Fears have been raised over the potential for copycat killings after a man slaughtered his lover and stuffed her diced corpse in the fridge.
The case involving Aftab Poonawalla, a trained chef from southern Delhi, who allegedly strangled his beau Shraddha Walker and sliced her into 36 pieces, could easily be mistaken for a near-identical case from almost three decades ago.
In the 1990s, a Delhi scientist killed his wife after a blazing row at their home before chopping up her body and stuffing the pieces in a suitcase, the BBC reports.
The man then travelled more than 900 miles to Hyderabad in southern India before checking into a hotel.
Over the next few days, he took the pieces out of the room and threw them away bit by bit in a nearby swamp.
The remains stayed undetected until a stray dog rifling through the mud for food discovered a human hand and picked it up in its jaws.
Senior Delhi Police Official Dependra Pathak said: "The man dismembered the body and took the parts to another city to eliminate evidence.
"There was nothing new about a 'dismemberment murder'. But we wondered whether the method of disposal of the body [parts] was inspired by a book or film."
But in recent months, a number of near-identical killings have been thrust into the public eye in India.
In all cases, the victim was chopped up and their remains were stored in either a fridge or suitcase.
To dispose of the remains, the suspect then transported them to waste grounds, like a desolate road or forest.
Crime data doesn't offer any explanation as to whether the same method of murder and subsequent body disposal.
India's 29,000 murder cases were largely provoked by "disputes", "personal vendetta or enmity", or "gain [for money]", reports the BBC.
The data lacks any indication of how many victims were killed or what weapon was used.
Cultural behaviourist Loren Coleman - who studies how media crime coverage impacts the general population - said: "Copycat murder and murder suicides are real. The media spreads the contagious behaviour: imitation."
In one of the most-reported similar murders, Poonawalla was charged in November with slaughtering his friend Shraddha Walkar after she asked him to marry.
Poonawalla is thougt to have been obsessed with the US hit series Dexter - a crime drama about a vigilante serial killer whose day job is analysing blood spatter for cops.
Criminal psychologist Anuja Kapur said though the sensationalising of murder can "inspire copycat acts", it's unlikely that Poonawalla took inspiration from the murder 30 years ago.
Mr Pathak added that copycats are usually inspired by "films or novels rather than the crime itself".
Furthermore, while the dismemberment of a corpse is rare, it's actually a common way of disposing of a body after the fact.
Head of Forensic Medicine at Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences said: "Dismemberment murders are relatively rare but they also happen all the time.
"It's just that many cases are not reported by the media.
"I am looking into three cases of murder and dismemberment that haven't been reported by the media at all."
