Noida Double Murder
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During the calm morning hours of May 16, 2008, police are called to a prominent home. With sirens ringing, they rush to the residence of a well-respected family in India. The dentist's precious teenage daughter is hurt. Bad. She's been murdered. The police car slams the brakes. Officers rush to the home and stop with awe.

There are already over 30 people at a crime scene? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 92, The Noida Double Murders. ♪

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.

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Now, let's jump right into this week's case. Hey everyone, welcome to October. By far, this is my absolute favorite time of the year. This weekend is my birthday, so I'll be celebrating by doing a triathlon.

Since my Ironman triathlon is coming up at the end of the month on October 24th, I wanted to squeeze in a shorter Olympic distance race just to build some confidence before this Ironman. And because of COVID-19, my husband and I, we haven't been able to do a race in months.

So I'm really excited about that. I know not everyone is familiar with what an Ironman triathlon is, but it's the longest distance triathlon. You start with a 2.4 mile swim. We're doing that in the American River up in Sacramento, California.

Then there's 112 miles on the bike. And then to finish everything off, there's a 26.2 mile full marathon run at the end for a total of 140.6 miles. So I'll be competing in my third Ironman again on October 24th, just coming up here in a few weeks in Northern California. So just spending my birthday weekend getting ready for that.

So the case we're talking about this week was submitted to me by a listener of the show. They sent in an email to me just a couple of weeks ago, actually. Now, initially, when I read the email and I briefly did a Google search into the case, I responded and said that I would look into the case and that I would try my very best to cover it in a future episode of the show.

I had never heard about the case before, and at first, I wasn't sure what the case was even about. I had never heard these names before. But when I looked it up, and this was just within five minutes of a quick Google search, I knew that I wanted to cover this case ASAP. So I stopped everything and dove headfirst into the story.

The more and more I researched, I couldn't believe that I had never heard about this. I'm talking about the 2008 Noida double murder.

Now, before we start, this is a case that comes out of India with many different names. Now, I promise to do my very, very best with pronouncing all of the names and places in this story. And I just want to apologize in advance if any of my pronunciations are wrong.

At 6.01 a.m. on May 16, 2008, the Talar's family servant, Bharati Mandel, rang the doorbell. She was reporting to work for the day. This morning in particular was only her sixth day working for the Talar family. So this was a relatively new part of her daily routine. But when she rang the doorbell that morning, nobody answered.

She rang the doorbell three more times before someone finally answered it. It was Nipur Talar who showed up on the second floor balcony of the three-bedroom apartment. Now, the servant was a little surprised to see Nipur. In the first five days of working for the family, the live-in servant, Hemraj Benjadi, always let her inside. Nipur and Rajesh usually worked late and liked to sleep in past six or seven in the morning.

The Tolar family lived in a three-bedroom, second-floor apartment in Noida, India. To get to the front door of the apartment, there are three sets of doors. First, there's the outer gate of the property. Then, inside of that gate, there's a middle grill door. Then, there's the actual wooden front door of the apartment. So when the servant arrives that morning, she's stuck on the outside of the first gate.

Now, once the servant sees Nipur on the second floor balcony, she asks her, where is Hemraj? Nipur said that she didn't know where he was and thought that maybe he went out to go grab some milk and must have locked the entrance gate when he left. Nipur tells the servant to wait outside until he returns to open the front gate.

But the servant doesn't understand. She doesn't understand why Nipur doesn't just come downstairs, unlock the gates, and let her inside. Why does she have to wait for Hemraj? So the servant continues to ask Nipur as she's coming in and out of the balcony just to let her inside. Finally, after several minutes of coming back and forth, Nipur throws a set of house keys out the window so that the servant can unlock the gate.

But when the morning servant finally gets inside the front door of the apartment, she's completely confused by what she sees. Not only is she surprised to see both Nipur and her husband Rajesh, that they're already awake that morning, but she finds both of them inside of their 13-year-old daughter Arushki's bedroom. Nipur and Rajesh are hysterically crying while holding their daughter.

They're crying out loud, quote, look what Hemraj has done, end quote. 13-year-old Arushi was lying motionless on the floor of her bedroom in a pool of her own blood. Someone had slit the teenager's throat from ear to ear, and she was rapidly bleeding out.

The housekeeper rushes out of the apartment to call for help. She was screaming to neighbors to call the police that there's been an accident. But it was too late. Arushi was dead. Arushi Talar was born on May 24, 1994, in Noida, India, to parents Dr. Rajesh Talar and Dr. Nipur Talar. Both of her parents were well-known dentists in northern India.

Anurushi grew up in a stable, comfortable household. She spent her entire life accustomed to luxuries like live-in servants. She had servants who cooked and cleaned for her. She had luxuries that you and I probably only dreamed about as children. Nipur and Rajesh co-owned a dental clinic with close family friends. And Rajesh was also head of the dentist department at Fortis Hospital.

The arrangement at the dental clinic was that the couple who co-owned it worked the day shift, while Nipur and Rajesh worked the night shift. So this shift would explain that why on the morning of May 6, 2008, the morning servant was so surprised to see Nipur awake so early.

The local police in Noida arrived at the apartment at 7.15 a.m. that morning. It was over an hour after the morning servant arrived and saw that Arushki was dead. When the officers walked into the Tolar's living room, they were shocked at how many people were present. Inside the home were about 20 people, and that's in addition to the parents.

The police learned that before the servant called them to the house, Nipor and Rajesh called their neighbors and a handful of friends to come over. This meant that about 15 people were in the living room and another five to six people were in the Talar's master bedroom. This group of 20 neighbors and close family friends were there at the apartment before they even notified the police about Arushi's death.

But there weren't only people inside of the apartment. There was also a dozen more people outside of the Tolar's apartment. It seemed like the story about a death inside of an affluent apartment complex began to spread around the neighborhood before the police were even notified. Now, this part of the story reminds me so much of the John Benet Ramsey case.

We all remember how Patsy and John Ramsey called their friends and neighbors to come over to their Colorado home while the police searched for any sign of John Bonnet. And by doing this, they thoroughly contaminated the crime scene. Of course, at the time, nobody knew what the Ramsey's house, that it was the actual crime scene where her body was ultimately found was.

But the Boulder, Colorado Police Department really dropped the ball by allowing so many friends and so many neighbors inside of the home, which meant that they were contaminating the crime scene. You're going to have mixed DNA all over the house.

fingerprints are going to be smudged, trace evidence is going to be lost, and Policing 101 tells us that the first thing you do as a police officer after arriving at a crime scene is to secure the location. Nobody should be allowed in. Nobody should be allowed out. But unfortunately, the Indian police do the same exact thing as the Boulder, Colorado police did in the case of JonBenet Ramsey.

Everybody, and I mean everyone, is touching everything inside of the home. But what's even worse, when police do arrive at the apartment of the Talars and they see people walking around the apartment, they didn't stop it. The police asked nobody to leave. Instead, they all stuck around contaminating more and more forensic evidence.

Now, I'm not sure if it's because the Talars were a wealthy family. Possibly the local police felt pressured to not tell this family that they simply needed to tell all these people to leave, to get out of there. But people were everywhere inside the apartment throughout this entire initial investigation.

The police quickly determined Arushi's death was a homicide. Her throat was slit with no knife or weapon found next to her body. But the police still knew that someone did this to her. This wasn't a case of a suicide. So the first people that the police want to speak to, of course, are her parents, Dr. Nipor and Dr. Rajesh.

The police were shocked. According to the Talars, they knew who killed their daughter. According to them, it was their live-in servant, 45-year-old Hemraj Banjati. The Talars hired Hemraj to cook and clean for the family, and in return, he received a monthly salary and a place to live. He had his own private bedroom inside of the Talars' apartment.

So when the police asked the Tolarz why, why did they suspect the servant? Dr. Nippur and Raji said that he was missing. They said they woke up in the morning to check on their daughter like they did every single day. But when they got to her bedroom, they discovered her lifeless body. They saw that Hemraj wasn't in his bedroom. He was gone. He was the only other person inside of the apartment that night.

The Talars were so sure that he was their daughter's killer, they even offered the police 25,000 rupees to track him down, which was equal to about $400 in the United States. Rajesh and Nipur told police that they didn't hear anything the night before when Arushi was killed. No screams, no sounds of someone coming in or out of the apartment. They didn't hear a peep.

Hemraj killed Arushi and was able to do it without waking up her parents. According to them, they shut their bedroom door that night and the sound of the two air conditioning units would have drowned out any screams from inside of the apartment.

As investigators continued to question the Tullars, crime scene technicians were busy searching the apartment for any signs of evidence. But there was one part of the apartment they couldn't get access to, and that was the apartment's terrace.

Not only did they want to look out there because it was the only part of the apartment unsearched, but the police received information from one of Rajesh's co-workers who said that he saw traces of blood on the terrace's doorknob.

But when the police officers asked the Talars for the keys to get up on the terrace, Rajesh said no. He told the police that he didn't know where the keys to the locked terrace were. So without the keys, nobody went upstairs.

The more the police continued to question the Tolarz that morning, the angrier they became. They were upset that the police weren't responding to their tip about the killer and being that it was their live-in servant.

And the police weren't taking the money. They kept telling the investigators they were simply wasting their time in the apartment and that each minute and each moment they stayed in the apartment meant that Hemraj was getting farther and farther away.

Now eventually, after extreme pressure from the family, the police decided to accept the family's money and decided to pursue their tip that Hemraj likely fled to his hometown in Nepal. The police took Arushi's body out of the apartment around 8.30 a.m. and was sent for cremation around 4 p.m. that afternoon.

Now, I know this sounds fast, but they didn't use any type of embalming procedures. It was common in Hindu custom for bodies to be immediately cremated so that the family could spread their ashes in the Ganges River. So at the time, the Talars were insistent that their daughter's body be cremated as quickly as possible so that they could spread her ashes the following day.

And since the police said that they didn't need anything from her body, she was cremated later that same day. The following morning, the Talars left the apartment to spread Arushi's ashes in the river. While they were out, the police returned to the apartment. They wanted to see if they could access that upstairs terrace, that room or that part of the apartment that they couldn't get into the day before.

So the police decided the only way they could check it out was to break the lock. They do it and discover a scene that would change the course of their entire investigation. Out there on the Talars upstairs terrace was the decomposing body of the live-in servant, Hemraj Benjadi. The prime suspect in Arushi's murder lay murdered as well.

Like Arushi, Hemraj's throat was slashed and he suffered blunt force trauma to the head. It was obvious that this wasn't the case of a suicide or anything like that. Without a doubt, without a question, someone murdered Hemraj. But who? Two days later, the police identified their first suspect. His name was Vishnu Sharma.

Vishnu had worked for the Talar family as their live-in servant for over 10 years. He was even the person who introduced the Talars to Hemraj while he left for vacation eight months before the murders. But while on vacation, the family decided to keep Hemraj on staff and let Vishnu go.

So the police theorized that maybe Vishnu held a grudge against the family and the new servant for taking the job that he had for over 10 years. So in revenge, he murdered Hemraj. But why kill Arushi, an innocent 13-year-old girl? She had nothing to do with the family's change in servants. Well, the police theorized he killed her to get revenge on the Talars.

Even though the police didn't find any signs of a forced entry, it seemed plausible that after working for the Tolarz for over 10 years, he might know a secret way to get inside of the apartment. He also knew the layout of the place. So he knew exactly the locations of Arushi's bedroom as well as Hemraj's bedroom.

So the police thought that if anybody could get inside of the apartment without the Talars hearing, it could be Vishnu. With no other suspects, the police arrested Vishnu for the murders. But shortly after he was arrested, the police released him. Even though it sounded like a good theory, the police didn't have any evidence backing it up.

And besides, Vishnu had an alibi. He was nowhere near the Talar's apartment that night. In fact, he was miles away in the city of Nepal. So the police then turned their attention to Arushi's parents, Dr. Nippur and Dr. Rajesh.

They were the only other two people inside the apartment that night. And what was also troubling was that the police couldn't find a single piece of evidence to suggest that there was a break-in. Let's rewind for a moment. When the servant, the daytime servant, arrived at 6 a.m., the apartment's middle gate was found locked from the outside. However, the gate had an outward-facing hatch.

So whoever got inside of the apartment would have had to exit and then relock the hatch. There was another entrance to the apartment through Hemraj's bedroom. His bedroom had a door to the outside as well as a second door that led into the apartment's living room. Hemraj's door was found locked from the inside.

Then, of course, there was the locked terrace where Hemraj's body was discovered. That door was also, of course, locked. According to the Talars, there were two known sets of keys to the apartment. Nippur and Rajesh had a set, and Hemraj had a set. The Talars claimed that the key to the upstairs terrace belonged in Hemraj's set of keys, not theirs.

However, when the Talars turned over both sets of keys to the police, the terrorist key was still missing. And since then, this key has never been recovered. In Nippur's statements to the police, they locked Arushi's bedroom door every single night, and they usually placed the keys to her bedroom on Nippur's nightstand.

But when Nipur spoke to the police later on, she said that she couldn't remember whether the door to Arushi's bedroom was locked or not that night. Now, I mention this because if she locked Arushi's bedroom door that night, the person who killed her would have had access to the keys. Inside the Talar's living room, the police recovered a whiskey bottle sitting right there on top of the dining room table.

Now, this whiskey bottle is significant for two reasons. Number one, the bottle came from the Tolar's concealed mini bar. The reason I say, quote, concealed is because if you didn't know this bar was there, you simply just wouldn't know. You couldn't see it. This bar was built into the side of the wall behind a wooden panel.

So to get to the bottle of whiskey, you would have to know where it was and therefore be familiar with the layout of the apartment. Number two, the reason why I think this whiskey bottle is so important to this investigation, the police found DNA evidence on the whiskey bottle itself. They found DNA consistent with Arushi's

and DNA consistent with hemorrhage. It was a mixture. So we've got both of the victims in this case, their DNA found on this whiskey bottle. But even though authorities removed the bottle from the home on May 16th, the police failed to swab the bottle for fingerprints.

one of the many forensic mix-ups throughout this investigation. So it's unclear as to who exactly drank from the bottle. The only thing we know for sure is that whoever did is likely Arushi and Hemraj's killer because a mixture of both victims' DNA was found on the bottle. This episode of Forensic Tales is sponsored by Old Timey Crimey.

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As the police started to narrow in on their suspicions of Nipur and Rajesh, details about what happened earlier that night started to emerge. Nipur worked at the dental clinic from around 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. After work, she said she picked up Arushi from school around 1.30 p.m. to drop her off at the apartment. At the apartment, Arushi had lunch with her mom as well as with her aunt, her father's sister.

Nipur then left the apartment to go to work at the other dental clinic from 4.30 p.m. to 7.00 p.m., returning back to the apartment around 7.30. Dr. Rajesh got home later that night, around 9.30 p.m. That's when the live-in servant, Hemraj, cooked dinner for the family like he did every single night.

According to the Talars, they gave Arushi a new digital camera as an early birthday present after they all ate dinner. That's when they opened up the camera and took several photos. The last one was taken at 10.10 p.m. After playing around with the camera for a little while, Arushi went to her bedroom and the Talars went to theirs.

According to Nipur and Rajesh, around 11 p.m., Rajesh asked Nipur to switch on the internet router, which was set up in Arushi's bedroom. When Nipur went into the bedroom to turn on the internet router, she said she saw her daughter on her bed reading a book. She then switched the router on and went back into the master bedroom.

For the next 45 minutes or so, Rajesh browsed the internet and sent out a couple emails. He visited a dentist website at 11.41 p.m. and sent an email at 11.57 p.m. Based on a digital forensic search of the computer, this was the last activity the internet router recorded from inside of the apartment until 3.43 a.m.,

At 3.43 a.m., someone switched off the internet router located in Arushi's bedroom. Now, this part of the story is significant because according to the medical examiner's report, Arushi and the servant were both killed sometime between 12 o'clock midnight and 1 o'clock in the morning.

This could only mean two things. One, whoever went into Arushi's room to turn the router off didn't see the blood-soaked bed or her dead body. Or two, whoever turned the router off is the killer. Other key evidence that pointed the police towards the Talars was phone data and evidence of staging.

On the night Arushi was murdered, one of her friends, Anmal, called the Tolar's landline looking for her around midnight. The friend decided to call the family's landline after trying to get a hold of Arushi on her cell phone, but she didn't answer. Typically, Arushi stayed up until after midnight talking and texting with her friends on her cell phone.

But on May 15th, her cell phone was inactive after 9.10 p.m. There was no outgoing activity. So her friend Anmal sent a text message to Arushi's cell phone around 12.30 a.m. However, cell phone data revealed that Arushi never received this text message because someone had already turned her phone off.

Now, the real troubling part here is that both Arushi as well as Hemraj's cell phones were missing from the apartment. Neither one of them had their cell phones. The police also believed that the parents staged the apartment. When the police encountered Arushi's body, she was on top of her bedsheets and the bed didn't appear to have been slept in.

There was blood on the bedroom walls, the bed itself, and the back part of the bedroom door. But they didn't find any blood on most of her toys. There was no blood on her backpack. And there was no blood on a pink pillow found behind her head. So this led the police to believe the parents staged the bedroom itself.

Because if Arushi had been murdered where her body was found, those items that I mentioned, the backpack, the pink pillow, would have had, quote, blood spatter on them. It would have been a part of the blood spatter range. But there was no blood found on any of these items surrounding her body.

The police believe there was also evidence that hemorrhage was dragged across the apartment using a bed sheet. The police would later accuse the Talars of attempting to clean up the apartment. The police overheard the Talars instructing the other servants to clean up the apartment, explicitly cleaning up the wall and floors inside of Arushi's bedroom. Of the evidence kept pointing back to the Talars.

They had keys to the locked apartment. They knew where the hidden liquor cabinet was. They were the only other two people inside of the apartment. The other two were brutally murdered. So on May 23rd, the police arrested Rajesh and officially announced that he and his wife Nipur were the prime suspects in the murder of their daughter and servant.

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The police theorized about possible motives in the case. Why would the Talars kill their own daughter? The first theory was that Rajesh walked in on his live-in servant and teenage daughter engaged in sexual activity. The autopsy itself didn't recover any semen from Arushi's body. Evidence suggested, however, that someone cleaned her vaginal area post-mortem.

The theory was, was that Rajesh killed Hemraj for raping his daughter and murdered Arushi in some sort of honor killing. Your daughter is raped and therefore, not to bring dishonor to the family, she's also murdered.

Rajesh first hit Hemraj over the head with the murder weapon, which they believed was a golf club. He then took a kukri, which is an Indian type machete, and slit his throat. Next, he used the kukri to slit Arushi's throat.

Next, he staged the bedroom by making it look like Arushi was put in her bed. Then he dragged Hemraj's body out of his daughter's bedroom using his bedsheets, placing the body out on the upstairs terrace. This is the story according to the police.

And also, according to the police, the plan was for Rajesh to dispose of the body, referring to Hemraj's body later on. But they didn't get the chance because the second servant showed up at 6 a.m. that morning, which would explain why Hemraj's body wasn't disposed of and was found simply on their upstairs terrace.

Then, finally, after committing the murder sometime that night, which the medical examiner theorized was between midnight and 1 a.m., that's when Rajesh grabbed the bottle of whiskey from the secret cabinet and drank from it, leaving behind Arushi and Hemraj's DNA on the bottle. According to the police, they said that the injuries to Arushi and Hemraj's neck support this theory.

Initially, investigators said that the wounds to their necks were done in, quote, clinical precision and careful thought, suggesting that this could be the work of a skilled dentist, which, of course, we know that both of the Tolar's were. Phone records also supported the police's theory.

Phone records from 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. on May 16th discovered that Rajesh's older brother, Dainish, a family friend, the retired deputy superintendent of police, and someone at an unidentified phone number all started to communicate while the medical examiner was completing the autopsy report.

Why is this important? Why is it important that all of these people were somehow communicating during this two, three hour window? Well, if you ask the Indian police, it's because these communications were an attempt to use the family's connection to the retired police superintendent to ensure that the word rape wasn't published in the official autopsy report.

And the Talars wanted to make sure any mention of sexual activity with his daughter was kept out of the official report. Now, another possible theory that the police threw around was that Rajesh was cheating on his wife, Nipur, and was engaged in an extramarital affair with another woman.

Rajesh was then confronted by his daughter, who found out about this extramarital affair, and then he was blackmailed by Hemraj, who also knew about the affair. And to prevent this affair from spreading and having people find out that he was cheating on Nipur, he murdered both of them.

Now, the Talars adamantly denied either of these theories were true. They claimed the police were trying to frame them for the murders to cover up for how badly they handled the investigation. They called out the police for failing to secure the crime scene. They said that valuable evidence was mishandled in the case, including the whiskey bottle as well as Arushi's mattress.

The Talars argued that although the police collected 28 sets of fingerprints throughout the house, without securing the crime scene, this evidence was useless. When it came down to it, this case was a complete disaster from a forensic science standpoint.

Whatever evidence wasn't contaminated early on was subsequently poorly tested by the police. And you can't really argue with the Talars about this point. The Talars were able to cast doubt on the entire police investigation. And subsequently, the investigation was turned over to India's Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI for short.

The Talars told the CBI that this idea of Rajesh having an affair and this idea of Arushi and Hemraj's sexual relationship came from a guy named Krishna Tadari, an assistant at the Talars dental clinic. Rajesh said that just two days before the double murders, he was reprimanded at the dental clinic for a mistake that he made on a patient's dental impression.

Rajesh's driver supported this claim by telling the CBI that he overheard Krishna say that he would get the Talars back for reprimanding and embarrassing him while at the dental clinic. So the CBI detained Krishna and executed a search warrant of his home. And what did they find?

Well, underneath a pillow in Krishna's apartment, the CBI found a blood-stained kukri knife. Krishna was arrested and given a polygraph test. During his interview with the CBI, he implicated his friend, Rat Kumar, for the murders.

Rakkumar was a previous servant for the Tular's. A search of his resident uncovered a blood-stained t-shirt. He was then also placed under arrest. Then, a third suspect was arrested, another one of Krishna's friends, Vijay Mandel. Vijay was a driver and servant for the Tular's neighbors. He was arrested after Krishna also implicated him in the double murders.

Even though the CBI now had three men in jail for the crimes besides the Tolar's, there were problems. First, all three men had alibis for the night of the murders. All three of the men were administered polygraph tests. They were issued narco tests.

And the polygraph test came back inconclusive. And well, the narco test, well, those type of tests are just extremely unreliable. And then third, the police didn't have any physical or forensic evidence linking any of these three men to the murders.

Because the crime scene was so badly contaminated, the police weren't able to recover any DNA or fingerprints from any of these men inside of the Tolar's apartment that day. But what about the blood-stained kukri knife found in Krishna's apartment?

Well, the police sent the knife for DNA testing, but investigators weren't able to recover a DNA profile from it. In fact, there was evidence to suggest that the blood found on the Kukri knife wasn't even human blood. In the end, all three men were released after the CBI received public scrutiny for unethical interview practices and lack of evidence to hold them in custody.

Like the local police, the CBI suspected that the parents were responsible. However, in 2010, the CBI turned the case over to another team that recommended closing the case. This team didn't believe that there was enough evidence against the Tullars.

But regardless of this team's input on the case, the CBI moved forward with their investigation and designated Dr. Nippor and Dr. Rajish as the prime suspects once again, even without physical or forensic evidence.

The criminal trial against the Talars for the double murder began on May 11, 2013. After six months of testimony, the CBI court found the Talars guilty on November 25, 2013. The prosecution for the CBI presented the court with this theory about what happened that night.

According to the CBI, Rajesh heard a noise and assumed the noise came from Hemraj's bedroom. But when he went to go check on him, he wasn't in his room. Instead, he grabbed the golf club from his bedroom, thinking that someone might have broken into the home. He then went to check on his daughter, Arushi, and saw the two of them engaged in sexual activity, consensual or not.

The prosecution said Rajesh hit Hemraj over the head with the golf club. But when he hit him again, he moved, causing Rajesh to accidentally strike his daughter with the golf club. By the time Nipur heard what was going on and rushed into Arushi's bedroom, both of them were close to death.

They decided to kill Hemraj so nobody would know what happened. And instead of saving their daughter's life, they had no choice but to kill her and blame the entire thing on Hemraj.

At this point, according to the CBI prosecution, this is when they cleaned Arushi's vaginal area. They cleaned the entire apartment. They left the apartment and locked the front gates from the outside and then came back in through Hemraj's room to trick the police.

Finally, Rajesh sat down at the kitchen table and drank from the bottle of whiskey, leaving behind both Arushi and Hemraj's DNA on it. In November 2013, the Talars were sentenced to life in prison for the murders. But that's not how this story ends.

Four years later, in 2017, India's high court overturned their convictions due to a lack of forensic evidence linking them to the murders. Instead, the high court argued that the CBI secured the murder convictions solely based on circumstantial evidence, not enough to present a person with a life in prison sentence, at least not in India.

The court also argued that the CBI didn't present a strong enough motive for the murders. So the Tolar spent just about four years behind bars and prison, but they were ultimately released in 2017 after the court's ruling. The 2008 double murder of Arushi Tolar and Hemraj Benjati remains unsolved.

Since their release from prison, the Tolar's point to the police and CBI's mishandling of the crime scene and valuable forensic evidence. They maintain their innocence and claim the police and CBI use them as scapegoats to cover their sloppy investigative work. The CBI, on the other hand, maintains that the Tolar's are guilty. They are responsible for murdering their daughter and servant.

In a public statement, the CBI said, quote, the only weakness we found with our investigation was that the scene of the crime had been badly tampered with on the first day itself. As a result, after that, we got nothing of value from the scene of the crime, end quote.

The murder of Arushi and Hemraj Benjati still frustrates many people today. The police should have easily solved this case if it weren't for the mishandling of valuable forensic evidence multiple times throughout the investigation. Was it an honor killing, an accident, or a cold-blooded double murder? Without the forensics, we may never know.

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