He felt his wife was a threat, so he killed her

The Oshiwara police investigating the murder of Payal Ganatra, 26, now claim that he husband Darshan Shivdasani, an Andheri-based real estate agent, had lured her to her death.

Ganatra had threatened to expose Shivdasani after she discovered that he had married two other unsuspecting women like her. A frightened Shivdasani played on her emotions by promising reconciliation and called her to his sister’s flat in Adarsh Nagar, where he stabbed her to death, the police said.

The motive for the murder came to light after he was arrested from a hospital in Pune after he attempted suicide.

After murdering his wife, Shivdasani left Mumbai, the police said. He was staying in a lodge in Chinchwad in Pune. On Tuesday, he attempted suicide by consuming an overdose of sleeping pills. A police team that had traced his location managed to get in touch with the manager of the lodge and asked him to rush Shivdasani to a hospital. In his suicide note, Shivdasani wrote, “I am not a criminal but now I have become a
criminal.”

“We had tapped his cell phone and were listening to the conversations he was having with others,” senior inspector Kiran Sonone said. “We were on our way to Pune to arrest him, when we realised that he had consumed sleeping pills,” Sonone said. “We got in touch with the hotel staff and his life was saved in the nick of time.”

In his statement given to the police, Shivdasani said that Ganatra, who was his second wife, had learnt about his earlier marriage with one Amruta and also about his third marriage to a woman named Niki. Ganatra, who had met Shivdasani on a matrimonial site, then sent him a divorce notice last month.

“Ganatra and Shivdasani were married a year ago, but were not staying together. After marriage, Ganatra grew suspicious of Shivdasani. She hired a detective to keep a watch on him and learnt about his several marriages,” said Sonone.

She then set out to obtain details about Niki and other women in Shivdasani’s life, if any, to alert them that he was cheating on them. Payal had also lodged a cheating complaint against Shivdasani with the Juhu police in March, the Oshiwara police said.

Shivdasani, who worked with an event management company, met his first wife Amruta on a company project. After divorcing her, he met Ganatra, a divorcee with a seven-year-old son, and Niki on the matrimonial website. He always posed as a “well-to-do bachelor”, the police said.

On April 5, Shivdasani called Ganatra to the Adarsh Nagar flat, which belonged to his sister settled in Dubai, on the pretext of working out a reconciliation, saying he wanted to live with her. He then stabbed her with a knife.

However, Ganatra fought back and Shivdasani’s hand was injured. Shivdasani then locked the flat and fled from Mumbai. Before leaving Mumbai, he had called his other sister settled in Mumbai to confess to the crime.

He also told her that he was going to commit suicide,  the police said.