PUNE, May 16: A State Bank of India officer, his wife and two children were brutally murdered at their spacious Princess Town apartment in Kalyaninagar area on Thursday night. The multiple murder was reminiscent of the Joshi-Abyankar, Owhal and Rathi killings which had numbed Pune in the past.

The brutality with which 45-year-old Rajesh Jaykumar Patil, his wife, Vijaya (40), their 13-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son, were done to death, has sent shock waves in the posh Kalyaninagar locality off the Pune-Ahmednagar road on the eastern outskirts.

The unknown assailants, suspected to be the Patils' maidservant, her labourer husband and another relative residing in the same locality, appear to have executed the murders in cold blood. The heads and faces of all the victims were smashed apparently with a blunt object and multiple stabs were inflicted with a large screw driver.

Police suspect that the Patils, who had shifted to Pune barely a month ago, were done to death in sleep as there was no evidence of any resistance by the hapless victims. The bedroom of the first-floor flat in building no C-4 presented a gory picture as it was splattered with blood.

The killers are suspected to have murdered the entire family in the bedroom and later attempted to dump them in a drainage manhole on the ground below the flat.

The bodies of Patil and his daughter were found stuffed in the manhole while Vijaya lay in a pool of blood in the corridor near a door opening into the balcony. The body of her son was found lying on a bed which meant that the killers had to abort the cover up attempt and flee the scene halfway.

When this reporter visited the site of the murder, the walls and ceiling of the bedroom were spattered with blood marks while the floor of the corridor and the balcony was covered with blood indicating that the bodies were dragged out from here.The lives of the family members might have been saved had their neighbours shown a little presence of mind and sense of social awareness.The furious barking of a dog in their neighbourhood had woken up a neighbour of Patil family, Phatak, around 2 am. Curious to know why the dog was behaving strangely, Pathak peeped out of the window and noticed a miscreant trying to put off the electric light outside the ground floor flat of another neighbour, but refused to budge.

Later, neither the Patils' milkman, nor their newspaper vendor showed any concern when the family failed to respond to the doorbell. While the milkman went away after a vain attempt to ``wake up'' the Patils, the newspaper vendor tugged a copy in the padlock.

It was an auto-rickshaw driver, hired by Patil to take him to work every morning, who took alarm when the family did not respond so late in the morning.

The auto-rickshaw driver, whose identity could not be ascertained till late in the evening, alerted a neighbour before going away. Later, the neighbour tipped off a builder Jugraj Palrecha and both of them went to the Yerawada police station after seeing blood in the balcony of Patil's flat.

According to the police, the culprits may have gained entry into the bedroom through a window left open.The police also recovered a black scarf tied to the cover of the manhole in which the bodies of Patil and his daughter were stashed. A few currency notes were also found wrapped inside the soiled scarf.

Since three construction workers, Bhagvat Kale, his wife who worked as a maid servant with the Patils, and another relative were missing since last night, their involvement in the crime was being probed. The police sniffers, who were rushed to the spot this afternoon, picked up the trail to Bhagvat's hut located at a short distance from the multi-storyed apartment building housing the Patils. The Pune police have launched a massive hunt to trace the Kales. A police team has been sent to their native Kalamb village in Osmanabad.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.