RedHanded - Episode 223 - Village of the Damned: The Nithari Child Murders

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

Every couple of weeks like clockwork, another child would vanish from Nithari, Delhi. The police didn't seem concerned, and no one wanted to take a closer look at the "black hole" – the alleyway from where all the kids had disappeared. What the locals would eventually find in the sewers surrounding bungalow D5 would expose a terrifying paedophile, necrophile and cannibal – in a case that would change India forever. Sources: redhandedpodcast.com  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, before we get on with today's episode,

just a very quick announcement about all of the extra content coming to your eyes and ears over on Patreon right now. So this month, if you are a $10 and up patron, your bonus monthly red-handed episode is on none other than Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot we thought it'd be fun to do something a bit more historical and of course it is very fitting for November so head on over and check that out you also get your weekly under the duvets if you

are a five dollar and up patron you get the audio version ten dollar and up you get the video version they're averaging over an hour these days so if you feel like you want a bit of the after party head on over and check that out and in this month in the news we are covering a much requested recent case of Penelope Jackson this was a case a lot of you guys were asking about at the live show not enough information is out to cover a full episode on it but we are going to be doing a deep dive on this month's in the news including those very very strange emergency calls that she made so yeah come on over and check that out for now on with the show i'm saruti and i am hannah and welcome to Red Hounded and last week we were van fresh this week we're fresh fresh because we're back for a week I'm clean I'm squeaky we ordered a

shit ton of Korean skincare so I feel I've just got that CGI baby face from Twilight it's delightful if you don't know what we're talking about was that on under the duvet what van fresh no no CGI baby face that was under the duvet yes What, Fanfresh? No. No, CGI Babyface. That was Under the Duvet. Yes. Oh, or was it Halloween Part 2? Oh, Halloween Part 2. Yes, you're right. You're right.

I enjoyed the people who had never seen Twilight because I didn't think that it was our prime demographic. But the people who went looking for the CGI Babyface and then put it all over Twitter at how horrific it is. And then the number of people who were like, I have to now go watch Twilight to check if this is real. It's real. That's so funny. And we the number of people who were like, I have to now go watch Twilight to check if this is real. It's real. That's so funny.

And we've just given Twilight a bunch of views. Which I don't feel great about, to be honest. I mean, it doesn't make a difference. They've made millions anyway. Yeah. They don't need our help.

No. When I was at uni, I was writing an essay on the use of mirrors in horror films. And I was stuck. And I was like, I can't do something about mirrors

that doesn't include vampires. That's ridiculous. But I couldn't find a vampire film eventually I used interview with a vampire because there's loads of like mirror stuff in there but I couldn't think of a very specific vampire film where there's enough like content about mirrors to talk about so I put like on Facebook because I'm old I put like a Facebook status and it's like do they use mirrors in Twilight and everyone was just like don't do it just don't don't do it don't do it to yourself don't do it to us don't do it to your tutor and I didn't so it was fine there you go I couldn't tell you I've only seen that one episode the one episode I've only seen that one film you've only seen CGI baby face CGI baby

face so I randomly just for some reason one Christmas it was on I watched it I think it was like I don't know fucking Breaking Dawn Part 1 of Part 10 or something. I had no idea what was going on. That baby's face. Scary. It is pretty scary stuff. It is pretty horrendous. And on the topic of horrendous things, we are taking you once again to Uttar Pradesh.

Can't stay out of UP. This actually, the case that we're going to talk about today, because if you guys have been listening for a while or you've been sort of hip-hopping around the episode, you might remember we did a case on the murder of Arushi Talwar, who was a young girl who was murdered in her own bed. And if the name Uttar Pradesh is sounding familiar, it's because that's where that case happened.

In fact, that case happened in Noida, which is basically also where we are today. And also, we've been to Uttar Pradesh one other time, which was when I did the Halloween child sacrifices. That also happened in UP. Can't stay away. They will not stop giving us murder cases. No, apparently not. So without further ado, this is going to be about dead children. Do with that information what you will. By the summer of 2006, the residents of Nithari, Delhi, India, knew that something dark was going on. The disappearances had started in 2005, and now there were nine children missing. And every three weeks, like clockwork, another child would vanish. This time,

the time we're kicking off with, the time we are talking about first, it was 10-year-old Jyoti Lal. Jyoti, like many children in the area, worked for her family's business. The Lals ran a laundry cart and on the 20th of June 2006, Jyoti had volunteered to take a delivery to a regular client who lived just a few streets away. But she never came home. Her family were beside themselves. And Jabu, Jyothi's father, went to the house she had gone to that day. And that house was actually not a house at all. It was a bungalow. A bungalow that was named bungalow d5 in sector 30 which is some district nine sounding shit yeah this is the thing a lot of indian cities a lot of indian municipalities they will break everything down sector by sector because they're just so fucking massive and it's

the only way to manage it also what i would say is in india at least from my experience and obviously in this as well people call houses bungalows and actually a bungalow there means like a big house oh i know it's weird so bungalow d5 it's not like a little granny house bungalow d5 means it's a fucking massive house okay so it is ginormous interesting yeah i know i know why not topsy-turvy town topsy-turvy so something to also explain right at the start of this story is that very much like India itself, this is a story of deep inequality. Most places where you'll read about this case, though that's not many at all because this case got hardly any coverage compared to cases like that of Arushi Talwar, considering especially how many children get murdered in this story. Nathari is in Sector 31, and this is where Jothi and all of the missing children in today's

story lived. And Nathari is kindly, I think, or maybe very peace-y-ly, called in many places a semi-rural urban village. I've not come across that term before until I started this research. Urban village is quite the... It's a slum. That's what it is. It's a shantytown. It's a slum. Like people are calling it a semi-rural urban village to be like sanitized about it, which

okay, fine. But what you're really doing there is pretending that it is not a part of the city that no one gives a fuck about where people are living in absolute poverty. it's a slum they'll call it a village that's not what it is so sector 31 is what i would call a slum and then sector 30 right next to it like literally back to back is where bungalow d5 is which is a very nice part of town and this is very typical in lots of indian cities it's not like where you'll have like oh the east side is the bad side and the west side is where the nice like fancy houses are there it's like right next door to each other that inequality

is kind of rampant throughout the city and it's very very obvious and the families who lived there are some of the poorest people on earth and And not only that, the majority of them are also migrant workers who come from hundreds of miles away from very rural states like West Bengal and Orissa. And they are also typically Dalits. Dalits in India are beyond oppressed. Hinduism, for those of you who don't know has a very rigid caste system and at the top you have the people who are like historically the priests and things like this so you don't necessarily still have to be a priest but your lineage is from that kind of group essentially that's what it's saying and is it that the people who can be priests have to be top tier oh yeah

yeah yeah yeah. Basically, if you are from the top, it's a very stratified society. And if you are from that top strata, only you can be priests. Okay, okay. But you don't have to be. You don't have to be. But it's historically, that's what your ancestry would have been. It's an option.

It's an option and only an option for you. Society is very, very sort of rigidly broken down in this way. So all the way from the priests down to the laborers at the very bottom. And typically in India, you can tell someone's caste by their surname, but also in places people just know. They know what your family is. Everyone knows who you are, what you are. It's something that is very ingrained in Indian, not Indian society, in Hindu society. Because India

for the longest time was actually, for as long as it's existed as a country, has been up until quite recently, unfortunately, quite a secular society. Now, I wish I could say the same. It's not. We're seeing the rise of the Hindu right in very aggressive terms. But yes, within Hinduism, this is a core part of the belief system. I used to spend every summer with my grandma, who was a very orthodox Hindu woman. And the belief system behind why there is a caste system is reincarnation. So the idea for many Hindus, and I can only speak from my experience, is that people who are on the lower rungs of the caste system are there because they've done something wrong.

It's all about karma. It's all about your place in society as decided by God. So therefore, it's okay for me to treat you like shit because you put yourself there. Precisely. It's a very handy, baked-in idea for why the caste system is okay, essentially. And I'm going to say it because I'm Indian. I was born there. I grew up there for a while. I went there every single summer. For a homogeneous country, for how it looks from the outside in terms of race, it is a very bigoted country. I would say it's far more racist than the West. Just to think that a country is homogeneous and there isn't inequality or racism or bigotry is fundamentally flawed. And

the Dalits unfortunately sit right at the bottom of that. And Dalits are also so low on the pecking order that they used to be called the untouchables. That is the literal phrase that they were called. And the reason is because they kind of do the lowest jobs in society as far as people are concerned. And so they're impure in every sense. And it's horrific. It's horrific. I mean, if you can think of these people as being subhuman, that's what typically, historically, they've been thought of. And although it may be improving slightly, it's not improved that much. And it's the worst in rural India. Like absolutely the worst in rural India. In rural India, men from

upper caste can rape Dalit women, nothing will happen, nothing will be done to them. I mean, if you just Google Dalit now and then hit the news tab, you will see hundreds and hundreds of cases just pop up like I did when I did this yesterday. Dalit men will be murdered just for disrespecting upper caste men, like that can just be done and nobody cares, nothing will happen. It's horrendous. It's horrendous. There's no other word for it. And these days, like I said, with Modi in charge and the rise of the Hindu right, particularly in the north, I would say this is a bigger issue there. Dalits, yeah, are just being killed, like I said, for eating beef. And while India booms, the Dalits are still very much ostracised from many parts of society. Often Dalits work as labourers and farmhands,

but as agriculture in India has hit turmoil in recent years, more and more people have been forced to become migrant workers and move to cities to try and earn a living. But this brings with it another huge problem for the community. According to Mohamed Aftab, a child protection expert with Save the Children, there is a direct link between migration, agrarian neglect, the drying up of rural livelihoods and the increased incidence of disguised, in air quotes, child trafficking in India. As he puts it, the amount of displacement that has taken place in India in the last 15 years has never happened in human history. And this has led to a huge rise in children, particularly Dalit children, being trafficked. And in fact, child trafficking in India is currently at epidemic levels.

Estimates place the number of children who vanish in one year to be around 30,000 to 50,000. And the reasons why they're being trafficked are depressing and varied in equal measure. Organ trafficking, forced begging, forced marriage, being used as drug mules. But of course, 96% of children in India who are trafficked are forced into sex slavery. And another horrific discovery that we've got for you is that there are some men in India who seem to believe that by raping a virgin child, they can cure themselves of HIV. And currently, India ranks number three in the world for HIV rates. There was a point in early 2000 where it was number one in the world for HIV rates.

And the last time I looked, it was number two. I checked again yesterday. It's currently sat at number three with South Africa and Mozambique being number one and two. So it is a real epidemic there. The government has, I don't know if the government's done stuff, but I would say actually a lot of the cultural change has been done through film actually to de-stigmatize HIV for people to go get help. The problem is there, it's the culture. The culture there is you don't have sex before marriage. You marry somebody and then you have sex with them and then you don't have sex with anybody else. So if that were true, then you wouldn't be seeing these stats. So people don't want to talk about it because where would that be coming from them?

So because it isn't culturally acceptable to go have an affair or to go meet somebody online and have sex with them, sex work is absolutely prevalent in India. Highly prevalent, but highly secretive. Because people aren't educated about sex, because you don't talk about it, then you have unprotected sex and you end up the number three rate of HIV in the world. And nobody talks about it because it's completely taboo subject. And then you smash that together with superstition and beliefs like this, that you can rape a child and get rid of your HIV. And this is what's happening. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart.

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The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mom's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now, exclusively on Wondery+. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti.

It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance. But it instantly moved me. And it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health.

This is season two of Finding. And this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. But for now, let's get back to Nathari. This slum isn't isolated on the outskirts of the city of Delhi. Like we said, it's set back to back with Sector 30, which is a posh and upscale neighbourhood. And between these two parts of town, there was a lane with a water tower that sits menacingly looming overhead.

And it was here, around this alley, that the children had all vanished. At bungalow D5, Jubu Lal, who was of course Jyothi's dad, knocked on the door and asked if the residents had seen his daughter. The man who lived there, a wealthy businessman named Maninder Singh Pundir, said that Jyothi had dropped the clothes off and then she'd left. The Lals searched everywhere for their daughter, but obviously they couldn't go inside the house, and then finally headed to the police station. So many children had disappeared at this point that the Lals and other devastated families begged the police to seal up and search the suspicious alleyway.

Police simply told the families you keep breeding these kids and then you lose them and you come here to waste our time. The disdain for the Dalit community in India I know I've been banging on about this but it cannot be overstated. And whoever was taking these children had found the perfect place to hunt for their prey. A poor, overcrowded slum where children rarely went to school because the parents couldn't afford it.

And even if they could afford it, what was the point in sending your child to school? It was better for these families to keep their children at home and have them work in their businesses like Jyothi was doing with the laundry cart. And also it's a place where children spend the majority of time unsupervised because their parents are working all the time. And of course, it's a population made up of largely migrant workers from the lowest caste. So you have people who don't care about them and they have no strong ties to the area that they're in because they're hundreds of miles often from their own sort of home. And as you go on to see, the police really couldn't have given less of a fuck about these missing kids. Djibouti searched all night for Jyoti but there was no sign of her. Over the next few months, the Lals used what little money they

had to photocopy missing posters and plaster them around the neighbourhood. Djibu followed up on every whisper of a lead and even went back to bungalow D5 ten times which is brave shit oh my god. But Monhinder Singh Kundir and his live-in domestic help a man named Surendra Kohli just kept saying that they had absolutely no idea what had happened to Jyoti, and I imagine they did not say that particularly politely. So after six months of searching, Jubu went to a medium to ask for help. And there are two documentaries out there that I could find about this case. One is called The Slumdog Cannibal.

Oh, wow. And the other is called The Karma Killings. Interestingly, The Slumdog Cannibal, I hated less. Oh my God. How? Because The Karma Killings. I don't know. I'm going to save it for the end because it will give away why I disliked this documentary so much. Sorry, I'm jumping the gun. No, I mean, I was actually confused

because The Slumdog Cannibal, you can just find it on YouTube. It's free. It's just there. You can watch it. And it looks like it was made quite a while ago. It looks very dated. The Karma Killings was only made a couple of years ago

and it was made for Netflix. Oh, okay. It's incredibly... We'll save it. Okay, okay, okay. But basically, in The Karma Killings, if you do go watch it you can pay it's like 99p on youtube because it's not on uk netflix anymore and in that you can watch jibu

go to this medium and he goes to this medium she's sat in front of a fire when he asks her she starts convulsing and like thrashing around on the floor the usual shit she starts speaking in tongues and then she tells jibu that jothi is dead and that she's never going to be found and she also tells him there's no point looking for her anymore she also says he took her but she doesn't say who jibu's obviously devastated by this news but he doesn't give up and over the next two years dozens more children vanished from nathari and this is a really heartbreaking part is that every time a child went missing jibi was there to see if there was any connection. But as you'll see, it will take a long time for anything to come out.

Then, in late 2006, or the same year that Jyothi went missing, a 22-year-old woman named Payal also disappeared. Payal's father, a man named Nand Lal, went straight to the police. He told them that Payal had gone to work that day and never returned home. And guess where Payal worked as a maid? Disneyland. Close. Bungalow D5, sector 30. And at first, the police wouldn't do anything. They even asked for a picture of Payal. And when her father, Nandlal, gave them one, the officer took one look at her and said, your daughter's pretty. She's probably run off with some guy. Which in India, again, I just to set the cultural context,

in India for a family to be told that your daughter's run off with somebody is like heavy dishonor. It's disgraceful. You know, we've heard this before in Western cases, in the 70s and stuff, they're just like, I was probably just run away or probably just gone on an adventure. For to say that about a child in india or a girl in india the undertones of what you're saying is that she is a girl who lacks morals right she's a disrespectful girl it's a double whammy and you must be terrible parents to have raised a girl like that jesus who's run off

with a guy so not only is it we're not going to look for your daughter it's your fault because she's a woman of low morals is what they're saying by this and also there's a lot of racism you'll see with this like because these people come from different states like the police who are involved in this will constantly say things like well obviously it's because you're from there nandlal had had enough, so he told everyone in Nitaari where Payal had disappeared. So everyone's eyes are on bungalow D5, apart from the police, obviously. The residents of Nitaari had been suspicious of the big white house ever since Jyothi had vanished earlier that year. It was also known to be a house of, air quotes, ill rep repute it's well known that there would be raucous parties there with women coming and going at all hours of the night and obviously the connotations of a house

of ill repute is that those women are sex workers yeah and this is the thing if you have a house around here that's just like there's constantly parties going on i'm not going to think much of it but again set it within an indian cultural context that there is a house where there are women coming and going at all hours of the night that is alarm bells going off for people did you know that my grandma used to live underneath a brothel no I didn't so my grandma Muriel is 96 so she was like a grown-up in the war she was in her 20s and she used to live downstairs from someone that she referred to as a lady of the evening. Oh, no, you did tell me that, actually.

Yes, yes, yes. So there would be visitors coming and going. And then one, I think it was like a boarding house situation. So it's just like a room and everyone shares a toilet. Like Dennis Nelson's flat, I would imagine. I don't even know where it was, Blackpool, maybe. And one of the patrons came into my grandma's room and pissed out the window. Wow.

There you go. Yeah, she's full of it, this Muriel. There you go. Post-war Britain reference. But enough about Muriel's urine-based trauma. Let's get back to Bungalow D5. Bungalow D5 sat slap-bang in the 100-metre stretch of road which had become like the Bermuda Triangle of missing children. The families of those who had vanished also knew that the man who lived there,

Maninder Singh Pundir, as you will remember from my excellent pronunciation, was incredibly wealthy and well connected and so panic immediately set in because they strongly suspected, they being Lal and the rest of the people with missing children, strongly suspected that the police wouldn't do anything, even if they found Payal in the house. And that's the thing, like, when you see the documentaries and they show you the footage of this area, it's basically like, you can see Sector 30, you can see Sector 31, and then you can see the sort of lane that connects the two. There's this really scary water tower. And there's bungalow d5 it is like a little bermuda triangle or as they describe

it in the karma killings a little black hole that's where all of the children are last seen before they go missing and bungalow d5 is slap bang in the middle of it like it is so fucking obvious so on the 29th of december 2006 the families of the missing children headed straight to bungalow d5 and what happened next when i call it an invasion it's the only word i can use to describe because they're fucking sick of it so the families basically start going through the sewers that ran around the house and they also climbed over the walls into the garden of this house and they began digging. Unbelievably the families found plastic bag after plastic bag filled with bones and even rotten flesh. Bones also littered the water in the drainage system around the house as well as the drain across the road and the bones were later

discovered to be the remains of small children. There were hands, legs, fingers and skulls. Inside the house the police also found sandals, toys and clothes that had belonged to the missing children. So now not only are they saying like the remains are here and oh we don't know how they got there, they find the belongings inside the house. So it really is, I mean, what more do you need? So 52-year-old Maninder Singh Pandir and 36-year-old Surendra Kohli were both arrested. Like we said, Pandir's the guy who owns the house. He's a very wealthy businessman. Kohli is like his domestic help. Not butler, because he's not fancy.

He's like... Manservant. Manservant, exactly. Like a chambermaid, but a boy. But a boy, that's it. They're arrested and Pandir kept saying that he didn't even know Payal. He didn't even know who she was. But considering that she was a very attractive young woman, even by the police's own comments, and she'd been working at this house as a maid, I find it very hard to believe that Pandir didn't

know who she was. In total, the police claim to have found the remains of 19 victims. Four of them were women, including Payal, and 15 were children, including, you guessed it, Jyoti. The locals went absolutely mad, and as soon as the men were arrested, the group who had got into the garden of D5 began to smash the house to pieces. And you can see video footage of this in the Karma Killings and in the Slumdog Cannibal documentary. They've lost it because these people have been ignored by the police for years about this. Their children have gone missing one by one. No one gave a fuck. And this house was there all along. And Jyothi's dad and family obviously screaming because when they had gone

there 10 times to ask these people and they had said no and Jyothi was in the house the whole time and they're just throwing bricks smashing this house to pieces and who can I mean I know legally these men haven't been convicted yet but who can blame them not me not only had the discoveries been nightmarish but there was a real fear that the police would cover up this entire thing because mahinda singh pandir had a lot of political connections and a lot of wealth in this fear as you will go on to see was very real and extremely justified and i mean obviously you see this in many guys, there's in many different situations, many different crimes, but it's so stark.

And like, it's so like, I don't know, it just makes me feel really empty that like the Daleks knew what was going to happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no doubt in anyone's mind that what is about to happen was about to happen. So the local police questioned Pandir and Kohli. And Pandir kept saying that he had no idea about any of it that it was all news to him that his garden had been filled with the bones of little children Kohli was beaten for days it's important to say at this point Kohli will go on to do a bit of a

deep dive into who he is and where he comes from but he's also a Dalit so Kohli is treated very differently by the police than Pandir is so Kohli is beaten for days and this isn't. So Kohli is treated very differently by the police than Pandya is. So Kohli is beaten for days. And this isn't just what Kohli says, by the way, it's not just like an accusation he makes. The lead investigator of the local police, a man named Vinod Pandey, says in the documentary Karma Killings that he and his team beat and quote, mentally terrorized Kohli. He says that. Wow. Because again, you've got to understand, culturally in India, the police beating the shit out of suspects is common. And they aren't trying to hide it.

It's not something to be ashamed of. No, it's part and parcel of interrogation. Legally, they're not meant to be doing it. But culturally, it's expected. So he admits it. And eventually, unsurprisingly, Coley confessed to Payal's murder. According to his confession, Payal had actually been a call girl and not a maid, and Coley had grown jealous of her and his boss. He said that he'd wanted a bit for himself. So when his boss was away,

he'd called Payal and asked to come over. He claimed that he had some new clients to introduce her to that were connections of Pandit's, so they would be wealthy men. Apparently Payal came, and when she did, Kohli tried to offer her 500 rupees for sex, but she had laughed at him. How much is that? 500 rupees is probably about six pounds. Wow, okay.

They make a lot of accusations about Payal being a sex worker. I can't confirm it one way or another. Her father and her family say that she was working there as a maid as we'll go on to see the police say that she is a sex worker and coley confesses to this and coley says that pandir used to pay her 25 000 rupees every night that she spent with him i don't know if that's what she was doing if she was her family were incredibly poor like sex work unfortunately has become a way in which young women from the Dalit communities do have to sustain themselves. They have no other choice in lots of regards, but I can't confirm if that is actually the case. Basically,

Kohli says that after Payal refused him sex and laughed at him, that he lost it and he strangled Payal to death. According to Kohli's confession, he then tried to rape Payal's body, but he physically couldn't do it. The police then showed him pictures of the missing children, and Coley also started confessing to those murders as well. He said that he strangled all of them after luring them into the house, and he would try to rape the bodies, and then dismember them, cook them, and eat them. The rest that he didn't manage to eat, he disposed of in the yard and the sewers behind the house. Coley also talked about a recurring dream he would have, about a lady in a white sari, mocking him. And he also said that this dream filled him with rage, and it was when the dream had started, that he had begun to have fantasies. Yeah, they never really sort of delve

more into that, and I don't know what he's sort of talking about here. He kind of talks about this woman in a white sari laughing at him and that being the trigger point for when he started to have these fantasies about wanting to rape and kill and eat children. What relevance that has to things, I don't know. They never sort of dig into it. The only thing I can add to it culturally is that a woman would only really, I know in places like Kerala, women wear white saris for different reasons, but predominantly you wear white saris to funerals or when you are widowed. And this is very old school. It's really not like this now, especially in like major towns and cities. But for example, if my granddad were to die,

my grandmother would wear white for the rest of her life. Wow. Okay. So you shouldn't be wearing color again, according to Hinduism, if your husband dies. And that's if they don't push you onto his funeral pyre while you're still alive. So just in case anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about, back in the day, if your husband died, they would just push the widow onto his funeral pyre. Because what's the point in you being alive now? Who's going to support you now? So we might as well just fucking kill you i'm talking hundreds of years ago you know that's not something that i've seen happen recently or even heard about on the news even in the most fucking you know rural parts of india but definitely my grandmother who lives in rural

india very orthodox woman absolutely she would believe that that's what she needs to do but then you know i don't know if i've ever talked about this on the show really tragically my cousin who's only six months older than me she lost her husband a few years ago in a horrible accident and uh she wears whatever she fucking wants and no one tells her not to and you know we share a grandmother and my grandmother would never tell her not to so there has been movement but if he is seeing dreams of an older white woman which is what he says in the documentary wearing white she would be a widow what relevance that has to anything i don't know and why that triggered him to wanting to kill children i don't know but nobody has any curiosity to find out and on the topic of funeral pyres i can't remember which episode we were talking about this one we were

talking about cremation how if it's possible to completely burn a human body in a fire and we've had some crematorium people get in touch with us. No, it is not. It is completely impossible. Oh, really? Even in the super duper fire that like crematoriums have, there will be bits of bone left over. And they're like, they don't look like it's not like a skeleton. But there are bits and they put them in a big coffee grinder type situation and grind them up and put that into the ashes and that's what you get so there is no way you can

burn a human body on just like a pit fire just like a pit fire on the beach yeah exactly that would leave no remains at all that's good to clear that up yeah so you're welcome thank you all of the funeral industry people who got in touch with us i thought you're gonna say funeral enthusiasts funeral enthusiasts do you remember when we went to that true crime meetup years ago and we were in this pub and there was this group of lads in there and they were all wearing matching t-shirts and they came up to speak to us oh yes and they were like oh what do you guys say what oh we do true crime podcasts it's like a true crime meetup and they were like oh we're undertakers and one of the undertakers was getting married and they were all on an undertaking stag do and it was fucking hilarious they were

and hadn't one of them sorry this is really morbid but they were telling us at the pub like you know they were the ones informing us one of them had got alexander mcqueen's body yes they did say that yeah out of his um house yeah mansion bungalow. Bungalow. Yeah, no, they were telling us all sorts of shit about MPs, who's been found in wardrobes, auto-erotically asphyxiating themselves. So yeah, if you want a good night out, find an Undertaker's tactic.

I mean, they were extremely good fun. They really were. It was an odd match-up. It was basically like a true crime meet-up full of what you can expect. Young women. Yeah. And then just like middle-aged undertaker, all men.

Yeah, all men, about 15 of them. Uh-huh. All wearing matching t-shirts. It was hysterical. It was one of the weirdest nights of my life. Oh dear. Once Pandya heard about Kohli's confession, he said that Payal was indeed a sex worker.

And he said that he would meet up with her whenever he was in Delhi. But that she'd started to blackmail him and he had told Coley to get rid of her. He claims that what he meant by that was to pay her off. And he had no idea that Coley would actually kill her. There's just so many lies. This was one of the hardest cases I found to research because there are so many lies coming from everybody, including the the police as you'll go on to discover and pundit he says all of this about her being a sex worker blah blah blah after coley says it and the police had been saying this from the start when nand lal her father came in to

report her missing and they told him the stuff about she's probably run off with some guy they then started to spread rumors that she was a sex worker because he was kicking up such a fuss to get people to look the other way so did co Coley say that of his own accord? Or did the police tell Coley to say that while they were beating the shit out of him and then he said that as a reason why he had killed her? And then after he says that, suddenly, Pandya's also saying the same thing. It's so badly done. Everything about this case. So we can only tell you what we have been able to research, but this is a fucking mess, this case. So that's what we know so far, right? Let's talk about who these men actually were. So Kohli, he was born in a rural village in the isolated foothills of the

Himalayas in the Almora district of India. His family, like we said, were Dalit and they had been incredibly poor. Kohli was known as a kid to be quite a shy, nervous, introverted child. He had dropped out of school by the age of just eight, which again is very typical for a Dalit child, unfortunately, especially in rural India. No one expected much of Kohli. And although things, especially in the cities, like I said, are changing a bit now with scheduled cast, like there had been a big push by previous governments to improve their circumstances. But typically, like we talked about, Dalits are left to do the kind of jobs that nobody else wants to do. They do a lot of the grave digging, they do a lot of pyre building, because again, it seemed like as a low karma job to be handling the debt. Even when we did the interview

with Sonia Folero, which if you guys haven't seen, the audio version is available to everybody, video is available to our patrons. In there, Sonia Folero came to talk to us about a book that she had written called The Good Girls, which if you guys haven't read, I would highly recommend. I won't get into it now because it's all in the interview, but she basically talked about how

in some parts of rural India, doctors don't want to become pathologists because to handle the dead is again it's so crazy that even people who are highly educated will think things like this it's a low karma job again this isn't widespread this is predominantly kind of the way of thinking in rural India where it's much more superstitious they basically said that they didn't have any doctors that were willing to carry out autopsies on these dead children that they found in the book the good girls so let's just get like the guy who sweeps the streets and he went to the market and They didn't have any doctors that were willing to carry out autopsies on these dead children that they found in the book The Good Girls.

So they had to just get like the guy who sweeps the streets. And he went to the market and bought some knives and then just had a go at looking inside these bodies. I mean, this is what we're talking about. It's mind-blowing. So that's basically what we're dealing with here. Kohli is living there, struggling for work, as most Dalits would do, especially in rural parts of India. So at the age of just 13 years old, Kohli, along with his brother-in-law, moved almost 500 miles away to look for work in Delhi. And in typical fashion, he lives there for, you know, a good while.

And then at the age of 30, he returns to his home village to get married. And after his marriage, his wife doesn't come with him because they have, like, you know, they've got work to do. They've got, like, farm handing to do or whatever back in the village. So his wife stays there and Kohli goes back to Delhi and he would send money home whenever he could. Now Shanti, who's Kohli's wife, said that he always treated her very well. In the Karma Killings, they interview Shanti quite a lot, so you can hear it from her herself and she says that coley would go home every six months he doted on her they had two children he doted on them she even says that he used to call her every single morning and tell her that he missed her seemingly coley's childhood and his married life showed no red flags. Once in Delhi, Coley hopped jobs for a while

before he landed the role of domestic helper at Bungalow D5. And this job was quite the shock for Coley because his new boss loved nothing more than throwing giant drink and drug-fuelled orgies at his house and Coley had never seen anything like it. I think he wouldn't, not even just not seen anything like it, I don't think he would have even contemplated anything like it. Comprehended that it even existed. No, this isn't a man who had access to the internet. This isn't a man who had access to even TV, most likely.

He just lived in fucking bumfuck nowhere India, completely rural, completely socially, sexually conservative. Conservative isn't even the right word. Repressed. The idea that a man like Pandya, who was very, very wealthy, travelled a lot, was exposed to everything, and as we'll go on to see, is a massive fucking deviant, in my opinion,

would do these kind of things in this house, Koli would have had no clue. It would have been unbelievable, incomprehensible to him that this was a way that somebody could live their life. But Pundir, we think, is far more interesting. Because of the way of the world, he gets a lot less attention than Coley does. On the surface, Pundir's a respectable, well-to-do businessman. Nicknamed Goldie from his school days,

Pundir was always known as a warm and amiable kind of guy. But it seems that it might all just have been for show. Some investigators claimed that Pundir had a disturbed childhood and that his marriage was a failure and a sham. He had all but abandoned his family in Punjab and had been living on his own in Delhi for years. Pundya lived a life of excess and luxury. He loved to drink, buy fast cars and throw his infamous parties. He loved to travel and would regularly fly around the world for business. And in his spare time, apparently, he liked to read about nightmares.

It's never elaborated on anywhere what this means. I don't know. And I left it in because it's just such an odd thing not that it's odd to be interested in nightmares but like i want to just build an image in your mind of this guy right pandir whenever you see him he's wearing like an argyle jumper like a golf jumper you know with the like diamonds on it like that's what he's always wearing he's like wearing a tweed coat and stuff like this it's very like western in that kind of way he's always wearing. He's like wearing a tweed coat and stuff like this. It's very like Western in that kind of way. He's living this kind of wealthy bachelor lifestyle

and just has left his family in the Punjab and does what he wants in this massive fucking house in Delhi where he just lives on his own essentially. And then there's just this weird thing about him reading about nightmares all the time and nobody explains what that is about. That is bizarre bizarre i still really want to watch that documentary nightmare you were actually in my nightmare last night was i was i

doing something no no no troubling no but i wonder what nightmares that man was having yeah given all the things that he definitely did allegedly and is that the reason he was obsessed with them in my opinion probably yes i've just never even heard of it. Like, I think, you know, being interested in dreams is something that people will say, but nightmares specifically. I think if it was, it's only because of the context of everything else I know about him. Anyway, let's not blow my load just yet. Let's keep going. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history.

Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes. And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster.

Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery+. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying

and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. So the psychologist who evaluated Coley and Pandir says in the documentary The Karma Killings that she thought Coley had been driven to kill after coming to Delhi and experiencing all of the sexual craziness going on at Pandir's house. She figures that this awakened something within Coley and gave him the urge to try it for himself. She says, you know, he grew up in a very sheltered situation where these kind of things would never have occurred to him before. But now once he's exposed to it, he has something of a sexual awakening, is her opinion. Why this

psychologist never mentions that maybe a man like Pandir, who seems to have had the inclination, appetite and ability to indulge in his every desire, wouldn't or couldn't want to push things further and further to the extreme to get a kick out of something like we've seen time and time again like we've talked about this before if you haven't listened to hunting warhead go listen to it there's also quite a lot of documentaries on youtube that i've watched about say pedophilia versus child sex offenders and the idea that child sex offenders can typically just be opportunistic sex offenders. Even people who end up watching sexually explicit videos of children being sexually abused on the internet, the reason that some of them have ended up there isn't because they were preferential paedophiles. It's because they have warmed themselves out on regular types of porn so much that they have to take it further and further to an extreme to be able to get the same kick so why this psychologist never even engages in the idea that someone like pandir who i think the word affluenza sums him up perfectly could or would not have gone to the point of raping small children and murdering them she never even engaged she just says

coley must have done it because he'd never had been open to sexual experiences before in a free and unrepressed way. And then he must have come here and been like, oh my God, look at what he's doing. Just having consensual orgies with all of these women. Maybe I can rape and kill some kids. It's such a bizarre thing that they skirt over Pandya at every opportunity, all of the authorities involved in this. And that's why I didn't like the karma killings. And the other psychologists who evaluated Coley and Pundir found that they were polar opposites. Unsurprising, they're polar opposites in every aspect of their lives. But Coley is, much like he was as a child, awkward. He mumbles when he speaks. He never made eye

contact with anybody when he's speaking to them. Pandir, on the other hand, he's a businessman. He travels all around the world. He's incredibly outgoing. He's incredibly confident. And he has all of the confidence of a wealthy man. Give me the confidence of a wealthy man. Exactly. A wealthy, privileged man. Interestingly, there's a test that the psychologist has Coley and Pandir do. She calls it the draw a person test.

And she asks them both to do it. And typically what she says happens in, again, the Karma Killings documentary, is that when people are asked to do this, they typically draw a version of themselves. So if you or I were to draw somebody in this test, we would draw a woman in their 30s. Yeah, I was just thinking that. I was like, what would I draw? I was like, definitely draw a woman. It wouldn't even cross my mind to draw a man.

Yeah, exactly. And that's what she says the majority of people typically tend to do. What was interesting here is that Pandya and Kohli both drew pictures of young girls. Kohli is 36. Pandya is 55. What? Yeah. Oh my god.

Yeah. Again though, they're like, say it. But then they're not like, hey, Pandya also did this. And she kind of ignores that completely. Again, that Pandya did this. Basically, she says that Coley drew pictures of very young girls. So girls who are maybe four or five. And Pandya drew pictures of girls who were like 18, 19.

So like, you know, just out of adolescence. And then she sort of ignores the fact that Pandya does that. And then says Coley did this because he was sexually obsessed with small girls. Right. But I'm like, so what if... But Pandya just gets a pass. And like, how can you tell in a drawing how old a girl is? Like, really?

If you can tell she's 18, 19, what if he's just drawn a bigger picture of a girl? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, no, that's weird. Again, the whole documentary, The Karma Killings, I took severe issue with it because they skirt over Pandya consistently. Right. On the 5th of January, Pandya and Kohli both both had extensive narcoanalysis tests conducted on them by police. We touched on this method in the Arushi Talwar case that we did last year, but let's revisit it. Narcoanalysis is an investigative tool that has been a highly controversial topic for decades. The test tries to put the subject into a hypnotic or semi-conscious state by injecting them with the barbiturate theopentyl sodium.

This drug depresses the central nervous system and it slows down brain activity. The theory is that in this state, the person's imagination is neutralised, making it harder for the person to lie. But it's flawed and it's highly questionable as well. Several critics have expressed major concerns about the legitimacy of its findings. For example, a person with a high tolerance to drugs or alcohol won't be affected in the same way, but they could easily pretend to be in a semi-conscious state and simply lie. And also, innocent subjects can become highly suggestible and easily led by the people in the room.

And just a reminder that one of Pandya's favourite things to do is to get drunk off his face and take loads of drugs. Yeah. As we will go on to discover next week, where we have another interrogation situation. I won't give the game away, but there are a lot of similarities between this one and the one we're doing next week. People are suggestible in interview rooms anyway. You don't need to be pumping them full of barbiturates to get that result but it probably helps i mean oh i'm sure it makes the process a lot quicker days to hours i would imagine so when he was under coley began again admitting to the

crimes saying how he had strangled raped chopped up and eaten the children. The interview was filmed and unbelievably the police released the interview tape of him giving his confession while he's under narco analysis to a national news outlet. Yikes. And it's played on national television before his trial so that seems fine right? So obviously people watched and listened to Kohli talking about carrying the body of an 8-year-old girl named Dimple up to the bathroom where he cut her into pieces and then cooked part of her arm and chest. This is the detailed story that he tells, but it's very similar to the story that he apparently confessed to police originally. Needless to say, these videos freaked everyone in India the fuck out. Again, just to put it into cultural context, like I think in the West, I wouldn't say we've become desensitized to true crime stories, but it takes a lot for people to be shocked anymore. Yes, I agree. In India, you're starting to see the emergence of

TV shows and movies now about procedurals, police dramas, murder mysteries, like that's becoming a more popular genre, but it's very, very sanitized. I'm not saying that people aren't morbid there. Of course they are. My grandmother is the reason that I'm morbid, for sure. She's telling me horrendous stories when I was a kid. But for people in India to sit and watch on national TV a man like Kohli talking explicitly about getting sexual gratification from necrophilia, because he said that he only ever tried to rape the bodies when they were dead,

from chopping up the bodies and from cannibalism, that's just something that as a nation, the mentality of people in India, that's not something that they are prepared for. The idea that one could be sexually gratified by that kind of thing. It's shocking. So yeah, it's a lot that they released this tape. As for what Pandir admitted to during his narco analysis interview is a lot less obvious, because there was also a tape of his released to the national media but it was heavily edited it was very clear to see it was heavily edited and in these parts it makes it look like

he doesn't know what happened because he says things like when the police ask him how could you not have known that this was happening in your house and remember what we said earlier one of the criticisms of narco analysis is people who have a high tolerance for drugs and alcohol can easily pretend to be under when they're not and when he's asked this he says i'm not a woman i don't just go around my house poking my nose into every room to see what's going on i'm sorry let's just quickly address that fact this man owns this entire house he lives there on his own he has coley there living as like we said a live-in domestic worker there is not one ounce of me that believes that a man like pandir with his status level in society would allow coley a a dali and be his

domestic worker free run of the house there is no way on this planet that that is true and yet just to repeat video heavily edited huge chunks missing the families of the victims knew that the local police were in it up to their necks with pundit so they appealed that the case be taken off local police and given to the cbi or the central bureau of investigation which is like the equivalent of the FBI. And as political pressure began to build after six officers who had been involved in the case were found to have been taking bribes from Pundit, you really couldn't make this up, they were found out and they were sacked. So that, you know, at least is a little bit of good news. And then the Minister of the Interior actually

did hand over the case to the CBI. They only did it after they had absolutely no other choice because these six officers were found out to literally have been taking thousands and thousands of rupees in bribes from Pandit. And we will go on to discover. It just gets more and more depressing as we go on. So yes, it is handed over to the CBI. Yes, they only do it at the last possible moment. And

it also doesn't really make that much difference. It doesn't really solve the problem. And that's because on January the 11th, 2007, two months after having taken over the case, the CBI cleared Pandya and blamed his quote unquote, psychopathic domestic help, Kohli, for the murders of 19 people. The CBI named Coley as the only accused saying that Pandir was guilty only of criminal conspiracy, destruction of evidence and running his home as a brothel. Those are all quite bad things. They basically, they had to charge him with these things because of the officers who were found to be taking bribes. Basically, they say that Pandir was having these regular orgies at the house, but that he didn't murder anybody. They say that he only ever destroyed evidence relating to the sex parties that he had been running. They even claimed that

the proven bribes that Pandir had dished out to the local police was because he had been called in for questioning over the brothel and the sex parties and he thought it would hurt his reputation as a businessman so he tried to get out of it so basically to get him out of murder the cbi were like look we have to say you did something because it's been proven that you've been moving money and paying these police officers bribes so we have to say something so the thing we'll say is everybody already knows you've been doing you know know, sex parties at that house. So let's just say that the reason you paid these bribes was because you were so scared because of these sex parties. I see.

And because he then says that, you know, he destroyed some evidence in the house relating to the brothel that he was running. They said that's all he'd done. So that's what the CBI essentially claimed to try and get Pandir out of the more serious charge of serial rape and murder. The problem is that the CBI were unable to present any police records of Pandir ever having been questioned or even called in for questioning in connection with charges of running a brothel. So the bribes, what were they really for? I'm guessing probably the 19 bodies that were found in his garden.

I mean, one would think. Mm-hmm. And it just gets worse. At a press conference, then-CBI joint director Arun Kumar, again, you can meet Arun Kumar

in the documentary Karma Killings, and he says that, and this is a quote, this is what he says at the press conference when they basically clear Pandya,

they say, except for one or two cases where Pandya's role has still not been probed, he did not rape or murder the Nathari victims. And that is a quote. And then he goes on to say he wasn't even aware of the killings by Kohli till the Noida police started digging up the bones at his bungalow. Which makes Pandir sound very dumb indeed, doesn't it? The idea that he was living in this house, and yes, granted he was away on business a lot, but he was living in this house as like one of his main residences,

and that he had absolutely no idea that his man-maid had been killing 19 people in this house. That he had absolutely no idea about this. Makes him sound quite stupid. But the CBI play up Pandir's intelligence when they need to by pointing out that Pandir was highly educated and he also had the means to get rid of bodies because he had so much money. So if he had murdered all these people, why on earth would he dump the bodies in his own garden? Oh my god. Yeah. So he's stupid on one hand,

but he's a genius on the other. And he's incredibly wealthy and successful and could have done anything. So why would he have done this? The other important thing to note is the number 19 that we keep saying, that's the number of skulls that they found in the yard and in the sewers. There were upwards of 40 victims that were reported missing, that the police didn't even file reports for. They just weren't linked to the Nathari case because they found no remains for these people. So where are the other half of the missing victims? If they are related to this, we can't know for sure that they are related to this case. Like we said, child trafficking in India is a huge problem. But if they were, maybe he got rid of those bodies. And then he gets lazy

and dumps these here. Like why that is a part of the argument and why they sweep under the rug, the idea that Pandya didn't know that this was happening in his house. Again, it's ludicrous. And Aaron Kumar is a seasoned, he's a fucking joint director at the CBI. He's not some beat cop. It's ludicrous. Like, I just don't even know what to say. No. Because it doesn't sound real. No. But it is. Yeah. And they don't come out and just say there's not enough evidence with Pandya, but there's enough evidence with Coley, so we're going to pursue this. He comes out and offers an aggressive defense of Pandir. That is the thing that is the most jarring about it.

And we've seen a lot of killers do this. But actually, when you think about like, I mean, the argument obviously is through said by the police is that why would he just dump all of the bodies in his back garden when he could have done anything to me he could have shipped them to timbuktu if he wanted to he got all this money and clearly has no problem with bribing people but the thing is he got away with it for so long it's hiding in plain sight killers do it all the time bob bardella just left people out for the dustman to come and get for god's sake and he wasn't rich and dennis nelson just buried them under his own fucking floorboards yeah dennis nelson did exactly the same fucking thing like lots of killers it's not to do with stupidity it's not to do with anything other than arrogance

yeah it's i'm obviously gonna get away with this like dennis nelson as soon as his body count started to get up he was like oh this is fine i can just do whatever i fucking want and obviously pundit has been able to do whatever the fuck he wanted his entire life. And Arun Kumar and the CBI went on to say that Cody had murdered all of these women and children when Pundir had been out of the country, or at the very least, not in Delhi. They concluded this by tracking Pundir's phone, and sure enough, in the majority of the 19 disappearances, Pundir was either abroad or somewhere else in India. But the CBI were only ever able to establish the dates of the abductions due to the state of the remains. Accurate dates of death are

basically impossible to get your hands on. So what proof is there that Pundir wasn't involved in the murders? Quite literally none. Just because he wasn't there when some of the people were taken, the children went missing, who knows how long the victims were in the house for? That kind of makes perfect sense. When he's sort of away on business, he's like, when I come back, I want three. Absolutely. This is held up by the CBI as like, aha, we cracked it. You haven't fucking cracked shit. The ones when he's abroad, okay, fair enough, he's got stamps in his passport. The one when he's somewhere else in India, like, you're just locating his phone. They didn't even show

evidence for locating the person, like him as a person being there. It's ludicrous. And one of the questions actually is why were some of the bones so decomposed? Like, yes, India is a hot place. Decomposition would definitely happen faster. But some of these victims hadn't been missing that long and they were in such just bone, bone and there is again no explanation for that and they could never establish with just bones they couldn't establish the exact date of death so no one has any idea when these victims were actually killed so to clear pandir based on the fact that he wasn't in the area when the abductions happened, given that the CBI can easily say that Coley was the one who was doing the abductions, but there is no proof of who did

the killings. Again, it's ludicrous. And on top of that, on many of the dates where Pindell wasn't in Delhi when the abductions happened, he was back just a day or two later. Literally, they're like, oh, he was in Australia on the date this child went missing. Two days later, he's back in bungalow D5. What? I don't know. I wish I could tell you. Yeah.

So also in court, and this is, this is again, absolutely shocking when I read this. The CBI would stand with Pundir's lawyers in court. What the actual fuck? Let's get this clear. The CBI, it's the state that's prosecuting Pundir and Coley. Like, that's the point. The CBI worked for the state. The state works with the victims and the prosecution. The CBI should have been standing with the fucking prosecution. They were standing with the defence, with Pandir's defence. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. No, absolutely none. Absolutely none. It is mind-boggling what is going on here.

I don't even know what to say. So unsurprisingly, Arun Kumar's version didn't really convince many people, especially not the victim's families. The CBI wasn't just pointing the finger at Kohli, like I said, they were aggressively coming out to defend Pandir. So the question became, why on earth would Kohli confess to these 19 crimes if he wasn't guilty, or at least if he wasn't solely responsible? Why would he not point the finger at Pandir as well and say that he had been involved? Firstly as we told you as the police themselves admitted he had been tortured by the police at their own admission. Coley was also a sixth or seventh

standard dropout that means that he was just eight years old when he dropped out of school. Pandir by contrast was a highly educated man and I don't mean he was just highly educated in a normal sense. He went to one of the most prestigious schools in India and then following that he went to one of the most high-ranking prestigious universities in India. This man came from money his entire life. I can't stress that enough. And in his confessions and interviews, Kohli even also always refers to Pandit as Sahib, which means master. It's literally a colonial term.

It's what Indians were forced to call, like, members of the British Raj. Like, that is what it means. It means master. And I'm not saying Kohli was a slave because he was obviously being paid for his work because he was sending money home to his family. But the terminology there, the power dynamic, I cannot stress this enough. This isn't just employer-employee. The mentality of people,

because also in India, this oppression is so deeply ingrained, people who are oppressed also feel that way about themselves, that they are lesser than. So Kohli will have believed that about himself. So the idea that when his master is away, he's going to murder and eat children in his house is kind of ridiculous. To me, I don't believe that. Calling him Saib tells you everything you need to know. Kohli would not, in my opinion, and maybe he's so overcome by these urges he couldn't help himself, but I find it hard to believe that Coley would have behaved that way in his Saib's house behind his back and I don't know I think therefore I don't see how you couldn't argue that Pandir could easily have manipulated and scared a man like Coley into taking the entire blame for this whole thing. What I find much harder

to believe is Pandir and the CBI story that Coley somehow killed 19 people in that house and kept it all a secret from Pandir. I find that impossible to believe. Even in the most generous telling of that version, the relationship again, like I said, that Pandir would have had with a man like Coley, a man that he absolutely would have seen as beneath him, I cannot believe that he left Coley with full run of that massive house whenever he wasn't there. And so when the CBI decided not to file charges against Pundir, six family members of the victims decided to do something about it. Sunil Biswas, Karambir, Jebulal, Nandlal, Jatin and Bandana Sarkar and Anil Haldar found a lawyer to take their case for free. And this lawyer

was Mr Khalid Khan. I love Khalid Khan so much. He takes this case pro bono and he's tough. He's tough on them. He says, I'll take this case. But if any of you backtrack in court, change your minds, change your stories, because there were payoffs. There were payoffs going around, which we'll come on to talk about. Any of you change your story, I will fucking sue you. And we'll go on to see what happens with that. And Khan isn't a Hindu name, is it? No, Khan is a Muslim name. So would that have given him a bit more of a like, outside perspective, or not really? Not really. I mean, anyone who grows up in India would be well aware of this, because Hindus are the majority. You know, we're talking 90% plus.

But no, Khan would be all too aware of the situation and the statuses at play. And also, even if you strip all that away, Pandya, mega rich. Sure. Kohli, poor. And kids, families, poor. And something else we need to mention about the Indian justice system is that each case is tried separately with its own separate trials. If Coley was being charged with 19 murders, there would be 19 trials. Yeah, so each victim would get their own trial. It wouldn't just be, we're trying you for 19 murders.

Fuck me, no wonder nothing ever happens in the justice system. Oh yeah, there is a massive fucking backlog. An absolute catastrophic backlog in the Indian justice system. Jesus Christ. Yeah. massive fucking backlog an absolute catastrophic backlog in the indian justice system jesus christ yeah we know that mr khaled khan is taking this case for free and if that's the case which it is why didn't all of the families of the missing children get involved it is worth mentioning of course that a lot of these people are day laborers so for them to take that much time out of their lives would have cost them the opportunity cost of going to work and maybe some of them were like look it's happened we're not going to get any

justice anyway we just have to get on with our lives so I don't want to unfairly scrutinize these people but it wasn't even six families it was six individuals it's actually only four of the victims actual kin who get involved in pursuing this case. And I think it is worth asking why because of the next bit. And the next bit is that several of the families were rumoured to have taken payoffs. We can't prove that because obviously it's not going to be an official bank transaction. No one's going to have signed any dotted lines. No, and it wasn't like an out-of-court settlement. It's like, it's payoffs.

Under the table, yeah. But according to Jabu, quote, people who had never even had bikes suddenly had cars. I don't think it takes a genius to deduce that those payoffs were not coming from Coley. Yeah, exactly. Follow the money. Here you can't because it's obviously under the table, but it is very interesting that this happens.

And again, I'm not going to criticise these people for taking that money. Like, they have nothing. They have less than nothing, some of these families. Yes, their child has been murdered and it's horrendous, but they would already know that they're not going to get justice. If they're lucky, maybe something would happen. But why sacrifice the opportunity cost of going to work every day? These are people who are paid cash in hand on a daily basis, who've got other children. I'm not going to scrutinise them for taking that money, but where is the money coming from and why would somebody who was innocent be paying that money especially when the cbi is already not even wanting to go after you and when pandir's son who has done a lot

of the pandir family's comms after his father's arrest when he was asked about why so many of the victims families had retracted their cases, he just said that he had sat down and talked to them and that they had decided not to pursue the case because of the evidence that he had shown them. So basically he's saying, we had a nice civil conversation, we sat down at a table and I gave them the logical reason why they were wasting their time. And they all agreed with me that my father must be completely innocent and they retracted their cases fucking hell jesus christ these people really are living on another planet and this is the 2000s like this isn't like no fucking no this

isn't this is like mid this not mid 2000s because you know you know what i Like, it's in, like, 2006 to 2000 and now that it's happening. And if you do want to hear from Vandir's son, watch The Karma Killings. He's fucking all over it. Again, I don't know whether he knows that his father did it or not. And maybe he is arguing with all sincerity. And bribes, to the Western ear, it sounds like, why would you do that if you weren't guilty? In India, bribery is like fucking, it's like breathing. People expect to pay a bribe for everything if you're driving around the police will stop you for no reason they'll be like show me this show me that show me the registration

papers for this car you were going too fast and you can't see me but i'm doing a handout signal like give me some money and then i'll let you go it's corruption is the name of the game. Bribery is like the universal language in India. So again, I guess we do have to say that why Pandira is paying is very suspicious, especially when the CBI aren't going after him. But I could see that Hassan maybe thinks this is just how we deal with things. So first up for the Nathari cases, because remember, there's going to be a trial for every victim, was the trial of Rimpa Haldar. Now again, people might be thinking, why haven't I read out the names of all 19 victims? I don't know them.

We only know the names of the victims whose cases have gone to trial so far. And even some of those, it's not obvious. And this is because, like we talked about with the case of Jyothi Singh, who was the nearby Delhi rape case, in Indian law there is a lot of protection given to families and victims about the name not being released to the press. And this is again, here in the West, we have this idea of name the victims, name the victims. In India, there is a thing of like, why are you dragging this person's name through the

fucking media? You're humiliating that family further. So it's a different cultural aspect. So we'll just name the people who have chosen to be named. But like I said, first trial, Rimpa Haltar. And Khalid Khan, although he knew that it was going to be tough, was quietly confident about the family's chances. Jatin and Bandana Sarkar, who were the parents of a victim named Pinky Sarkar, had some evidence that the CBI seemed to have buried. And this is just like, well, I had to read this like five times because I was like, this cannot be real. It's fucking unbelievable. So according to Jatin Sarkar,

on the day that the police had raided bungalow D5, remember we said that a lot of the residents of Nathari had actually broken into the property on the same day that the police were raiding it. He had been there and he had heard Circle Officer Dinesh Yadav interrogate Kohli and Pandir the day that the local police had searched the house first. And apparently Pandir had confessed there and then to the murders to this officer Yadav. And Jatin said that he had heard him confess. Pandir said according to Jatin that he would send Kohli out to go and find the victims and the victim type that he asked for because remember some of the victims are children four of them were grown women he said would depend on the mood that he was in or the type of guests coming to their next party. Pandir would then rape

the victims pass them around his guests and then give them back to Kohli, telling him to do whatever he wanted but then to kill them afterwards and get rid of the body. So this is what Jatin said he heard Pandir confess to officer Yadav. Now this statement on its own wouldn't exactly stand up in court, especially when it's a murder trial, but the officer Yadav had apparently recorded these confessions by Pandir in his police officer's notebook that night that he had been there. Yadav's constable, and again this is all according to Jatin, apparently Yadav's constable had then told him you should go and make a photocopy of that page just to be safe. And this constable had actually been the one to take the

notebook. He said I'll do it, take the notebook and went and got a photocopy. Jatin then said that this constable then came back to the house and gave a photocopy of that page to him, to Jatin. And apparently when he did this, this constable looked scared and he looked, quote, disturbed. And apparently he said, keep this safe because it was quote an important piece of evidence that would help you when the time comes. The CBI and the local UP police didn't know that the Sarkars had this evidence but they did know that Jatin had been eyewitnesses to the confession and guess what? After numerous intimidating visits to his house, backed up by neighbours who saw scary men come and go in the middle of the night, Jatin was eventually found dead on the 1st of September 2007. He was

made to look like he drowned, but the massive gash on his forehead and the numerous broken bones in his body told another story. But even this didn't deter his wife, Bandana, though. She had safely kept the photocopy of the notebook page. So when Khan asked the CBI where Yadav's notes were from that night, from the night of the confession, they just gave him a piece of paper with some scribbles on it that had been dated for the night of the confession. And they claimed that Yadav hadn't actually taken his notebook with him that day. So that's why the notes weren't in his official notebook they were on a piece of paper but Bandana Sarkar's photocopy that we know that she had she's kept safely all this time was in Yadav's writing and this is the real nail in the coffin it even had a page number

in the bottom corner and that page number just so happened to be missing from officer Yadav's diary so they just ripped it out thrown it away and presented Khan with a trumped up piece of evidence that they just made up so essentially the CBI just realizing that the jig was up kind of they just threw Yadav under the bus pinning all of the intimidation on the victim's families and even the alleged murder of Jatin on Yadav but no case was ever brought against Yadav under the bus, pinning all of the intimidation on the victim's families, and even the alleged murder of Jatin on Yadav. But, no case was ever brought against Yadav, and to this day he's still serving as a UP police

officer. So nothing really happens. No, they were just like fuck, we got caught in a massive lie. Let's just blame him, say he was acting as a rogue officer, but then we don't have to convict him anyway. Because then he might bring a case against us. So we'll just leave him. It's fucking ridiculous. So thanks to this evidence of

the photocopied page from Yadav's notebook, and well, everything else glaringly obvious about this case, even though the CBI didn't want to bring charges against Pandir, because they still don't want to do it after this page from the notebook is revealed. The court indicted Pandir anyway, because they'd seen enough. And in court, the pair, so Pandir and Coley, stood in severe contrast, reflecting firstly their enormous power differential between them, but also their demeanour. Pandir looked calm and composed, like he knew that he was going to be fine, like he was going to be safe. He's been fine his whole life. Yeah, exactly. Why would it change now? No. Kohli, on the other hand, was wide-eyed and frantic-looking.

And eventually, on the 13th of February 2009, both Kohli and Pandir were found guilty of the murder of 14-year-old Rimpahalda and sentenced to death. When he heard this, Pandir fainted. Wow. Yep. he heard this pandir fainted wow yeah and in india this was a real like watershed moment to some degree because for india to see a poor dalit families building a case against a rich man like pandir and taking it all the way to court and getting a death sentence for him was incredible what i would like to say is that for a lot of people especially like people weren't like oh

my god look at these dalits doing they they were like good. They were like fucking sat in court instead was enormous. And also, tragically, most of them were illiterate, but they still had to photocopy every single document and keep it safe. And just the photocopying costs alone had run into the thousands for these families. But finally, it seemed like justice was going to be served and it was all going to be worth it. But in September that same year, so 2009, the Indian justice system decided to slap back, and at an appeal in the Allahabad High Court, Pandya was acquitted of the crime, on the grounds of a lack of evidence.

But Kohli's death sentence was confirmed. This is the thing you have to also understand about the Indian justice system, or Indian legal framework in general. A confession will do. Kohli had confessed, Pandya had never confessed. So in the eyes of no other evidence being there, even though the bodies were found in the fucking literal garden, the confession was enough. And it still isn't over. Kohli still has a roller coaster heading straight in his direction. The courts seem to go

into hyperdrive trying to get him executed because often with high profile cases in this country, in India, in many countries across the world, I would hazard a guess at all, when there is political pressure, the justice system and the police just want to get it done as soon as possible. And sometimes they kind of don't care who it is. It didn't really make sense wanting to kill him so quickly because there are still 18 other murder trials to deal with, some of which Pundit was also in the frame for. So given that Coley still had numerous charges against him and that he was the only eyewitness in cases against Pundit,

why were they rushing through his execution? It seemed quite unusual, especially when you take into account that they kept moving the date of the intended execution and that they kept it a secret, something that is only really a thing in India when a prisoner is convicted of terrorism, which is not really at all in any way, shape or form what he's convicted of. But Kohli had been appealing his execution with the help of some new lawyers. He now claims execution with the help of some new lawyers.

He now claims, with the help of his new legal team, that he covered up for Pandey and that all he had ever done was lure children into the house. But even then, there are still a lot of holes in the case. For example, three bodies seem to have gone mysteriously missing. The police claim that there were 16 murders, despite initially reporting they discovered 19 skulls. And also, other leads or motives have barely been looked into beyond the point of Coley being a serial killer. It's really pixie-choozy. It's a cherry-picking, if I've ever seen it. It makes little to no sense. So originally they say find 19 skulls, there are 19 murder cases, but three of the bodies have

never been accounted for at all. Don't know where they've gone. So obviously in those cases they'll just say there's no evidence, there's not even a body, throw it out of trial. Like what is going on? None of it makes any fucking sense. And if you are confused by any of this, this is literally the best that we could do. This case is a complete fucking mess. Everyone's lying. Everyone's lying. So yeah, like Hannah said, other motives for what could have happened here were completely ignored. Including other highly probable motives such as, for example, organ harvesting was never even looked into. And this was despite the fact that the house which backed onto Bungalow D5 was that of a doctor named Navin Chowdhury who had been under police suspicion in 1998 in connection with an alleged kidney racket in his hospital.

Never looked into. Also, the interesting, because you might be thinking like, what's that? It's just a coincidence. Why are all the torsos missing? All they ever found were legs, arms, and skulls. The torsos were never found. If you're going to harvest organs, that's where the organs are. Yeah, right, that's the bit you want.

That's the bit. Never looked into. Never, ever looked into and also sex trafficking was not properly investigated at all even though the police made links between pandir and sex rings by pandir's own fucking admission because he tried to get out of the murder by saying that's all he was involved in and finally if coley was the sole culprit and if the investigation into the serial killings really is complete, then why were children going missing in Nathari long before Coley arrived? And why are children in the area still going missing regularly today?

And why are the police still avoiding registering these cases? Because that's exactly what's happening. I don't know. I have no answers for any of those whys. There are honestly some incredible journalists who have done great work on this. When I say this case isn't talked about enough, I mean like by some of the bigger newspapers, but there are some smaller newspapers, which I'll link below, who are doing incredible investigative work. A sting operation done by a paper called Teleka was the way that the bribery came out.

Like, there are some journalists who are really following up hard on this, but there's only so much you can fight against a system like this. Evidenced by the fact that Pundir now lives as a free man in Chandigarh, the capital of the state of Punjab. Since he was released, reports have leaked that when the police raided Pundir's house, they found bottles of vintage wine, expensive golf clubs, fancy furniture, and also laptops full of sexually explicit images of children, including pictures of Pundir actually abusing children himself. But if these do really exist, they haven't publicly surfaced. Surprise, surprise. It's also been alleged that he'd paid bribes to officers

before when suspicions had been raised previously about his involvement in the disappearance of children in the very same area and he had quashed the reopening of historical cases of missing children in chandegarh i know that generally to keep the heat off ourselves we tend not to say people who have been acquitted or cleared or maybe not even taken to trial at all definitely did it but he definitely did it there's just no way in my mind that pandit didn't do this like it's appalling it's truly truly appalling i mean you put all of the pieces together he fits the profile like again i'll reference hunting warhead if you guys haven't listened to it go listen to it it's a terrible name for a podcast because nobody knows what it's about but but it's so good. And it's basically about a group of police officers and a hacker bringing down the biggest child sexual exploitation website on the

internet called Child's Play. And on there, they talk about the users and the producers. And Bandir to me fits all the hallmarks of a producer he has access to hundreds of children literally on his doorstep who he can take do anything to and no one will do anything no one will give a fuck what happened to those children except their families and he can abuse them in this house that he just lives on on his own if his wife and kids were there as well I'd be like oh how could he get away with it they're fucking hundreds of miles away he can do anything total free reign selling indecent images of children on the internet like he was so wealthy I just don't believe that this wasn't a part of his diverse revenue portfolio and something that he just fucking loved doing

I know allegedly allegedly allegedly but how this is why I didn't like karma killings they really just tried to be balanced balanced balanced and they just don't make any like point anything too hard at the fact that there are so many fucking holes in the fact that Pandit they just never come out and say it and I'm like are you serious following his acquittal he moves back to Chandragal like you said someone set fire to bungalow d5 and a lot of the protesters who were outside the house regularly, oh, they also turned up at court every single day to try and attack him. And I was like, you know, fair enough. Not that I'm saying the police shouldn't have stopped them.

Obviously they should. They should keep defendants safe. But I think it shows like, you know, people were fucking angry. People were furious because they knew, they fucking knew he was not going to go to jail for this. He has been told by the court so he's not allowed to give any interviews about this which i'm sure he's not particularly keen to do anyway but he's living his life he's living his life and the ending of karma killings again made me so sick it's just he's not allowed to speak so they're just in his house filming him he's wearing a

little fucking tweed suit and an argyle jumper and whatever and he just like walks out of his very nice house onto the street just walks down the road and they're just filming him and he just like walks out of this very nice house onto the street just walks down the road and they're just filming him and i'm like fuck off fuck off so anyway somebody burnt down bungalow d5 well they didn't really burn it down they set fire to it now it's just kind of stood there as a bit of a husk of a building it looks really ominous and of course the locals of nathari are convinced that they can see and hear the ghosts of the many victims who are brutalized inside and try as he might Pandir just can't seem to sell the place which he's been trying to do for several years I mean you'd need an estate agent that was also

a superhero and an angel and a demigod to get rid of that yeah it's not going anywhere though I think he'll be just fine if anything it's a hole in his portfolio that I'm quite glad is there. Yeah, and Coley, well, he's been in prison ever since 2006. As of 2021, actually, he stood trial yet again, but he was acquitted of that one. Again, it's like individual, 19 individual cases.

They have more evidence for some than they do for others, apparently. But again, it feels weird to me because if he had killed one person, then he kills all of of them but that's not how the justice system works there and he now defends himself because oh jesus this is a man who dropped out of school age eight and i don't know even if you think coley did this he needs to be in a hospital not on death row no no no and that's not just because i'm saying he's mentally ill because of what he's done is so extreme when you hear him speak he is not a man who looks well and i don't

know if it's the stress of this case or whether because he actually did it i don't know but the whole thing is completely fucked up and there you go guys that is the story of the nathari child killings i don't know check out the documentary see what you think but the whole thing is a mess and that's what you need to know basically so yeah thank you for listening that was quite a long one

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