AHMEDABAD: A 48-year-old woman allegedly killed her 21-year-old stepson, Hardik Patel, by strangling him, stuffing his body in a sack and dumping it at Kunjad village of Daskroi taluka in Ahmedabad on Tuesday, Kanbha police said on Saturday.
Police officers said that the accused, Gauri Patel, told them that she had also killed her own 11-year-old son 15 years ago. She married Hardik’s father Rajnikant about seven years ago.
Hardik’s younger brother, Umang Patel, who runs a dairy in Kanbha, stated in his FIR that Gauri and Hardik often fought over money.
“My stepmother used to take money from our relatives and my father’s friends in the name of investing in our dairy business, but never spent the money on it,” he said in the FIR.
She had borrowed Rs 25 lakh from relatives saying Hardik had suffered losses in the dairy business due to Covid-19 pandemic, the lockdown and curfews.
When these relatives began asking Hardik for the money, he objected to her taking money from them and spending it on herself.
On Tuesday morning, when Hardik was asleep alone at home as Umang had gone to his dairy, Gauri along with her three relatives from Nashik — Sanjay, Anil and Dinesh — strangled him with a rope, said DySP K T Kamaria.
They then packed his body into a sack and dumped it on Chosamia Road in Kanbha, he said.
When Umang returned home and did not find Hardik till late in the evening, he inquired with Gauri about him, but she did not give any clear answers.
On asking his neighbours, Umang found that Gauri and her three relatives had loaded a sack into an autorickshaw on Tuesday afternoon.
Meanwhile, Kanbha police inquiring into the missing person’s complaint on Wednesday found the body in bushes near Chosamia Road. It was later identified as Hardik.
On questioning, she confessed to having killed Hardik with the three men.
“During her questioning, she also confessed that she had in 2014 killed her 11-year-old son when she was working as a domestic helper in Nashik,” said Kamaria.
She and two male friends had killed her son as he witnessed them breaking into the house where she worked.
They strangled the 11-year-old boy and she cooked up a story that burglars had broken into her employer’s house, tried to rape her and killed him when he tried to intervene. She married Hardik’s father in 2015, said a police officer.
Kanbha police registered a complaint of murder and criminal conspiracy against Gauri and her three aides for killing Hardik.
