but her mouth felt dry and her tongue felt thick and her voice was soft and slurred.
She couldn't get the words out.
She could feel the car taking lots of turns, but her vision was starting to blur and she couldn't quite tell where they were.
She felt the empty champagne glass slip out of her fingers and heard it clink softly on the floor of the car.
Nobody moved to pick it up.
She was starting to get scared.
Eventually, Sheena's whole body felt tingly and hot.
Outside the car, the sun was setting and it was getting dark.
Sheena was trying to keep her eyes open, but they felt so heavy.
She could feel the car starting to slow down, and she was dimly aware of the fact that the three other people riding in the car with her were just staring at her in silence.
Finally, she just leaned her head against the window, she closed her eyes, and she fell asleep.
Then she woke up to the feeling of intense pressure everywhere on her body.
When she opened her eyes, her vision was still blurry and she was seeing stars, but she could tell she was no longer sitting upright.
She was now on her back in the backseat of the car and someone was sitting on her chest, with their legs on either side of her body.
Sheena tried to roll to the side, but she could feel two fists tangled in her hair, pulling hard and keeping her head from moving.
Someone's hand was also smashed down over her mouth.
Everything seemed to be happening so fast.
Sheena was terrified, but she couldn't even tell where everyone in the car was or what they were doing.
Her arms were wrenched up over her head, and when she tried to pull away from whoever was holding her, they just dug their fingers into her wrists and she could feel fingernails cutting into her skin.
And then Sheena felt two hands wrap themselves around her throat.
She started kicking furiously, her feet hitting the backseat, door and window, and her knees were bumping up against the back of the person who was sitting on her chest, but the hands around her throat only squeezed harder and harder.
She tried to twist her head, but the hand over her mouth kept her pinned, so she bit down as hard as she could on it.
Sheena tasted blood and the hand on her mouth came off for a second.
It looked like she might have a chance.
She tried to scream, but no sound came out.
All she could get out was a little cough.
It was too late.
She had no more air and she couldn't breathe in anymore.
Sheena opened and closed her mouth uselessly.
She couldn't see anything anymore.
Her vision was just a combination of blackness and random bursts of light.
And then finally, her eyes closed.
Sheena never went to America.
She died in the back seat of that fancy silver sedan, just about an hour after Rahul dropped her off on Linking Road.
The prosecution of the people accused of killing Sheena has been going on now for seven years, and it has gripped the country.
However, nobody has been convicted yet.
But the following is the story of the murder of Shinobura that has emerged from all of the witness testimony and documents presented in court and in the media so far.
But again, until there is a conviction, all the crimes I'm going to describe here are just allegations.
The person who climbed onto Sheena's chest in the backseat of that car and wrapped their hands around her throat was Indrani Sheena's overprotective older sister.
But as detectives dug deeper, it would turn out that nothing in Indrani's life was as it seemed.
And Sheena wasn't who everyone thought she was either.
It would turn out Indrani was not Sheena's older sister.
She was actually Sheena's mother.
Sheena had never wanted to lie about her relationship with Indrani and she had never wanted to leave Rahul.
She loved Rahul, but Indrani had forced her to lie.
In fact, Indrani had created an elaborate set of lies and fake personas to trick everyone in her life, including Sheena, and she had been doing it for years, starting with the story that Indrani told everybody about her own life.
The city of Mumbai, where Indrani and Peter were considered one of the most powerful and glamorous media.
Couples knew Indrani as a beautiful and almost tragic figure.
She had told everyone that her father died when she was a child and her mother married her uncle, who abused her.
So she said she fled her hometown of Guwahati, leaving her brother and sister, Mikael and Sheena, behind.
She got married, but she said her husband beat her so she left him and finally found true love with Peter.
And once Indrani had built her life with Peter, she told everyone that she went back to Guwahati and rescued her brother and sister.
So when Sheena appeared in Mumbai, everyone thought that Indrani was generous and selfless and loyal.
But almost none of that was true.
Indrani actually grew up spoiled by her parents, who were both still alive.
Indrani had Sheena when she was about 17 years old and then Mikhail a year and a half later.
And Indrani hated taking care of those two babies.
So one day, she just left.
And once Indrani was out of Guwahati, it was like her kids, Sheena and Mikhail, didn't exist.
She just started her life over again.
She got married to a rich businessman, but she got tired of him quickly, so she divorced him and moved to Mumbai, where she married Peter, who was much more rich and famous.
And this is how Sheena came back into Indrani's life.
Indrani's parents back in Guwahati were raising Sheena and Mikhail, and their financial situation was just getting worse and worse.
Then they saw a photograph of Indrani in the news with Peter, and so they called Indrani right away and said you need to help us out financially.
Indrani didn't want any connection with Sheena or Mikhail and she was furious that her parents had reached out at all.
But she also didn't want anyone to know that she had two kids from her teenage years that she had abandoned or that her whole life story was a lie.
All Indrani wanted was to keep her secret family back in Guwahati quiet, so she knew she had to do what they wanted.
At first, Indrani just sent money.
But then, as Sheena and Mikhail grew up and they became more expensive, Indrani's parents demanded more money.
And that was how Indrani wound up bringing Sheena to Mumbai in 2006, under a very strict agreement that Sheena was going to tell everyone that Indrani was her sister, not her mother.
And it was an agreement that Sheena kept, but it made her incredibly depressed.
When Sheena and Rahul fell in love, Indrani wasn't really worried about Rahul being a bad influence on Sheena, even though that's what she told people.
Instead, Indrani was just afraid that if Sheena and Rahul got married they would cut her Indrani, out of Peter's huge fortune.
And even worse, Indrani was afraid that Sheena would expose her secret identity.
So, when Sheena and Rahul moved in together, Indrani made her first attempt to separate them.
In 2009, Indrani had come to Sheena and Rahul's flat and convinced Sheena to come with her back to Guwahati.
She took Sheena to see some doctors and convinced the doctors to prescribe Sheena very heavy psychiatric medication that would make Sheena very sleepy and confused basically all of the time.
But Rahul showed up in Guwahati and effectively rescued Sheena from Indrani.
Indrani told people that this incident showed that Rahul had too much power over Sheena.
But what it really showed was that Indrani was going to have to do something much more drastic to get Sheena out of the picture.
And she would do just that.
After Sheena and Rahul got engaged at the end of 2011, Indrani started reaching out to Sheena so she could pretend to repair their relationship.
In March 2012, when Sheena wrote to Indrani saying she was sorry they fought so much.
Indrani wrote back telling Sheena she would always love her.
Then Indrani started trying to get Sheena to meet her for dinner, offering to buy her a diamond ring and pay for her to rent a three-bedroom apartment.
Then Indrani created a fake email address under Sheena's name and sent herself an email from this fake account, pretending to be Sheena.
That was the email that Indrani showed to Peter that said Sheena was desperate to get out of this relationship with Rahul.
Later, Andrani would send her husband Peter, another fake email from Sheena, the one he received in 2013, warning him to watch his back around, Rahul.
As for that phone call that Peter would receive from Sheena telling him she was in America and doing just fine, That was obviously not Sheena.
That was Indrani's secretary.
So once Indrani got Sheena to agree to meet her for dinner, she turned her attention to her other child, Mikhail.
By this point, Indrani had decided she would need to murder her son, as well as Sheena, in order to make sure her lies wouldn't be exposed.
So, she contacted Mikhail and asked him to come visit her in Mumbai on April 24th.
Mikhail didn't really want to, but Indrani was paying for everything in his life, so he agreed.
On April 24th, 2012, Indrani set her murderous plan in motion.
She had summoned her first husband the one she had divorced, who was still, for some reason, very loyal to her, to come help her.
And she had paid her driver for his silence.
She bought sedatives, liquor, and a suitcase and rented a car.
Then, around 630 pm that night, a couple of hours before Mikhail was sent to land Indrani, her first husband, and her driver pulled up on Linking Road in Bandra to meet Sheena.
When Sheena climbed into the car, she found Indrani sitting in the back seat and Indrani's first husband in the front passenger seat.
Sheena was confused by the presence of Indrani's first husband, but she knew him and she wasn't afraid of him, so she didn't feel too worried.
When Indrani handed Sheena a glass of champagne spiked with the sedatives, Sheena didn't suspect anything and she drank it happily.
When the sedatives took effect and Sheena fell asleep, Indrani knew it was time to act.
She told her driver to pull over on a deserted cul-de-sac, and then Indrani's first husband climbed into the backseat with her.
And then all at once they sprung on Sheena, who was laying on her back on the seats.
Indrani's first husband grabbed Sheena by the hair while the driver reached back and gagged her mouth.
Indrani herself climbed on top of her child's chest and straddled her, and then started to strangle her.
The sudden violence woke Sheena up and she started fighting.
She kicked and she bit the driver's thumb, but it was no use.
Slowly, Indrani strangled the life out of her daughter.
When Sheena finally stopped moving, Indrani just stared down at her without any emotion on her face.
At this point, Indrani took Sheena's cell phone and sent a text to Rahul pretending to be Sheena.
She told him in this text that Sheena was going to be spending the night with Indrani, and the next morning it would be Indrani, again pretending to be Sheena, who texted Rahul to say that Sheena had fallen in love with someone else and was leaving him.
Indrani and her accomplices didn't dispose of Sheena's body right away.
They propped it up in the silver car and made their way back to Indrani's apartment, where they parked in the garage and then stuffed Sheena's body into a suitcase Indrani had bought for this reason, and then they left the suitcase hidden in the garage.
It was late by the time Androni got upstairs to her penthouse, accompanied by her first husband.
Mikhail, whose flight had landed that night, was waiting impatiently inside.
When Androni greeted him, she was unusually kind and interested in his life, asking him lots of questions about his job.
Then she handed him a drink, the same spiked drink that she had just given to Sheena.
But unlike Sheena, when Mikhail started to feel woozy, he became suspicious.
He stopped drinking it and he didn't pass out.
Indrani got frustrated and told him to go to bed, but instead, Mikhail left for the airport.
He was completely sick, but he was able to get a ticket and get out of town.
A few hours after Mikhail left Indrani's penthouse, Indrani decided it was now time to get rid of Sheena's body.
She went down to the garage and she pulled the suitcase out of hiding.
She was worried about being stopped at a checkpoint and having the luggage examined.
So she pulled Sheena out of the suitcase and carefully brushed and styled Sheena's hair.
She put makeup on her.
She sprayed her with perfume.
Then she sat her up in the backseat of the car like she was a living passenger.
Then Indrani, her first husband, and her driver piled into the car as well and began driving to where Indrani wanted to dump Sheena's body the forest in Raigad.
As they drove, Indrani sat in the back seat next to her daughter Sheena, whose head rested on Indrani's shoulder.
Once they got to the forest, the driver, Indrani and her first husband together dragged Sheena's body out into the woods, where they smashed her body with rocks and then lit it on fire.
Thank you.
A month later, on May 23 2012, Ganesh Patil, the man from Raigad who worked as a deputy for local police, discovered Sheena's body.
When Ganesh contacted the police about it, an officer wrote the report that detectives would frantically search for.
But at the time of Ganesh's gruesome discovery in May of 2012, the police didn't investigate.
They just paid villagers to bury the body where it lay.
And where the body lay was where Ganesh had taken police in the early morning hours of August 2015, right at the bottom of a hill, near where the mangoes grow.
Indrani was arrested and charged with murder, along with her first husband.
As for her second husband Peter, he was also arrested a short time later and charged with murder, though he has denied knowing anything about Indrani's plans and claims that he too was tricked.
Indrani, for her part, denies murdering Sheena and says that Sheena is not even dead.
She says that Sheena is alive and well and living in America.
The driver has testified in court against Indrani and Peter in exchange for immunity.
Indrani's first husband was initially said to have confessed, but now says he's innocent.
Peter and Indrani, who are now divorced, are out of jail as the trial drags along.
As for Rahul, he has said he doesn't believe his father Peter, was involved in what happened to Sheena.
This case continues to shock and horrify the people of India, and stories about it appear in the news almost every day.
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