Recent cracking of Regent Park beheading reminds KP success in 1954 murder case

Kolkata: The recent cracking of the case relating to discovery of a severed head of a woman in the Tollygunge area brought to light the 1954 landmark 'Bela Rani Dutta' murder case of Tollygunge Police Station where the Kolkata Police was successful in reaching the accused to the gallows for chopping his wife into multiple pieces and discarding her parts in areas spreading across south Kolkata.

According to police archives, in the winter morning of January 30, 1954 a shopkeeper of Kalighat refugee market spotted three bundles of newspaper wrappings, tied with a rope, near a public lavatory beside Keoratala crematorium. Through the bloodstained wrappings, fingers of a human body were sticking out. Tollygunge Police station was informed and thereafter more parts of hands were recovered.

In the afternoon, while the guard of Kalighat Park was doing his daily rounds, was taken aback when he found similar bundles containing a severed head of a woman and parts of her upper body. Barring a few strands, the head didn’t have any hair, nose, ears and lips while skin was peeled off. A foetus was also recovered from one of the bundles, confirming that the victim was a pregnant woman.

The case was handed over to Lalbazar Detective department where it was probed by Inspector Samarendra Nath Ghosh, then OC of the Homicide Division. The body parts literally had to be pieced together and autopsy revealed the injuries inflicted on the neck by a sharp weapon, were “ante-mortem (before death) and homicidal in nature”. Rest of the injuries were “post-mortem (after death)”.

For identification, police even had to get a plastic surgeon. However, the corpse had begun rotting by then. Retaining some samples for forensics, the rest of the body was cremated as no one came forward for identification.

Days had passed without a breakthrough. On February 25, when the investigating officer was returning home he stumbled across the first clue while buying cough syrup from a medical shop within the area from where the body parts were recovered. The shop couldn't provide him with the medicine and said the owner was absent for days. That’s what led police to the accused Birendra Nath Dutta who later during grilling confessed he killed his wife who was pregnant for the second time and that he was maintaining another wife at a different location.

To crack the case, police also had relied on the works of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso.