Original subtitles

Local police from the Karchuliyan area of Rewa

have found the dead body of a young man.

It is claimed that the dead body's head and private parts were mutilated

and all of its clothing was stripped off.

Onlookers who saw the dead body were baffled

as to how can anyone kill another human so brutally.

The Kumbh Mela was around the corner in Allahabad back then.

SCENES FROM THE MAUNI AMAVASYA GATHERING

Amidst such a spiritual atmosphere

a grave sinner was lurking amongst the pilgrims.

and no one had a clue.

In the 34 years of my career,

this was indeed a big case

just the sheer brutality of it left all of us stunned.

This is the work of a predator.

I still believe.

My father did not do any of it.

He was a psycho criminal.

For him, murder is not a crime.

Murder is something the victim deserves.

He is a monster in the guise of a human.

A serial killer is someone who is a very specific kind of predator.

Such people do not deserve any trial

or any court hearing.

They should be shot dead on the spot.

My name is Veerendra Singh.

The name of our village is Bairi.

Everyone in this village is related to each other.

We all trace back our lineage to the same set of ancestors.

We were four brothers.

Dheerendra was the youngest.

Dheerendra was a B.Sc graduate.

Our financial condition wasn't great.

Due to dire circumstances,

I helped him get a job at a magazine named News Plus in Allahabad.

Then with his sheer hard work and contacts,

he joined the Hindi newspaper Aaj.

AAJ HINDI DAILY NEWSPAPER

Dheerendra was a good man,

still in his early 30s.

Wheatish complexion, short frame...

He had rented a room

in Kydganj area of Allahabad.

He used to fight for the rights of the people of his community.

He was a good journalist with great potential.

He would try to help everyone

to the best of his ability.

He never had any rivalry or disputes with anyone.

Back then, in our block,

illegal mining operations were on the rise.

He wrote a piercing article about it.

RAMPANT LOOTING IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

Soon all the illegal mining stopped.

MINING LICENSE SCAM

So the mining mafia was miffed with him.

Dheerendra visited his newspaper office regularly.

He had reported there on the night of December 13.

He told his colleagues that he was going to his village

and wouldn't be reporting for work the next day.

His wife was pregnant back then.

He wanted to take her for a check-up in Allahabad.

Two of our uncles lived right next door to Dheerendra.

He informed them before heading to the village.

In fact, he is said to have offered to carry any message home.

BAIRI, 46 KM

Then he left from there on December 14, 2000.

Dheerendra didn't reach out till the 15th.

My uncle, who works at the post office, came home on the 16th.

Upon asking, he told us that Dheerendra had left two days ago.

He had even told his reporter colleagues that he would return on the 15th

but he didn't show up.

They tried calling him up,

but his phone was switched off.

As more time passed, I grew anxious.

I was afraid some mishap had occurred with Dheerendra.

In a big city like Allahabad,

when the Kumbh Mela is being organized,

the administration is on high alert as people come from all over the world.

So for a journalist to go missing in such an environment was no small matter.

It was really serious.

In Uttar Pradesh, both the spread and extent of crime

has always been a matter of discussion

Speaking solely of murder cases,

as per data from the NCRB,

from 1993 to 2018

Uttar Pradesh has been number one in the entire nation.

REPORTER GOES MISSING UNDER MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES

AAJ REPORTER GOES MISSING

Around that time, I spoke to PK Tiwari, the Senior Superintendent of Police

He told me he was aware of it and the police were taking action.

Since the incident was reported at the Kydganj Station

he summoned SN Tripathi, the Kydganj Station Officer back then,

and asked him to investigate the matter thoroughly.

Back in 2000,

I was the SO of Kydganj.

The Station Officer.

The SSP realized it was my jurisdiction.

He signaled me to come over.

He introduced me to the journalists

and asked me to look into their matter.

As the investigating police officer,

I studied his room carefully.

I was looking for something that indicated where he went.

I even spoke to the people around.

His brother had told me that he owned a mobile phone.

And the mobile phone's charger was still in the socket.

I thought that it's been two days and if he were going out of town,

he would've taken the charger too.

Meanwhile, his fellow reporter Satyendra Singh Chauhan

helped fetch the call details of Dheerendra's phone.

That was when the report arrived.

We got the call details

which listed a few numbers.

Further investigation revealed that he had spoken

to a former legislator from that number.

There was a home landline number to which he had spoken for five minutes.

And one railway hotline number. Just these three numbers.

A mobile number may have a false address but not a landline number.

So I called that landline number.

I called it from my station's number.

The speaker on the other end said her name was Phoolan Devi

and that she was a district council member.

The address she gave was near Ramsagar lake.

That's where she said she lived.

I asked Dheerendra's brother, who was right there,

whose number was it?

He instantly replied that she was a woman from his village.

And she was a district council member and her husband...

His name was Raja Kolander.

When that mobile number was traced to Raja Kolander's name,

my uncle told SN Tripathi

that he was on the right track.

To which he asked my uncle why he felt so.

My uncle explained that

despite owning 80 bighas of farmland

and working on a full-time job,

he wasn't able to afford a motorcyle.

Whereas a Grade-4 employee owned a Tata Sumo, a Jeep Commander,

and a scooter.

TV and VHS recorders were a rage back then.

And this man owned all of that

and traveled from Naini to Allahabad very often.

He ought to be doing something illegal.

A thought immediately occurred to me.

If a call was made to this number from Dheerendra's phone,

either she knew where Dheerendra was

or what was being discussed, or who had his phone now.

And whoever had the phone would surely know where Dheerendra was.

So first of all,

I asked Veerendra visit her place since he knew her.

I followed closely behind him.

There, we met Phoolan Devi.

I asked her if Dheerendra had visited.

She replied, "No, Brother" in her rustic accent.

Until then, Officer SN Tripathi

was standing on the street outside.

He saw a Tata Sumo approaching from the Naini route.

Sumo SUVs were rare back then and this one had a unique color.

White was the most common one then.

This caught my attention.

Neither of us knew the other.

I was in my uniform.

I stopped the vehicle.

The vehicle had a "District Council Member" board fixed to the front.

I asked him how he was related to this district council member.

He replied, "I am her husband."

No matter how seasoned a criminal is,

criminals are bound to stutter when faced with the police.

An innocent person would talk normally.

SN Tripathi asked him,

I have seen you before.

Is your name...

He said, "Ram Niranjan."

Tripathi pressed in, "No, isn't there another name?"

Then he asked, "Is it Raja Kolander?" and he nodded in agreement.

He was so overambitious that he changed his own name to Raja Kolander.

Raja Kolander was a Grade-4 employee

at the Civilian Department

in Central Ordnance Depot, Chheoki.

And, he also had a piggery farm.

Raja Kolander never indulged in arguments.

He looked pretty simple, barely spoke, and kept to himself mostly.

He was from Shankargarh constituency,

where district council elections had taken place.

It was also a reserved constituency.

So he had changed his wife's name from Gomati Devi to Phoolan Devi.

Everyone knew back then, Phoolan Devi was a notorious dacoit.

Phoolan Devi then became a legislator of the Samajwadi Party.

He wanted even his wife to be famous like Phoolan Devi.

So he changed his wife's name from Gomati Devi to Phoolan Devi

and had her contest the district council member elections which she even won.

Basically, Kolander contested the elections in her name.

DISTRICT COUNCIL MEMBER

The police arrested him.

His brother-in-law Vakshraj was also in the same vehicle.

The inspector's car and Kolander's SUV both headed to the police station.

When we were taking him away he tried to reason with us.

A common belief is that if you're caught, bribe the police and get released.

That you can get away.

I asked him why he thinks he needs to bribe us.

He said that someone had probably misinformed us about him

or spread rumors about his vehicle.

I told him I didn't care. I asked him about Dheerendra.

Where was Dheerendra?

When the police team left,

we were on-ground, reporting on the crime.

When the police detained Vakshraj and Raja Kolander,

they brought them to the station for questioning.

When they took them in,

he was not ready to issue a statement.

So the police tried to intimidate his brother-in-law Vakshraj.

Vakshraj seemed really nervous.

He looked really scared.

His eyes and body language and expressions seemed off.

Suddenly the police noticed Vakshraj's shoes.

It seemed odd and ill-fit.

They didn't seem like his shoes.

Another police officer asked him about the cost of his shoes.

He replied that they cost around 300, whereas they actually cost 2,500.

They asked how he got them for so cheap since they looked expensive.

We started to suspect that the shoes belonged to Dheerendra.

Because I'd seen Dheerendra in them.

It was confirmed right then that they were hiding a secret.

But they wouldn't confess right away.

In the call details, on the 16th

a call was made from Dheerendra's number.

So they were interrogated.

We showed them they had spoken to that particular number

and asked where they had called from.

They tried misleading us.

The police have their methods of questioning.

Sometimes they have to be stern when criminals don't reveal information.

The police suspected that since Dheerendra spoke to them last,

they started thrashing Vakshraj, and no sooner they did that,

he immediately confessed that Dheerendra's phone

was in their vehicle.

Next was Raja Kolander's turn.

At around 3:00 a.m.,

he finally confessed

that they had murdered Dheerendra.

We were stunned to the core

when we were informed that he was murdered.

When Dheerendra's wife learned that he had been murdered,

she cried a lot. She would cry till she fainted.

She was also pregnant then.

It was a very delicate situation.

She had a three-year-old child. The older children coped somehow.

Handling the three-year-old was tough.

My name is Rahul Singh.

Deceased reporter Dheerendra Singh was my father.

Back then I must've been around two years old.

When my father died...

REPORTER DHEERENDRA SINGH 01-07-1969 TO 14-12-2000

As I grew up,

my family told me the truth.

I'm all grown up now.

Had Father been alive, maybe my dreams would've come true.

Sometimes I would want revenge.

But since I am an educated man,

I realized that it would only ruin my family further.

But Dheerendra's death took us back by almost 50 years.

REWA, 85

When we cross-questioned him,

he confessed that his vehicle was a stolen one.

He said he had a gut feeling

that Reporter Dheerendra Singh knew about his actions

and would probably hassle him as a reporter.

He was afraid he would get him caught by the police.

So he invited Dheerendra home.

He owned a piggery farm. A place where they raise pigs.

Raja Kolander told me that it was a cold, wintery morning.

It was the month of December, so we lit up a bonfire.

It's called "Kaura" in villages,

where people sit by a fire.

The weather was cold.

Once Dheerendra went there, they sat by the fire.

Kolander asked his brother-in-law to get some tea.

Since Dheerendra was facing him,

he could see his brother-in-law.

The brother-in-law moved to Dheerendra's back,

there they had kept a 30-bore pistol.

Vakshraj got the pistol pointing at Dheerendra's back

while Kolander sat facing him.

Right then, at point-blank range,

he shot Dheerendra.

My name is Adalat Singh.

Currently, I'm a teacher at a private school.

We were really young then, maybe around 15, when it happened.

The police took away my father and he didn't return all night.

We were distressed. We tried calling people we knew.

They told us my father wasn't there

and would us call if he came. The next morning...

police visited our house.

His wife, Phoolan Devi

and his boys

were taken into custody.

Then they were questioned.

They took me away, promised to take me to my father.

They kept me somewhere and then let me meet my father the next day.

He was sitting with his head down.

I asked them why they were troubling him.

I asked them to release him and find the real culprits.

I was detained at the station for around 20 days.

And, they would bring my father under remand.

Then they'd torture us and question my father.

Kolander was a hardened and a professional criminal.

It wasn't easy to make him confess.

But the police have their own methods.

They roughed him up.

Then he confessed that he had murdered Dheerendra.

They asked where the dead body was.

He confessed that he was at his farmhouse all day.

And that was where the body was.

The farmhouse had a fairly high boundary wall all around.

Even the front gate was big.

I asked him if anyone heard it when he shot Dheerendra.

He said gunshots were common around the area.

He then swiftly wrapped the body and loaded it into the boot

of his Tata Sumo SUV.

He was carrying Reporter Dheerendra's dead body

in his Tata Sumo SUV along with Vakshraj.

The route they took was

the Madhya Pradesh-Uttar Pradesh state border.

There're always police personnel and checkpoints stationed on that route.

It was night.

So they stopped his vehicle.

Since it was a big vehicle and he also knew little bit of English,

before the police could approach, he got down from the vehicle,

to greet them.

He said, "I'm Raja Kolander.

I'm heading to Rewa."

Since Madhya Pradesh has witnessed the rule of monarchs,

the officers couldn't pinpoint where Raja Kolander was from.

They saw that it was a luxury SUV and just let them pass.

So they went ahead.

Dheerendra's dead body was in the very same vehicle.

They drove beyond Shankargarh to Rewa District.

REWA, 85

Then they stripped off his clothes.

Beheaded him or executed "cutting" as he would say,

cut off his genitals.

They then dumped the naked dead body so that no one would identify.

We wish to remind you that last week,

near the Karchuliyan Station limits of Raipur,

the police had found a dead body of a young man

which could not be identified

and no one came forward to claim the body either.

The Rewa police took a few pictures and buried the dead body.

The same night, Rewa police received a call from Allahabad

informing them that UP state police

have been looking for a missing journalist for the last few days.

We met the local police there and saw the photograph.

Based on the photograph, a cut mark on its thigh and complexion,

we identified the body, since there was no head.

We deduced the torso was that of my cousin, Dheerendra Singh.

The following day, Raja Kolander identified the spot

where he had dumped the body.

Then they took us to the spot where they dumped the clothes.

Around 7 to 8km before Rewa City,

we found it.

All his clothes were bundled in the windcheater he was wearing.

It was recovered right in front of us.

The inspector of Raipur Karchuliyan Police Station

accompanied us to Rewa.

He got an order from then Magistrate of Rewa

to exhume the dead body.

The body was exhumed the following day.

We returned with the dead body

to perform the last rites.

My paternal cousin, Jeetendra,

was taken by the police to identify Dheerendra's belongings.

Speaking of the head...

A little ahead of Rewa, there's a lake named Bansagar.

He stuffed the head in a bag and threw it in the lake.

Back then, that lake was used

for fishing, I guess.

So there was a boat.

A fishing net was cast.

The head was found wrapped in a polybag.

The journalists requested us

to bring the head to Allahabad for cremation.

I had never imagined

that I would have to cremate my brother twice.

DHEERENDRA SINGH'S MURDER

KILLER UNMASKED

CULPRIT ARRESTED

KOLANDER

Raja Kolander replied

when the officers asked him

why he murdered Dheerendra.

Raja Kolander said that Dheerendra had an illicit affair with his wife.

He had said that to mislead the officers

by maligning Dheerendra's character.

So...

Aiwaran Singh and Shri Narayan Tripathi were the authorities present.

They said that going by his wife's age

and Dheerendra's wife's age and facial features,

it seemed highly unlikely.

They rubbished his claim.

The truth is that Dheerendra had never been to his house.

So his claim was just next to impossible.

This was a topic of discussion among people,

that Kolander's wife was from Dheerendra's village.

Both of them hailed from the same place.

People kept gossipping.

Kolander never told me directly.

He told me that Dheerendra had doubts about his vehicle.

Kolander claimed that he was being blackmailed by the journalist.

Raja Kolander claimed that Dheerendra was asking for money.

And that's why he killed him.

It is a criminal's mentality

or fear deep within him

that compelled him to say all that.

The truth was Dheerendra was a very honest reporter

and would never blackmail anyone for money.

MAKE PHOOLAN DEVI WIN VOTE FOR KETTLE

When the village council elections took place,

Raja Kolander's brother-in-law's wife had contested.

He suspected

that Dheerendra had conspired to defeat her

or was against her.

Because when it came to such matters

he was really ruthless.

He thought killing Dheerendra would have two benefits.

One that he would have no rivals,

and secondly, he would get

Dheerendra's new Bajaj Boxer motorcycle.

Dheerendra's Boxer motorcycle didn't have any registration number,

as it was new.

He had parked it in Banaras.

His relative worked there for the excise police.

Then he left for home.

Until then, he hadn't used Dheerendra's mobile phone.

He didn't even know how to use that phone.

He approached a person who seemed educated at the station

and told him he bought it recently and didn't know how to use it.

Once that person helped him,

he began making calls constantly.

And that got him caught.

Or else, no one would have ever suspected.

Dheerendra didn't even have any enemies as such.

Dheerendra was a reporter.

A son to a mother.

A brother and a husband.

I asked him why did he kill Dheerendra.

And how could he think of dismembering

his head and private parts so brutally

and throw his head and other parts all around.

It was such a savage deed

and so unfortunate

that society had to witness this.

Six months later, even his wife died in an accident.

It only made our suffering worse.

I had three children and had to also raise his three children alongside,

as well as farm the land.

Nothing can replace parents.

No one else can do

what your own parents can.

It hurts deep inside.

I just cry it out. That's all I can do.

Then I calm myself down.

And I get back to work.

The one who ruined my life... Raja Kolander.

He had shot him

with a country-made pistol.

When we asked him about that gun which was later recovered,

he said it was hidden in his home under cow-dung cakes.

We went and recovered the pistol.

When the police went there to investigate, they found his vehicle's visor.

Hidden in a drum of wheat.

When we were recovering the pistol,

we found a suitcase at the same spot.

Inside it, we found many vehicle documents.

We asked them what they were.

Kolander said they were vehicle documents.

However, amidst it, we found a small diary.

It was titled "Raja's Diary."

RAJA'S DIARY

We were not so curious then.

We were unsure about reading it.

But when we read further,

it listed names of 13 people and the 14th name was his name,

Dheerendra...

DHEERENDRA SINGH

No one knew who those people were.

If they were his victims,

why hadn't he been caught so far?

And if he hadn't been caught, how would the secret come out?

RAJA'S DIARY

Now Kolander alone

can reveal the further story.

I have some questions about your case

I see, ask whatever you want to.

Subtitle translation by: Bharath V H