For the past few months, Karan Dev and Sushmita’s neighbours in Dwarka’s Uttam Nagar had noticed something odd. The 36-year-old worked a late-night shift at a call centre in Gurgaon and would come back home at 4 am. And almost every evening, neighbours would allegedly spot Karan’s cousin, Rahul (25), entering the house at 11 pm and leaving right before he returned. Even when Karan was found dead in his bed on July 13, neighbors claimed to have seen Rahul enter the house earlier that morning.
“We did find it odd but never suspected anything illicit,” said Sharvender Kumar, who lives opposite Karan’s house. “We thought maybe Sushmita might be uncomfortable spending the night alone at home while Karan was at work.”
Sachin, a childhood friend of Karan’s, who also lives close by, said, “These are such delicate matters. If we ever questioned her, she could have turned around and said it was none of our business. She could have asked us why we had a problem with a relative visiting her.”
It would take a murder for Sushmita and Rahul’s affair to come to light.
According to police, Sushmita allegedly laced Karan’s dinner with 12 sleeping pills — and the two later electrocuted him. They would be arrested for the crime.
Karan’s cousin, 25-year-old Rahul (Source: Express Photo)
Plot unveiled in Instagram chats
On the morning of July 13, Sushmita (35) rushed to her in-laws’ house a few metres away, shouting that she couldn’t wake her husband up. Through sobs, she explained to her family that Karan had fallen asleep with his phone’s charging cord wrapped around his hand and had been electrocuted.
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At first, Kunal Dev, Karan’s younger brother, found this weird. “… a charging cord won’t electrocute me if I plug it in and put it in my mouth,” he said.
“But I was in shock at my brother’s sudden death… my only thought at that moment was getting him to the hospital.”
Karan was rushed to a nearby private hospital, where the doctors pointed out some major red flags to Kunal. “The doctors immediately told me that something was off. There was foam coming out from his mouth and he had an injury on his chest, apart from the one on his hand… they told us to get a post-mortem examination done as soon as possible,” said Kunal.
As Karan’s body was shifted to Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital, Sushmita allegedly began to plead with Kunal to not go through with the autopsy. “She told me that she and Karan had discussed before that should anything happen to him, he wished not to have his body examined,” Kunal scoffed.
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Rahul, too, echoed Sushmita’s pleas, asking the family to respect Karan’s wishes.
“It was a total farce,” said Kunal bitterly. “I had barely even come to terms that my brother was dead. I had spoken to him just a day ago… and these people couldn’t stop telling me what to do.”
Kunal came back home from the hospital exhausted. As he sat under a tent outside his house with the rest of the mourners, a neighbour handed him Rahul’s phone.
“In the rush to get Karan to the hospital, both Rahul and I had left our phones behind… our community is tight-knit, so we often leave our things behind at neighbours’ houses while running errands. It was Rahul’s bad luck that someone saw me and thought to hand over his phone to me,” said Kunal.
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Needing to make a call and hoping to find his own phone, Kunal unlocked Rahul’s device — and what he saw made his blood run cold. An Instagram chat between Rahul and Sushmita was open on the phone.
The more Kunal read, the sicker he felt. There, as the words swam before his eyes, was the intricate, chilling exchange detailing how the two had allegedly planned to kill his brother.
The more recent messages showed a purported conversation between the two from the night before — they were deciding their next steps as Karan lay unconscious, drugged on almost a dozen sleeping pills.
“Let’s wait till 4 (am),” Sushmita had texted.
“Won’t that be too late?” Rahul asked.
“I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do,” she wrote.
“What do I say? Is he still sleeping?”
“Yes,” responded Sushmita.
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“Feed him more pills, all of them, all at once,” urged Rahul.
At one point, Sushmita messaged, “Can you check how long it takes to die on sleeping pills? It’s been three hours since he’s eaten dinner. He hasn’t vomited or anything.”
A few texts later, Rahul impatiently writes, “Yaar, if you can’t decide what to do, just electrocute him.”
“Are you asking me to electrocute him?” she asked, then wrote, “I thought the pills alone would get the job done.”
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The messages continued — Sushmita struggling to get Karan’s mouth open to administer more pills, Rahul directing her step by step. Eventually, Rahul seemed to reach his limit. “Let’s just finalise the electrocution if he’s still breathing,” he allegedly wrote.
The two ended the conversation when Rahul last texted her around 6 am to open the door and let him in.
They then allegedly stripped an extension cord to expose the live wire, wrapped it around Karan’s hand and touched it to his chest — electrocuting him. Sushmita would wait a few more hours before rushing to her in-laws’ house.
Kunal immediately rushed to the police with the evidence.
The police registered a case on charges of murder and criminal conspiracy.
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“While we were waiting for the post-mortem report, the victim’s brother discovered some Instagram chats, which contained serious incriminating content. The brother informed the police, and a written complaint was filed. Based on the complaint, we registered a case on charges of murder and criminal conspiracy,” DCP (Dwarka) Ankit Singh had said.
According to the police, the two had started an affair one-and-a-half years ago. “Sushmita confided in Rahul about her husband’s violent behaviour… she had been contemplating leaving him (Karan) for the past year,” a police officer had told The Indian Express earlier.
Karan had allegedly slapped her last year in October, just a day before Karva Chauth, the officer had said.
Three months ago, Sushmita allegedly told Rahul that Karan’s death was the only way out for her. Since then, the police officer said, the two had been allegedly plotting to kill the husband and make it look like an accident.
Days after the arrests, life had returned to a strange sense of normalcy in the Dev household. On Monday, as some of Kunal’s friends gathered at the house to figure out the logistics of a sudden death — informing Karan’s workplace, getting the insurance details right, talking to the lawyers — a pair of large eyes followed the commotion around the house.
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Karan’s six-year-old son, now left behind without either of his parents, seemed not to understand why the house had been in such a state of commotion for the last few days.
“He knows that his father has left to meet God,” said Kunal. “We don’t know how to tell him that his mother killed his father… kids these days are sharp. I think he might have seen the news online,” he said.
The boy, however, seemed pleased with all the attention being lavished upon him. He spotted a pair of bright turquoise and orange shoes one of the guests had left outside the room and cried out, “Chacha, buy me those shoes!”
Kunal smiled and took the boy in his lap, promising he’d get him whatever his heart wished for.
