Who killed Shruti Hill? MP HC releases ex-MBBS student after nearly 14 years in jail

A significant court verdict leaves a murder mystery unsolved

16-Marskole-leaves Free at last: Marskole leaves the Bhopal Central Jail on May 9 | Mujeeb Faruqui

On May 9—4,979 days after he was picked up from room number 61 in the B Block of Gandhi Medical College, Bhopal—Chandresh Marskole, 36, walked out of Bhopal Central Jail with a grocery bag full of personal belongings and some medical books. He was, finally, a free man.

“My role started and ended with the complaint. I also cooperated fully with the investigation. I have and will always stand with the truth.” — Dr Hemant Verma, senior medical officer, Gandhi Medical College
“Such cases are like big exams for us. The pandemic-induced delay gave me more time to prepare for the case and we could present our case well in court.” — H.R. Naidu, Marskole’s lawyer

A Gond tribal from Doke village in Waraseoni in Balaghat district, about 480km from Bhopal, Marskole had been in jail for close to 14 years on charges of murdering Shruti Hill, his alleged girlfriend. “He has been a victim of truth being sacrificed at the altar of a motivated and malicious investigation,” said the Madhya Pradesh High Court on May 4. It also directed the state government to pay him 042 lakh as compensation within 90 days.

The 78-page order written by judges Atul Sreedharan and Sunita Yadav is a significant documentation of jurisprudence. It has all the makings of a crime thriller novel, given the detailing of the investigative loopholes and legal aspects. But, unlike in a whodunnit, the real murderer is still unknown.

“From the material on record, we find the conduct of the police is malicious and the investigation has been done with the intention of securing the conviction of the appellant (Marskole) for an offence he did not commit and perhaps, for shielding [prosecution witness] Dr Hemant Verma, whose involvement in this offence is strongly suspected though there is no material to hold affirmatively against him as he was not on trial,” the court said.

THE CASE

On September 20, 2008, the police picked up Marskole, a final year MBBS student, on the basis of a phone call and a written complaint; GMC senior resident Dr Hemant Verma had complained about Marskole to Shailendra Shrivastava, then inspector general of police, Bhopal. Verma also submitted a written complaint at the Koh-e-Fiza police station.

An old photo of Shruti Hill. An old photo of Shruti Hill.

This written complaint was a key document in the case. In it, Verma said (as quoted in the High Court order) that on September 19, 2008, Marskole had asked him for his personal SUV (Toyota Qualis, MP04 HB 1550) to go to Hoshangabad, 77km from Bhopal. Verma loaned him the car and his driver, Ram Prasad. The following day, Ram Prasad told Verma that Marskole was carrying a bedding [from his hostel] and when the car reached Budhni (on the way to Hoshangabad), he asked the driver to take him to Pachmarhi (200km from Bhopal) instead. In the jungles of Pachmarhi, he asked the driver to stop the car. When the driver went a short distance away to relieve himself, “He (Marskole) took the bedding out of the vehicle and threw it into the ravine, which bedding was heavy (sic)”.

Marskole and Ram Prasad returned to Bhopal at 10pm, continued the complaint, and the driver said the circumstances were suspicious. “The student (Marskole) was in a relationship for quite some time with a girl from Pachmarhi who used to visit him in the boys’ hostel and [used to] spend the night there,” read the complaint. “I (Verma) had to suddenly go out and when I returned in the evening [of September 20], my driver informed me. And so, I am giving the complete information to the police so that... the murderer is not able to hoodwink the process of justice.”

On September 22, in the presence of Marskole and other witnesses, a joint team of Bhopal and Pachmarhi police recovered the body of a young woman tied up in black bedding from the ravines of Satpura. It was at Denwa Darshan, a scenic spot about 20km before Pachmarhi.

Marskole identified the body as that of Hill, 23; later in the day, her father, George Stevenson Hill, too, identified the body. Inquest proceedings by the police on September 22 recorded witnesses saying that, “[Marskole] had told them he had strangled the deceased and wrapped her body in the bedding and thrown it from the railing.”

Murder, mystery: Denwa Darshan, the place where Hill’s body was found | Sravani Sarkar Murder, mystery: Denwa Darshan, the place where Hill’s body was found | Sravani Sarkar

On September 24, a postmortem examination was conducted and the cause of death was determined as “throttling (manual strangulation), homicidal in nature”. An FIR was registered on the same day at the Koh-e-Fiza police station and, on September 25, Marskole was formally arrested and charged with sections 302 (murder) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence) of the Indian Penal Code.

The case was tried by the 8th additional sessions judge, Bhopal, and, on July 31, 2009, the court sentenced Marskole to life imprisonment and fined him Rs5,000 for charges under section 302, and added another three years imprisonment for charges under section 201.

Marskole moved the High Court in 2009 itself, but the case dragged on till H.R. Naidu became his lawyer in 2017-18. “We tried to expedite the case, but the Covid-19 pandemic struck,” said Naidu. “Though online hearings were conducted, the case could not progress much because of its technical nature.”

Naidu argued in court that the case against his client was based on circumstantial evidence and there were no eyewitnesses to the murder or the disposal of the body. “Such cases are like big exams for us,” said Naidu. “The pandemic-induced delay gave me more time to prepare for the case and we could present our case well in court.”

The High Court order ends by saying, “This is a case that has been deliberately botched up and the appellant falsely implicated to protect, perhaps, the actual perpetrators of the offence who may have been known to the higher echelons of the state police.”

R.R. Sahu, the investigating officer and then in-charge of Koh-e-Fiza Police Station, told THE WEEK that the police undertook a fair investigation and presented all the facts before the court. “It was on the basis of those facts coming out of investigation that the trial court convicted him,” he said. Sahu is currently a sub-divisional officer of police at Bada Malhera in Chhatarpur district.

Verma, on his part, told THE WEEK that he generously allowed Marskole to use his car as he had said that he wanted to visit his ailing mother. Verma added that he was being a law-abiding citizen by filing the police complaint. “My role started and ended with the complaint,” said Verma, now a senior medical officer at the GMC. “I also cooperated fully with the investigation. I have and will always stand with the truth.”

HOW WAS MARSKOLE ACQUITTED?

The High Court judges observed that the main witnesses for the prosecution were Ram Prasad and Verma, but neither was an eyewitness to the murder. In fact, there were no eyewitnesses in the case.

Dr Hemant Verma Dr Hemant Verma

The court pointed out that Ram Prasad’s statement said that Marskole brought down the bedding from his hostel on September 19 and loaded it into the boot of the car, but does not say whether he helped in loading it or even touched it. Later in his statement, he said that the bedding was heavy. However, the police failed to question Ram Prasad on how he knew it was heavy if he had not touched it.

The court also questioned how Verma came to know that the bedding was “heavy”, as his complaint was based only on information provided by Ram Prasad, who himself had never touched it.

THE WEEK could not contact Ram Prasad for his version. But Verma said that the driver told him that he had seen Marskole “rolling down” the bedding at Denwa Darshan and surmised it to be heavy.

The court also noted that the police did not question Ram Prasad on how Marskole opened the boot of the car at Denwa Darshan—it was locked, and the key was with the driver, as mentioned in the police statement.

Verma said the driver had, as a matter of habit, left the car doors open, as is done when leaving the car for a brief time. Marskole might have used the boot door release button/lever near the driver’s seat to open it.

The court also said that a receipt from a Pachmarhi toll booth on September 19 showed that the Qualis had four occupants, including the driver, but the police did not ask Ram Prasad about the two other occupants; in his statement, he mentioned only Marskole and himself.

Verma said the driver always maintained that he took Marskole till Pachmarhi [after the bedding was allegedly dumped], where Marskole bought and drank a bottle of beer, and asked the driver to take him back to Bhopal. Ram Prasad told him that no one else was in the car, said Verma.

H.R. Naidu H.R. Naidu

The court also observed that Verma had said in his statement that he had gone to Indore for some personal work on September 19. But the police never interrogated him on the details of this trip and why he lent the car if he himself was travelling.

The toll receipt was “the largest hole in the prosecution’s case”, noted the High Court order, adding that it should have set alarm bells ringing in the mind of investigating officer. Also, given that Verma could not establish his journey or presence in Indore on the date, he should have been subject to rigorous interrogation to confirm or eliminate his presence in the Qualis.

Verma said he had gone to Indore on September 19 to meet his wife and children, who were at his in-laws’ place. He also said that, whenever he had to travel alone, he preferred Volvo buses as it was convenient and cheaper; the buses passed in front of the GMC campus, where he stayed with his family.

He said Marskole had also promised to fill diesel in the car.

The court also asked how Verma concluded, as early as September 20, that Marskole was a “murderer”, why had he mentioned Hill and how had he arrived at the assumption that it was her body. Ram Prasad had not told Verma any of this, and the latter’s complaint was based on the information the driver had provided. The police should have interrogated Verma intensively on this aspect, but never did so, the court observed.

Verma said that after Ram Prasad narrated the incident to him on September 20, he went to Marskole’s hostel room and talked to him casually. However, Marskole looked quite discomfited and did not even invite him into the room. Verma said he then spoke to some other hostel dwellers who told him about the girl who used to visit Marskole’s room. That girl had not been seen for a couple of days. It was then that Verma rang the Bhopal IG.

Sources said that Hill got to know Marskole at the GMC, which she used to visit as a patient. She used to live in Pachmarhi, where her mother was a missionary school teacher.

QUESTIONS ON POLICE ACTION

The court pointed out that it was clear from prosecution documents that Marskole was in illegal police custody from September 20 to 25, when he was formally arrested. Before the arrest, the court noted, Marskole was made to confess to the crime in custody, as reflected by the documents related to the identification of the body and the inquest report of September 22. “[This] clearly reveals the malice with which the police was conducting the investigation against the appellant,” said the court order.

Also, despite the forensic report disclosing the presence of semen on the lower undergarment of the deceased, the police failed to send the samples for DNA testing. The court said that if the sample was a match for Marskole’s DNA, his romantic relationship with Hill could have been proven. And if not, the scope of investigation could have been enhanced.

The Qualis allegedly used to dispose of the body was seized on October 3, 2008; the rubber matting in the boot bore a mark of “secretion”. The matting tested positive for human blood, according to the forensic report, though the blood group was unidentifiable because the stain had disintegrated.

The court raised questions on this delayed seizure of the car, and said that the “alleged discovery of human blood from the mat of the car is highly suspicious” because the antemortem (before death) injuries to the victim were abrasions and contusions, and could not have led to bloodstains on the mat, after seeping through the bedding (in which the body was wrapped).

The court also raised doubts about the use of word ‘secretion’ in Hindi by the police on the seizure memo, saying it was uncharacteristic. The police usually use the phrase khoon jaise dhabbe to describe ‘blood-like stains’. All these factors related to the seizure [of the vehicle and the mat] “[are] highly contrived and smack of manipulation by the police in fabricating and introducing extraneous evidence”, the court observed.

The court said that the prosecution was also unable to prove Marskole’s motive to kill Hill. The judges said that the presence of a mangalsutra alongside the body, and the testimony by Hill’s father that the two wanted to marry, could have meant that they were married before the murder.

OBSERVATIONS ON TRIAL COURT

The court pointed out that, in his statement under section 313 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), Marskole said that Verma was vengeful towards him because of campus politics. He said that the prosecution witnesses were against him because of political rivalry. Marskole also said that Verma knew senior police officers, and with their help fabricated evidence against him to spoil his career.

The court said it was incumbent upon the trial court to deal with the allegation levelled by the appellant, especially when Verma himself stated that he had personally called Shrivastava. “Moreover, the Koh-e-Fiza police station, which conducted the entire investigation, was under the jurisdiction of Mr Shrivastava and, therefore, his influence in the case... was enough for the trial court to find that the entire investigation showed signs of manipulation though the same may not be directly attributable to Mr Shrivastava,” the court observed.

Verma said he did not know Marskole well enough to have any rivalry with him. “He was eight years my junior and a studious boy hardly involved in campus politics,” he said.

As for his links with Shrivastava, Verma said that he was active in student politics and had been the president of the Junior Doctors’ Association from 2005-07. He carried phone numbers of many senior police and administrative officials, as well as journalists. “I certainly did not know the IG personally, but I thought that the matter was too important to be discussed with junior cops.”

Shrivastava, who has retired as special director general of police, told THE WEEK in a written response: “Where am I wrong? Our mobile numbers were in the public domain. It was also written at the GMC police post. I attend all calls, known and unknown, and also call back even unknown numbers. It is unfortunate that this fact was not brought to the knowledge of the honourable High Court. When Dr Verma called me, I asked him to report the matter to the police station concerned and asked the police station officer to take everything in writing.... And that is it. After that I had no role in the investigation as I was neither the investigating officer nor the supervisory officer.”

SO, WHO KILLED HILL?

Verma has already stated his case, and, after being released, Marskole refused to comment on who could have killed Hill.

So, unless there is a thorough reinvestigation, the answer to ‘Who killed Hill?’ will never be available. Reinvestigation, however, is not on the horizon as of now. The Madhya Pradesh government is yet to decide on filing an appeal against the judgment in the Supreme Court or on undertaking a reinvestigation. Sources said that the Madhya Pradesh Police are scrutinising the case and the Bhopal police commissioner has been asked to provide some information. “We will be seeking legal opinion in the matter before taking any further step,” Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Rajesh Rajora told THE WEEK.

Also, there is no one to take the case forward on Hill’s behalf. Her only known relative, uncle G.P. Hill, told THE WEEK on call from Jagdalpur, Chhattisgarh, that her mother had died of cancer before Hill’s death, and a brother died later of depression-related reasons. Her father, George Stevenson Hill, and another brother seem to have “disappeared”; they have not been in touch with the family for years.

“I hope Shruti gets justice,” said the uncle. “I do not know any details of the case or even Shruti to make any other comment. George was our eldest brother, but he and his family were not in touch with us. Last I heard, my brother and one of his sons were in Korba (Chhattisgarh) about 10 years ago.”

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