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Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. A 2022 survey revealed that 8 out of 10 Americans play the lottery. People play with dreams of quitting their job, traveling, and starting a new life when they hit the jackpot. But not Arooj Khan. By all means, he was already a successful, self-made man.
He played the lottery sparingly and mostly for fun. The odds of hitting the jackpot are extremely low. But what about the possibility of being murdered after winning? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 171. The mysterious death of Aruj Khan. ♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new compelling cases, conduct in-depth fact-based research, and produce and edit this weekly show. As a thank you for supporting the show, you'll get early ad-free access to weekly episodes, shout-outs and episodes, priority on case suggestions, and access to weekly bonus episodes.
To support Forensic Tales, please visit patreon.com slash Forensic Tales or simply click the link in the show notes. You can also support the show by leaving a positive rating with a review. Now let's get to this week's episode. It all started as a classic lottery success story. Someone walks into a local gas station to grab a cup of coffee, but they purchase a lottery ticket before heading out the door.
They know the odds aren't in their favor, but they do it anyway. In fact, according to one news article by NBC, the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot by matching all numbers are 1 in 292,201,338. You're more likely to get struck by a meteorite than hitting the lottery. You're more likely to be killed by a swarm of bees.
And your chances of becoming U.S. president are higher than winning the lottery. So why do so many people play it? Is it because we think that we're going to be the one in 292 million? Do we enjoy the thrill of thinking it could be us? Or is it just for fun? Do we enjoy spending a few bucks to buy a lottery ticket just for the fun of it?
After all, someone will win that Powerball Mega Jackpot at some point. Yes, our chances of winning are extremely low, but someone has to win it. Why not me? Well, that's exactly what 46-year-old Arooj Khan thought when he went into a gas station and purchased a lottery scratcher ticket.
He knew his chances were slim to none at winning any type of significant money on the scratcher, but he thought he'd go for it anyway, at least for a little bit of fun. So in 2012, Aruge walked into a 7-Eleven convenience store near his home in Chicago, Illinois, and purchased $30 worth of scratchers. This was a little bit more than what he was used to spending on lottery scratchers, but his business was doing well.
He owned and operated a local dry clean business in Chicago, and business was booming. So we thought, why not? He could afford to lose the $30. Instead of using his $30 to buy one ticket, he split the money and purchased two scratchers. He thought that by buying two tickets, his chances would be higher. In the past, Arooj had only won a small amount of money from the scratchers. He may win a few bucks here and there, but that was it.
After years of buying lottery scratchers, he never won any type of big money until 2012, when his purchase of two tickets changed his life forever. Before Aruge even got to his car parked outside the 7-Eleven store, he scratched his tickets. He scratched the first one in a flash, but nothing. He started working on the second ticket.
After only seconds of scratching off the numbers, he realized he had won. But he didn't just win a few dollars. He won big. The total payout on the scratcher was $1 million. Arooj had somehow managed to turn $30 into a million dollars. This day had quickly become the luckiest day of his life.
As soon as Aruj realized he won a million dollars, he ran back inside the 7-Eleven store and told the cashier that he had just sold him a winning scratcher. He told the cashier behind the register that he was now a millionaire. And before turning around and going home, he handed the cashier a $100 bill and said, take this $100 and I promise I'll make you happy later.
The state of Illinois has a unique law for people who win large amounts of money in the lottery. Under Illinois law, anyone who wins the lottery is required to appear for public news conferences. This is mainly done to ensure that the state pays out on its prizes. But Illinois isn't the only state in the U.S. to have this type of law.
Many states require the winners to publicly disclose their names and their identity to the public. There are only seven states which allow lotto winners to remain anonymous. They are Delaware, Kansas, Maryland, North Dakota, Texas, Ohio, and South Carolina. Only six states allow people to form a trust to claim prizes anonymously.
The state of California, where I live, entirely forbids winners to remain anonymous. Every other state has some sort of law requiring winners to be made public. And in the case of Illinois, where Aruge won, they require winners to be present at a public press conference announcing their winnings. That means anyone watching the press conference will know who they are and how much money they won.
And in Aruj's case, everyone found out he had won over a million dollars from a scratcher. At the press conference, Aruj talked about how excited he was to win the money. This was life-changing money for him and his family. Winning a million dollars would completely change his life for the better. Although his dry clean business was doing well, this money meant a lot to him and his family.
They would no longer worry about saving money or making ends meet. A million dollars provided him and the family with a significant financial cushion. It offered financial freedom for the foreseeable future. Aruj also discussed what he planned to do with the money at the press conference. He planned to use the million dollars to help grow his dry clean business. He also talked about doting a portion of it to charity.
He specifically wanted to donate to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. Like most lottery winners, Aruj had the option to collect a lump sum or receive monthly payments. He would receive a lot more money if he opted for the monthly payments. If he accepted the lump sum, he would take home less money but receive all of it up front.
In this case, Aruj opted for the lump sum option. He didn't want monthly payments. Instead, he wanted the money now. And in this case, this meant that he received over $600,000. But after Illinois state taxes, he ended up taking away closer to $450,000.
He accepted the oversized promotional check from the Illinois Lottery representatives and stood proudly besides his wife and teenage daughter. He knew his life was about to change completely, but he didn't realize just how much. After the public press conference, Arooge returned home where his wife made a traditional Indian dinner to celebrate, layam curry.
That night, Arooj had his celebratory dinner with his wife, his father-in-law, and daughter Jasmine. But unfortunately, that celebratory dinner also turned out to be Arooj's final meal. Just a few hours later, he was pronounced dead. Before Arooj Khan could collect his million-dollar prize money, the 46-year-old businessman, husband, and father was dead.
His wife called 911 after she heard him screaming inside the bedroom. She had no idea what was going on, but Aruj kept screaming in pain. Aruj was taken by ambulance to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, several miles from his house. But unfortunately, when he arrived at the hospital, it was too late.
There wasn't much the emergency room doctors or nurses could do. And the following day, he was pronounced dead at 46 years old. He had just become one of the luckiest men in the world, but now he was dead. Born in India, Arooj moved to Chicago, Illinois in the late 1980s. A few years after he arrived in the U.S., he started working in the real estate business.
But he quickly realized that wasn't the type of business for him. So he decided to open his first dry clean business in Chicago. The business did so well that he and his wife decided to open a second location. After a few years, the couple had a thriving cleaner business with several locations. After that, he started living what many people would consider the true American dream.
His sudden death immediately triggered both anger and confusion within his family. How does a seemingly healthy 46-year-old man suddenly drop dead, especially right after winning life-changing money off a scratcher? But the aftermath of his death only led to more questions. The Cook County Medical Examiner announced that Aruj had died from natural causes.
Initially, the Cook County authorities attributed his death to cardiovascular disease or plaque buildup within the artery walls. But how did the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office conclude this cause of death? It wasn't from an autopsy because they didn't perform one.
According to Cook County authorities, they didn't need to perform an autopsy on Aruge because this was a case of someone dying from natural causes. Autopsies aren't necessary when someone dies from something natural, like heart disease or a stroke. If everyone got an autopsy when they died from natural causes, there would be no time for people who actually needed autopsies, like when the cause of death isn't known.
So according to Cook County officials, Aruge's situation didn't require an autopsy. They didn't think there was anything suspicious about his death. Yes, there was a coincidence that he had recently won the lottery, but that was it. They said there was nothing fishy about it. He didn't have any signs of trauma or injuries to his body. He was over the age of 40, so there was no reason to suspect foul play.
His death was completely natural. Bad timing, but natural. Authorities did take a sample of Aruj's blood, standard practice for any death. In this type of blood test, they look for things like alcohol, drugs, or opioids. But when the toxicology report came back, everything appeared normal. He didn't have any detectable drugs or alcohol in his system.
They even checked for deadly levels of carbon monoxide, but that came back negative too. So when all the tests were done, the preliminary results didn't raise any alarm bells. This simply further proved the Cook County Medical Examiner's position that Aruge died from natural causes and an autopsy wasn't needed. It would only delay things and cost the county additional money and resources.
Once the officials had the blood results back, they were even more confident in their finding that he died from heart disease. And they weren't alone. Today, heart disease is the most common cause of death in the U.S. So to the authorities, Arooj was merely another person to fall victim to this disease. His situation wasn't unique, but Arooj's family wasn't satisfied with this ruling.
He had never been diagnosed with any condition related to heart disease before. And before he died, he was completely healthy. He showed no signs of having any blockages in his arteries. His death seemed to happen within seconds. He was alive and well one moment. The next, he was gone.
So immediately after the medical examiner announced they were listing his death as natural, Aruj's brother stepped in. He said, hold on a minute here. This isn't a natural death. This wasn't a heart attack. This was murder. Around the clock over the next several days, Aruj's brother and family petitioned the medical examiner's office to take a second look at the case.
They weren't buying this story of a heart attack or heart disease. This went on for weeks. Day after day, members of Aruj's family showed up at the medical examiner's office begging for help. They wanted someone to, at the very least, conduct further testing or perform an autopsy to see if there was another possible cause of death. Just because he didn't show any signs of injuries or trauma
His family still believed he might have been murdered. Who suddenly dies after winning a million dollars? The chances of that happening just seemed too far-fetched. All the family asked for was additional testing so other possibilities could officially be ruled out. And after weeks and months of pressuring the medical examiner's office, they got what they wanted.
They finally agreed to perform additional testing on Aruj's remains. By the end of the summer, the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office agreed to perform additional forensic testing. They specifically wanted to find out if they could detect anything in his system. Initially, they only performed a basic toxicology report on his blood. This type of basic testing only looked for things like illegal drugs and alcohol.
As far as blood testing goes, it was as basic and routine as you can get. It didn't test the blood for harder to find substances like other types of drugs or possible poisons. So the authorities and the family hoped that advanced DNA and blood testing could reveal something different, something that can't be detected in a basic toxicology screening. The advanced testing took several weeks.
Aruj's case was considered a relatively low priority for the department. The medical examiner's office believed that they had already reached a conclusion about his death and that they were only really doing a favor to this family by performing additional tests. So anything related to his case was considered low priority. And the results of the advanced DNA testing took several more weeks.
But when they finally got the results of the testing, the wait was well worth it for Aruja's family and friends, as well as the Cook County authorities. On September 11th, the medical examiner's office contacted both the Cook County Sheriff's Department as well as the Chicago Police Department to alert them about what they found in Aruja's blood. The test results revealed that cyanide was in his system.
Now cyanide is one of the most deadly poisons that humans can ingest. And when the levels get too high, that can easily lead to death. Cyanide is so toxic because it interferes with the body's ability to use oxygen. It blocks the capability of your blood to circulate oxygen throughout your body and you die from suffocation.
Cyanide poisoning would probably feel like someone had wrapped your face with saran wrap. It's also extremely deadly because it's almost completely odorless and it doesn't have any taste. So people who are poisoned with cyanide probably don't even realize it until it's too late. And it doesn't take much to turn deadly.
A lethal dose of cyanide is only about 100 milligrams. Once a person ingests a lethal amount of cyanide, they can die within a few minutes. And those that don't die right away usually experience terrible side effects. Some of these side effects can include high heart rates, shortness of breath, seizures, or even loss of consciousness. Even if someone survives cyanide poisoning, they're likely to experience many long-term effects.
So how did Aruge get cyanide in his system? And why was it missed during the initial tests? Well, standard toxicology tests typically don't find cyanide if it's present in someone's bloodstream. They usually look for simple poisons like recreational drugs, over-the-counter medications, prescriptions, and alcohol. It's also hard to detect cyanide because this particular chemical is metabolized quickly by the body.
So the only way authorities could see cyanide in Aruge's blood was by performing more advanced DNA and blood work. But how exactly did he get cyanide in his blood? Well, cyanide in itself is present in a lot more things than you might think. You don't have to be intentionally poisoned with cyanide to die from cyanide poisoning.
Sometimes, in rare cases, death can occur from long-term exposure to it. Small amounts of cyanide can be found in many foods we eat and drink, like almonds, lima beans, and pits from common fruits like apples, peaches, and apricots. Now, the level of cyanide in these foods are so low that they're extremely unlikely to ever cause an issue.
But the takeaway here is that low levels of cyanide are present in everyday foods and drinks. But that's not what happened to Aruj Khan. He didn't eat one too many almonds and then suddenly die from cyanide poisoning. Something else happened here. Early suspicion fell on Aruj's wife, Shabana Ansari.
Research has always told us that we are far more likely to be murdered by someone we know than compared to a random stranger. In fact, we're even more likely to be killed by someone incredibly close to us, like a partner or a spouse. So once authorities suspected that Arooj had been poisoned, they turned their attention toward his wife. The night before his death, Arooj ate a traditional Indian dinner of lamb curry that his wife made.
So naturally, authorities wondered if Shabana put cyanide in the lamb curry. It wouldn't be the first time a wife has tried to kill her husband by using cyanide and disguising it with food. It's an easy poison to do this with because it doesn't taste like anything and it doesn't have an odor.
So someone can ingest cyanide without even realizing it. It simply just blends into the food. And in this case, it probably would have just blended into this curry sauce. But Shabana insisted that she didn't do that. She said she had no reason to want her husband dead. To prove it, she allowed investigators to conduct a complete search of the house for cyanide.
She explained that her entire family ate the same dinner. She ate the lamb curry, her father had some, and even her daughter had the curry. So if it were poisoned with cyanide, they would all be dead, not only Aruj. But the authorities didn't simply take her word for it. They turned the family's house upside down looking for anything containing cyanide.
But nothing turned up. They didn't find anything, and they eventually abandoned the idea that his wife had anything to do with it. The second person the authorities considered was Aruja's father-in-law. He was the only other adult who also ate the curry dinner that night. Maybe he was the one who slipped the cyanide into the food.
The father-in-law became an even better possible suspect after authorities learned that just a year before Aruj's death, the IRS placed liens on the family residence in an attempt to collect more than $120,000 in back taxes owed by Aruj's father-in-law.
So people wondered, did the father-in-law have him killed so that he could use the lottery money to pay back the back taxes? If the taxes were paid, the IRS would remove the liens that they had on the properties. But like the wife, Aruj's father-in-law was also ruled out. That's because they found no connection between him either buying or obtaining large amounts of cyanide.
And they didn't really identify any specific motive for him wanting his son-in-law dead other than the back taxes. As soon as they found out that cyanide was involved, the Chicago Crime Lab performed even more testing on the blood samples. They needed to find out exactly how much cyanide that he had ingested and what was the likely source of it.
But the only way to perform this type of testing was to exhume Aruj's body, which had already been buried in Rose Hill Cemetery. On January 11, 2013, a Cook County judge approved the family and the police's request to exhume his body.
The initial theory was that he was poisoned by ingesting cyanide. But to confirm this, they needed to see if there were traces of it in his stomach when he died. Dr. Stephen Sina, the forensic pathologist who initially handled the case, was the one in charge of the second exam. But immediately, the pathologist was faced with some serious challenges. For starters, Aruj was never embalmed.
It's strictly against traditional Muslim culture to embalm someone after they die. So when they exhumed his body, it was in pretty rough shape. Much of his body had already been badly decomposed, which meant that they couldn't really retest anything. The first toxicology reports showed that Arooj had a lethal amount of cyanide in his blood.
But when they took samples of his lungs, liver, and spleen, they found no traces of it. So they couldn't say exactly how the poison got into his system. And all that was found in his stomach was a, quote, non-specific residue. This meant that they also couldn't figure out what his last meal was. His stomach only contained small amounts of residue that they couldn't identify.
But the authorities weren't too surprised that they couldn't find any additional traces of cyanide either in his organs or his stomach. That's because cyanide has a short half-life, the time it takes half the sample to decay or die. Since cyanide has a short half-life, whatever was left in his body likely disappeared during decomposition.
If Aruj's body had been embalmed before he was buried, there might have been a chance to detect cyanide in his stomach or other organs. But the second round of exams did reveal further key details besides the lack of cyanide in the organs. When the forensic pathologist studied Aruj's body again, he noted 75% blockage in his arteries.
So they weren't too far off in their original assumption that he might have suffered a fatal heart attack. But the blocked arteries still didn't explain the cyanide. Based on everything they gathered in the second examination of Aruja's body, the Cook County Medical Examiner agreed to change his cause of death. It was originally classified as a natural death,
But because of the presence of cyanide, they decided to switch it to homicide. The amount of cyanide in his bloodstream could only be explained by someone poisoning him. It was impossible for him to have that much cyanide in his bloodstream from anything other than an intentional poisoning.
But the reclassification of his death didn't answer any more questions. It only meant that the state recognized his death as a homicide. It didn't answer important questions like how did he ingest so much poison and who poisoned him? Was it possible that he did it to himself?
But why? The man just won a million dollars playing the lottery. Then hours later, he's dead. Nothing was making any sense here. After the second exam, there was nothing more the forensic pathologist could do. They didn't find any traces of cyanide in his organs because his body was too badly decomposed. So there was nothing new they gained from it except changing the cause of death.
So after they did what they could and tested what they could test, they reburied him. Aruja's final autopsy was released and made public in February 2013. A part of the report read, quote, Since cyanide affects oxygen utilization in the tissues,
It follows logically that a natural disease process that already limits blood flow to the heart could render an individual particularly susceptible to death due to this toxin, end quote. In other words, they admitted he ingested a lethal dose of cyanide, but the pre-existing blockage in his arteries only added to his chance of death.
So essentially, he died from a combination of heart disease and cyanide poison. But again, this still doesn't explain everything. How and why did he ingest the poison? Dr. Sina, the Cook County pathologist who performed the autopsy, doesn't believe he intentionally ingested it. In his opinion, he thinks he was poisoned.
He believes that someone else was responsible for his ingesting of the cyanide. There was no evidence that Aruge was depressed or suicidal, and he had just won the lottery. Even if he was depressed or suicidal, wouldn't winning a million dollars talk you off the ledge, or at least for a little bit? At least that's what Cook County officials believe.
Almost immediately after her father died, Aruj's daughter, Jasmine, left the family and moved in with her aunt and uncle, her father's sister and her husband. Although Jasmine has never publicly talked about her father's death, there's been speculation that there's a divide between Aruj's family members. Some believe someone in his own family may have murdered him so that they could get the money.
while others think he was murdered by someone else outside the family. But speculation aside, one fact remains. Arooj's death caused a divide between the family, a rift that led some family members to suspect he was murdered by someone close to him. When Arooj died at 46, he didn't have a will. Maybe he wasn't expecting to die so young or suddenly.
But without a will, there was no legal document spelling out exactly where his money and assets should go in the event of his death. So not only did they need to figure out where his current money and assets should go, but they also needed to figure out what to do with the lottery money.
There were a lot of financial things to figure out here besides just the money because Aruge also had a lot of assets related to his dry clean business as well as some real estate properties. So calculating where this money should go wasn't easy. A few months after the medical examiner announced they believed his death could be a homicide, the case was sent over to Cook County's probate court.
A judge would decide the allocation of his money and assets. Should the money, including the scratcher money, go to Aruj's wife? Should the money go to his daughter? Or should it be divided among them and maybe some other family members who relied on him financially? Remember, right after Aruj died, his family became divided. And some even pointed fingers at each other for being responsible for the poisoning.
After several months of going back and forth in probate court, the judge decided. Now, there are some discrepancies that I found when it comes to exactly how the money was divided up. Various news articles report it differently. One article published by ABC News reported that Aruj's wife got one-third of the lottery winnings and his daughter, Jasmine, received two-thirds of the money.
But other news articles, like the Chicago Tribune, reported the opposite. The daughter received one-third of the lottery winnings, and his wife received two-thirds of it. According to the Chicago Tribune, his daughter was awarded some condos her father owned said to be valued at $250,000, as well as one-third of the lottery winnings, which totaled about $140,000.
His widow kept the dry cleaning businesses valued at a little more than $1 million and two-thirds of the lottery winnings valued at $280,000. Either way, whichever news article is most accurate, both of them received portions of the winnings and both of them received both real estate and part of the dry cleaning business within this settlement.
And in the end, some of the settlement money went toward legal fees just to pay for the probate court proceedings. Now, under this legal settlement, both sides, so we're talking about Aruj's daughter as well as his widow, wouldn't be allowed to pursue any wrongful death lawsuits against one another unless one special occurrence happened.
Unless the criminal investigation into Aruj's death turned up new evidence. In other words, if the authorities find new evidence linking anyone in the family to his death, the other party can sue the other. So if there's new evidence suggesting that his wife poisoned him with cyanide, the daughter can initiate a wrongful death lawsuit against her and vice versa.
But until there's new concrete evidence presented that someone poisoned him, no wrongful death lawsuits can be pursued by either side. And this was something that was determined by the probate court. So not only did the court decide who gets what, how much of the lottery winnings, what part of the dry clean business, everything else that Aruj Khan owned was
Not only did they figure that out, but the court also said, you cannot sue each other, although there's this divide, there's rumors speculating it could be this person, it could be the father-in-law, whoever else, the court says, no, you can't sue each other for Aruj's death specifically unless there is new evidence that's presented.
And unfortunately, we don't know if any new evidence in this case will ever surface. At the time of this recording, no arrests have been made. And the mystery surrounding Arooj's sudden death is as confusing as ever. Who killed Arooj Khan is still an open question. Only one point is certain.
The man who won a million dollars playing the lottery died from a fatal dose of cyanide before he could collect on any of his winnings. He beat the odds and won the jackpot, a jackpot that may have cost him his life. To share your thoughts on this story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook.
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