The basaltic slopes of Gawli Dev Hill are typically beautiful during the monsoon. To the weekend trekkers who escape the concrete choke of Navi Mumbai, this forest reserve is a rare sanctuary of seasonal waterfalls, misty canopy walks, and quiet bird watching. But in July 2026, the quiet of the forest was broken by the sound of police boots trampling through the wet underbrush.

Armed with maps, shovels, and plastic evidence bags, detectives from the Rabale MIDC Police Station scrambled down the steep, muddy ravines, guided by a man who knew these rugged roads intimately: Rahul Dashrath Prajapati, a local autorickshaw driver.

Beside him, watching the muddy earth with a hollow gaze, was Sunita Kushwaha, her wrists bound. For nearly eleven months, Sunita had played the role of a grieving, abandoned wife, explaining away her husband Baliram’s sudden disappearance with a practiced sigh. Now, the rain-slicked ground beneath her feet was giving up the truth. What began as a routine missing person report filed by a desperate brother from Uttar Pradesh unfolded into one of the most calculated, cold-blooded murder conspiracies in the history of the metropolitan region. It is a story of a sacred family ritual twisted to shield an illicit affair, a labyrinth of forty burner SIM cards, and a ruthless act of violence executed while two children slept far away.

Forensic Custody and the Monsoon Search

The legal proceedings surrounding the case reached a critical juncture in mid-July 2026. Following their formal arrests on July 10, 2026, Sunita Kushwaha, 40, and her lover, Rahul Dashrath Prajapati, 30, were escorted under heavy police guard into the Belapur Judicial Magistrate First Class (JMFC) court. The magistrate remanded both accused to police custody to allow investigators to piece together the remaining fragments of a highly complex crime scene.

Retrieving physical evidence has proven to be an uphill battle for the Rabale MIDC police. Nearly eleven months have passed since the night of the murder, and the fierce monsoons of the Western Ghats have repeatedly washed over the Gawli Dev hill forest. Senior Inspector Devidas Kathale, who is leading the investigation, noted that wild animals and heavy rains have scattered the remains across a wide, heavily forested area.

Despite these environmental obstacles, search teams have successfully recovered several skeletal remains, including bone and skull fragments, from three separate locations in the dense woods. These grim findings have been cataloged and dispatched to the regional forensic science laboratory for DNA testing. Forensic experts are working to extract viable DNA profiles from the bones to match them against Baliram’s living relatives, establishing undisputed scientific proof of his death.

Because the murder was committed in August 2025, after the historic transition of India's penal code, the accused are being prosecuted under the modern Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) rather than the legacy Indian Penal Code. The formal First Information Report (FIR) registered at the Rabale MIDC station lists grave charges:

Triangulation and the Interrogation Room

The collapse of Sunita’s carefully constructed facade occurred on July 10, 2026, within the stark walls of the Rabale MIDC interrogation room. Recognizing that a direct confrontation might cause the suspects to double down on their alibis, Inspector Kathale’s team separated Sunita and Rahul, subjecting them to sustained, parallel questioning.

The interrogation quickly exposed glaring contradictions. When asked about the timeline of the minor household dispute that supposedly prompted Baliram to leave, Sunita gave conflicting dates. Rahul, when questioned about his autorickshaw routes on those same dates, grew visibly nervous, giving statements that failed to align with Sunita’s story.

The definitive breakthrough, however, was anchored in digital forensics. Technical analysts from the Navi Mumbai Crime Branch had been meticulously reconstructing the suspects' communication logs. Despite Sunita changing her mobile handsets and swapping between approximately forty distinct SIM cards over the course of eleven months, she could not entirely erase her digital footprint.

The Call Detail Records (CDRs) revealed a relentless pattern of highly localized, late-night communication between Sunita's burner numbers and Rahul’s personal cell phone. More damaging still was the cell tower triangulation. On the night of August 8–9, 2025, both of their devices were registered to the same cell tower servicing Yadav Nagar in Airoli. A few hours later, as dawn approached, Rahul’s phone pinged off towers bordering the desolate Gawli Dev Hill—precisely where the skeletal remains were eventually found.

Confronted with the irrefutable CDR data and the irreconcilable gaps in their testimonies, Sunita and Rahul broke down. In a detailed confession, they admitted to the murder, the dismemberment, and the dispersal of Baliram's body parts across the forest.

The Deoria Emissary and the Ashram Alibi

The legal machinery that brought down the conspiracy was set in motion on April 24, 2026, when Hareram Kushwaha, Baliram’s brother, walked into the Rabale MIDC Police Station to file a missing person report. Hareram had traveled hundreds of miles from his native village in Deoria, Uttar Pradesh, driven by a deep, unsettling silence that had stretched for nearly eight months.

Upon arriving in the working-class neighborhood of Yadav Nagar in Airoli, Hareram expected to find his brother. Instead, he discovered that the family home had been rented out to complete strangers. Neighbors informed him that Sunita had abruptly packed up the family's belongings, taken her two children, and moved out of the area without leaving a forwarding address or notifying any of Baliram's relatives.

Hareram eventually tracked Sunita down to a rented apartment in Ghansoli, where she was living with Rahul Prajapati. When confronted, Sunita appeared evasive and defensive. She told Hareram that on August 10, 2025, Baliram had left the house following a trivial domestic argument. She claimed he had packed his bags to go to the ashram of the spiritual guru Asang Baba in Uttar Pradesh, stating he would return in five months.

Hareram’s suspicions hardened into certainty. He knew his brother was a devoted father who would never abandon his children for months on end without making contact. Most damning of all was the realization that Sunita had never reported her husband's long absence to the police. Recognizing that the ashram story was an engineered lie, Hareram immediately went to the police, giving investigators the critical lead they needed.

The Ghansoli Domesticity

For nearly eleven months, Sunita and Rahul lived in a state of hyper-vigilance, constantly adapting their lives to shield themselves from exposure. Immediately after the murder in August 2025, Sunita took decisive steps to dismantle her old life. By renting out the Yadav Nagar residence, she secured a steady stream of income while physically distancing her children from the actual scene of the crime.

Once settled in Ghansoli, she and Rahul lived as a couple. Yet, their domestic life was underpinned by deep paranoia. Sunita understood that modern police investigations rely heavily on mobile tracking. To bypass this, she built a highly complex communication web. She routinely purchased cheap, prepaid SIM cards using forged or third-party documents, cycling through approximately forty cards over the course of the year. She would use a card to coordinate with Rahul, then discard both the SIM and the cheap handset, constantly shifting her digital identity.

In Yadav Nagar, she left behind a carefully cultivated myth. To any neighbor or local vendor who asked about the quiet, hard-working Baliram, she painted a picture of a man undergoing a spiritual crisis, claiming he was seeking solace at the distant Asang Baba Ashram. This story effectively exploited the community's religious respect for spiritual retreats, suppressing any immediate alarm or suspicion about his sudden disappearance.

The Night of the Cleaving

The execution of the murder on the intervening night of August 8 and 9, 2025, was carried out with chilling precision. Sunita had meticulously prepared the ground. Under the pretext of a family visit, she sent her two children to stay at her sister’s house, ensuring there would be no witnesses to the violence planned for that night.

In the quiet, early hours of August 9, while Baliram was fast asleep in their Airoli home, Sunita unlocked the door to let Rahul Prajapati inside. Working quickly and silently, the two lunged at the sleeping man. While one pinned him down, they strangled Baliram, cutting off his ability to scream. To ensure he was dead, they slit his throat with a sharp knife, letting him bleed out onto the bedding.

With the corpse cooling in the small room, the killers faced the challenge of disposal. Yadav Nagar is a densely populated area; dragging a full-sized body out of the house without being seen was nearly impossible. Drawing on Rahul’s familiarity with the isolated, rugged terrains of the nearby hills, they made a brutal decision. Using a heavy, sharp tool, they hacked Baliram’s body into three distinct pieces: the head, the torso, and the legs.

They wrapped each piece in plastic sheets, packed them into gunny bags and bedsheets, and cleaned the immediate bloodstains from the floor. Rahul then loaded the heavy, blood-soaked sacks into the back of his passenger autorickshaw. Under the cover of the pre-dawn darkness, he drove through the empty streets of the Rabale industrial belt, heading toward the Gawli Dev Temple hill. Deep within the dense forest, far off the main trails, they scattered the three sacks at different locations, trusting that the monsoon rains, dense vegetation, and forest scavengers would quickly erase all traces of the crime.

The Rakhi Deception and the Boiling Point

The roots of the murder go back to the months preceding August 2025, within the modest household of Baliram Kushwaha. Baliram, a 50-year-old auto-rickshaw driver, had spent years working long shifts to support his wife, Sunita, and their two children in the Airoli area of Navi Mumbai. Their domestic life began to unravel when Sunita met Rahul Dashrath Prajapati, a 30-year-old autorickshaw driver from Ghansoli.

An intense relationship developed between them. To allow Rahul to visit the house frequently without drawing Baliram’s suspicion, Sunita devised a clever psychological cover. During the annual festival of Raksha Bandhan, which celebrates the protective bond between siblings, Sunita tied a rakhi around Rahul’s wrist, publicly declaring him her adopted brother.

In their close-knit, traditional neighborhood, this gesture carried immense social weight. It completely disarmed Baliram, who welcomed Rahul into his home, treating him as family. This fake sibling bond allowed Rahul to spend hours at the Kushwaha residence, often while Baliram was away driving his rickshaw.

However, the deception eventually collapsed. Over time, Baliram began to notice subtle inconsistencies—late-night phone calls, hushed conversations, and Rahul’s lingering presence even when Sunita was supposedly alone. When Baliram finally discovered the true nature of their relationship, it sparked explosive arguments within the home. He strongly opposed the affair and demanded that Rahul stay away from his family.

Realizing that Baliram would never back down and fearing the social ruin of exposure, Sunita and Rahul reached a dark consensus. They decided that the only way to preserve their relationship was to permanently remove the man who stood in their way.

Case Metrics and Narrative Chronology

To provide a clear, structured overview of this complex case, the following tables detail the timeline of events from the latest judicial developments to the origins of the conspiracy, alongside a comparison of Sunita's deceptive alibis versus the actual facts uncovered by the police.

Timeline of the Kushwaha Case (Latest to Earliest)

Comparison of the Alibi vs. the Reality