The case dates back to July 2, 2006, when Dr Smitha Mahajan lodged a complaint at the Prabhat police chowky in Pune stating that someone claiming to be from the Omkar Charitable Trust had called her husband. The trust had offered him a post as a consultant and in order to discuss the prospect further, her husband had gone to meet them and had been kidnapped. With the family receiving extortion calls demanding Rs 25 lakh for her husband’s release, a frantic Smitha had approached the police.

The Anti Extortion Cell of the Pune police, then headed by Inspector Balkrishna Agashe, started a search operation and his team had intercepted the repeated extortion calls with the help of the mobile phone company. The findings confirmed the involvement of Leena Deosthale and her daughter, residents of Uttam Nagar, in this case. The police arrested them on July 7.

Investigations revealed that the Deosthales had called Dr Mahajan at Shantanu lodge in the city where they injected sedatives into Mahajan, an overdose of which had killed the doctor. The accused had then meticulously hacked his body, using surgical instruments. The police recovered Mahajan’s body parts wrapped in plastic bags from various spots in Katraj Ghat and Nashik Phata. His head and limbs, however, remain missing till today.

While the accused were arrested within a week after the murder, the mystery began to unravel only during court proceedings. The prosecution examined 47 witnesses, comprising police officers, residents of the Uttam Nagar area and Leena Deosthale’s siblings.

“Every day was a turning point in this case, as each witness contributed different pieces to the jigsaw,” said advocate Ujjwala Pawar, the Additional Public Prosecutor in the case. “Four ‘employees’ of the Blue Bird Detective Agency, namely Ketan Kale, Rahul Bhosale, Pravin Kamble and Ashok Magar, were star witnesses in the case, as they had been privy to the duo’s scheming, albeit unknowingly,” said Pawar.

Although they were suspects earlier, the police later found that the Desothales had also duped them claiming that their agency was planning to bust a kidney transplantation racket allegedly operated by Dr Mahajan. So the employees helped the Deosthales in forcibly injecting five syringes of thiopental into his body. They never knew that the heavy dose of sedatives would kill the doctor.

This was not the end of the story. Some startling revelations came to light indicating that the duo had not intended to stop with Dr Mahajan alone.

The police raided the duo’s Uttam Nagar room as well as their Dahisar flat and seized around 220 items; the most important of them being two notebooks containing the names and contact details of prominent doctors and orthopaedic surgeons. “It is a shuddering prospect to imagine that several other doctors would have fallen prey to these women’s plans if they hadn’t been arrested,” said Dr Smitha Mahajan.

As the case progressed, ‘arrogance in attitude’ became synonymous with the accused duo’s conduct in the court. The duo refused to engage a lawyer, standing by their decision to fight their case themselves.

The prosecution rested its case on December 6, after a powerful testimony of its last witness— investigating officer DySP B R Patil—who had not only traced the line of events prior to the murder and ascertained the modus of the crime, but also investigated narcoanalysis tests taken by Leena Deosthale.

“She had experimented with the injection on herself and hence knew the dosage and its impact which she used to manipulate the tests,” said Patil who had dissected each of Leena’s replies.