This murder in Calcutta remains by far the most complicated murder case in the annals of crime of the whole world. Excerpted from the author’s book ‘Murdering Murders: Secrets of Global Investigations’, a tribute to those relentless crime-fighters of the world who have been securing justice for the wronged souls.
This murder in 1933 in Calcutta remains by far the most unique murder case in the annals of crime in the whole world and it goes to the eternal credit and pride of the then British police in India that they solved it successfully.
Our story started in the Zemindari estate of Pakur (in present-day Jharkhand), some 300 km from Calcutta. When the zemindar died in 1929, his two sons from two wives were 27 and 16 years old respectively. They inherited his estate as well as the estate of their aunt Rani Surjabati. The older one Benoyendra Chandra Pandey held half of the ancestral estate in trust for his then minor brother Amarendra Chandra Pandey. However, Benoyendra was a man of loose character who was not only fraudulently misappropriating Amarendra’s share of income from the estate, but in a manner quite typical of young men from that class, was also squandering it on debauchery including relations with a nautch girl. The joint family was outraged by his character but, as Amarendra came of age, he objected particularly to the defalcation in his share of the property’s income.
They had been living in Calcutta for some time as had a house there too. Amarendra had just recovered from a long illness and wanted to go back to Pakur. Benoyendra decided to stay back but went to the railway station to see them off. In December, 1933, as the entire family including Benyoendra was waiting at the crowded platform of the Howrah railway station, Amarendra was jostled by someone coming from the opposite direction. He suddenly gave a cry and clutched his upper arm, saying that something had pricked him. He rolled up his sleeve and there was indeed a small puncture from which blood and some oily liquid was oozing out. In the milling crowd, the family could neither find the person who had done it nor the thing that had pricked his arm. They suspected some foul play and urged him to stay back in Calcutta to get it treated. However, Benoyendra laughed it off saying it was nothing significant as people moved around on platforms with all sorts of things including steel boxes etc. on their heads, and persuaded them to proceed to Pakur as planned.
Amarendra fell sick almost immediately thereafter and was rushed back to Calcutta. There he received the best possible medical treatment from not one but several doctors that money and class could buy in that era. Nothing worked, however, and on December 4, just eight days after the fateful prick at Howrah station, he lay dead. Towards the end, he had developed painful swellings in his armpits and glands. One well-known doctor of Calcutta Dr. Shivapada Bhattacharji who was one of the physicians treating him, issued a death certificate stating the cause of death to be septic pneumonia.
In view of that, no need was felt for a post mortem and the body was, as per Hindu custom, consigned to flames. Benoyendra thought ‘that was that’ and heaved a sigh of relief. The thorn in his side was removed forever and he could now lead his life of indulgence with gay abandon flush with the entire estate’s income.
A few weeks later, however, a letter was received in the Detective Branch of Calcutta Police from a relative Kamala Prasad Pandey and a family friend Kalidas Gupta which alleged that it was actually a murder at the behest of Benoyendra, and Amarendra was pricked with a needle that carried bacteria of plague.
Given the fact that in the past five years in Calcutta, there had been just one recorded case of plague, the allegation was rather far-fetched and most police officers would have dismissed it; but, not the then Detective Branch, Calcutta Police. They swung into action with full force. Inquiries amongst relatives made it clear that Benoyendra bore a grudge against Amarendra for his objecting to the defalcation. Thus, a motive was found and Benoyendra became a suspect.
Extensive inquiries were made at every single place Amarendra had visited in the past couple of years and all that had happened to him in that period. They found that during the Puja holidays of 1932, the brothers had visited the estate of their aunt Rani Surjabati at Deogarh, about 500 km from Calcutta. There Benoyendra had produced a pair of pince-nez as a gift for his brother. Amarendra had poor eyesight but, out of vanity, was averse to wearing glasses all the time at that young an age. The name pince-nez comes from French pincer (to pinch), and nez (nose). In this design of specs, popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a metallic leaf or coiled spring connected the lenses and gripped the bridge of the nose without the usual temple and temple tips over the ears as found in other specs.
Benoyendra tried the pince-nez on his brother’s nose and, in a playful gesture, used enough force to scratch him slightly. No one paid attention. Within a few days, however, Amarendra fell sick. A local doctor diagnosed it as tetanus and treated it with anti-tetanus serum. There was not much improvement and they called for their family doctor in Pakur. Instead of the family doctor, Benoyendra produced an unknown physician Dr. D. R. Dhar whom he introduced as from Calcutta. In any case, even as Dr. Dhar moved him to Calcutta and changed the line of treatment, it took him some months to recover fully. It was after this recovery that Amarendra wanted to go back to Pakur as narrated above.
Then the police focused their attention on the treatment received by Amarendra during eight days of his fatal illness and questioned every single person connected with that. As stated above, the rich family had roped in several doctors. One of them, Dr. Santosh Kumar Gupta, told he had quietly taken his blood sample and had sent it ‘unofficially’ for blood culture to a doctor friend working at the School of Tropical Medicine, Calcutta. When reports came, he was shocked that it indeed had the bacteria Yersinia pestis that caused bubonic plague. He informed the Principal and he, in turn, informed the police.
Still, it did not implicate Benoyendra. The police then made inquiries about every medical person in Bengal who was in any way interested in plague. They found that there was a man called Tara Nath Bhattacharji in Calcutta. His medical degrees were dubious but he managed to pass himself off as a bacteriologist of sorts. This man had gone to the length of visiting first the Haffkine Institute and then the Arthur Road Infectious Diseases Hospital in Bombay to get live culture of the plague bacteria under the pretext of testing a cure invented by him. He stayed there for just five days and as soon as he got the culture, left the place on some flimsy pretext, never to return or contact them. Most importantly, he was found to be a very close friend of Benoyendra who had no good reason to be friends with man from such a dissimilar background. Dr. Tara Nath could not furnish any explanation for his leaving Bombay suddenly, and what he did with the live culture thereafter.
The police believed that Amarendra’s sickness in 1932 was also an attempt to murder him by infecting him with the bacteria Clostridium tetani that caused tetanus. These bacteria are found in many things including faeces of horses, which was available aplenty in those days. The metal spring of the pince-nez was infected with it. Because he survived the attempt, Benoyendra thought of plague, a much deadlier disease.
This was a case in which there was no eyewitness to the crime, the man who had pricked the victim was never found, and there was no post mortem. But a sample of blood left by the deceased before he died had survived and that alone led the police to the killers.
In sheer deviousness, it beats any other crime by long miles. The murder was in planning for years. Imagine a moderately educated young man from a rural estate in colonial India planning a murder with a biological weapon that was unheard of even in the military arsenals of then Great Powers, and going to great lengths to execute it, befriending and employing several senior doctors in the process! What possessed him; what gave him such a diabolical mind; God only knows!
Both Benoyendra and Dr. Tara Nath were sentenced to death but it was reduced to transportation for life to Andamans by a Division Bench of the Calcutta High Court (Justices Sir John Rolleston Lort-Williams and Nasim Ali), then the highest court in the country as the Federal Court was established in 1937 only, just for want of the mysterious man who had pricked the victim at the railway station. Most probably, he was a short-statured, dark-complexioned man hired by Benoyendra and was seen with him earlier. But he simply vanished after the crime. Drs. Dhar and Sivapada were acquitted.
The fiendish Benoyendra somehow managed an amnesty from the government of India after independence even though he was not a political prisoner. That was, in itself, a murder of justice by Nehru and showed what people with money and power could not do by pulling the right strings. His release remains an eternal shame on Nehru and his government. But Lady Justice could not tolerate this outrage. One day in Pakur, Benoyendra had taken up a gun and was threatening to kill everybody. He was killed in the ensuing gunfight with the police.
