Mikhail killed Sheena, I was only shielding him, Indrani Mukerjea told Peter in jail
Indrani Mukerjea was in denial after her arrest in August last year on the charge of murdering her daughter, Sheena Bora.
So much so that when Peter Mukerjea met her in jail, the only time he would do so, she reportedly told him: “I have been framed. I didn’t do it. Mikhail did it. I only disposed of the body.” The snatch of conversation occurred at Byculla jail in October and Peter was stunned by the web of lies.
On Sunday evening, Peter’s brother Gautam Mukerjea had an exclusive tete-a-tete with Mumbai Mirror, while sipping Earl Grey tea at a restaurant in the heart of the city. He was accompanied by his twin sister, Shagun Mukerjea. They were both essaying to convey the point that by suspecting Peter’s involvement in the conspiracy, the investigators were barking up the wrong tree.
“There are over 250 witnesses in the case but not one statement indicts Peter. He was as taken aback by these disclosures about Indrani as anyone,” says Gautam. The siblings break their silence to defend Peter, caught in a storm not of his making, they believe.
On the fateful April day in 2012 when Indrani is alleged to have killed Sheena, Peter was in London. Murdering her daughter was the farthest thing from Indrani’s mind, as she was keener to have a “dirty weekend” with her ex-husband, Sanjeev Khanna, who was in town, conversations with the family reveal. Mikhail had gone out with driver Shyamvar Rai and Sheena, and when he returned, Indrani asked him about Sheena’s whereabouts and he told her he had murdered her. Mikhail, who had a substance abuse problem, was under Dr Yusuf Matcheswalla’s psychiatric care, in Pune.
Soon after her arrest, Peter discovered she and Khanna were still lovers. “Pete’s trust has been misused,” says Gautam, a media baron in Goa. “When I met him in court, Pete told me, ‘What pains me most is how Indrani cheated me for 15 years. She could have taken everything, my money, property everything, but why betray me’?” “Vidhie, Rahul and I had gathered at the CBI office in Nariman Point on November 19, as we all wanted to celebrate Pete’s 60th birthday which falls on November 21. As we were preparing to leave, we were told the sleuths needed to arrest him for just one day because they had got orders from higher-ups,” says Shagun.
The family has no clue who these “higherups” are. “Peter was helping the CBI for almost 40 days now. One day in custody seemed liked a ludicrous thing,” a relative said. Indrani was arrested on August 25. She was on her way to donate money to an old-age home — it was Vidhie’s 18th birthday — when the cops brought her back to her Worli residence. Both Peter, who was at the gym, and Vidhie, at college, rushed home.
As she was being bundled into the police jeep, Peter got in, telling her: “Why don’t you call Sheena? I can get her to fly back from Los Angeles tonight,” according to Gautam. “Much later, when I visited Khar police station along with Pete, I was told am quite fortunate to see my brother alive. ‘After Sheena, it would have been Mikhail and then your brother’ I was told,” Gautam says. “Indrani had spread a web of lies. For three years she said Sheena was alive, pretending she was in LA, or married to a diamond merchant,” says Shagun.
For a while, Peter thought it was all a misunderstanding that could be solved by Sheena’s return from the US. It was much later that he understood that Indrani was booked under section 302 of the IPC. “When Peter called his friend (joint commissioner, law and order) Deven Bharti, he was advised to get a lawyer,” says Gautam.
