A chilling case from Agra has left neighbours and investigators equally stunned, a woman named Ruby spent nearly 45 days pretending to help police search for her missing husband Surendra, all while his body lay buried under the bathroom floor of their own home.
A missing person complaint filed on May 18
The case surfaced in the Runakta Dham colony, which falls under the Prachi Tower police post in Agra's Sikandra area. On May 18, Ruby walked into the police station and reported that her husband Surendra had not returned home for several days. Officers launched a search, and Ruby stayed close to the investigation around the clock, appearing to join the hunt for her husband even though she already knew where his body was.
The truth comes out after 45 days
About 45 days after the complaint was filed, family members sat Ruby down for detailed questioning, and her carefully maintained story finally collapsed. She admitted that she had mixed sleeping pills into a bowl of kheer and fed it to Surendra, which killed him.
How the body was hidden
According to Ruby, Surendra's body was lying on the bed at the time of his death. Her mother in law and both daughters happened to be away at the time, visiting the home of Surendra's elder brother in Vayu Vihar. Ruby paid 400 rupees to have soil brought in and broke open the bathroom floor. She then dragged the body into the bathroom and laid it down there, covering it first with salt and then with soil before levelling the surface. On June 19, she called in a mason to plaster over the floor, which dried within a single day. She then travelled to her brother-in-law's house herself and kept up the pretence, telling relatives that Surendra had been missing from home for four days.
Police suspect she did not act alone
Investigators are inclined to believe Ruby's account of lacing the kheer with sleeping pills, but they remain stuck on one question, whether she could have disposed of the body entirely on her own. The bathroom in the house measures roughly ten feet in length and four and a half feet in width, and it was from beneath this very floor that police recovered the skeleton of Surendra Kumar Sharma. While a woman could plausibly carry out the poisoning alone, dragging a full grown man's body, breaking the floor and burying it convincingly is seen as a task requiring help. Police are now working to establish who else may have been involved in the murder.
