Mehrauli murders: 'An overdose of sedatives ensured no fightback'

NEW DELHI: As his neighbours desperately tried to break down the door on Saturday morning, Upendra Shukla sat on a couch inside the house, impassive and uncaring about the blood oozing from the slit on his wrist. Around him, in a grisly picture of family life gone wrong, the 33-year-old science teacher’s wife, daughter and two sons lay slaughtered to death.

Even when the door finally crashed down, Shukla neither uttered a word nor displayed emotions.It was only much later that the cops were able to get some information out of the resident of south Delhi’s Mehrauli. Apparently, sometime before he committed the murders, he had gone and bought two litres of milk, a knife and sleeping pills in preparation for the familicide that he had been planning for three days.
Deepak, whose grocery shop is adjacent to the apartments where Shukla lived on the fourth floor with his family, disclosed that he last saw the man at 4.30pm on Friday after he had returned from his tuition assignments. “Normally, his kids came to buy milk from my shop, but on Friday Upendra himself was here. He bought two litres of milk. I did not notice any signs of stress or disturbance in his demeanour,” said Deepak.
After returning to his house, Shukla first saw off his nephew who was leaving for his village in Bihar. Having dropped him off at the bus-stand, Shukla proceeded to the weekly market where he purchased a kitchen knife. He then stopped to buy a packet of sleeping pills. The initial probe has established that he was suffering from high blood pressure and frequently took the sleeping pills. The investigators also learnt that on Friday night, Shukla took his 45-day-old son from his mother-in-law and fed him the sedative-laced milk.
A graduate in Russian studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Shukla had come to the decision to kill his family members after despairing that his and wife’s health were not going to get better any time soon. According to the cops, over the last three days Shukla had mulled different ways to end his life and those of his wife and kids. He ultimately decided to give them an overdose of sleeping pills to prevent them from fighting him back as he slit their throats.
Family members said that Shukla was earning approximately Rs 65,000 per month giving home tuitions in physics and chemistry to Class IX and X students in Gurugram, Vasant Kunj and Noida, charging each around Rs 1,000 an hour. The family had moved to the fourth floor apartment five years ago.
Shukla came to Delhi a decade ago after completing his schooling from Bihar. He had initially tried to get into a medical college, but dropped the idea and took admission in JNU. A native of Khajuria village in Purnea district, Shukla got married to Archna in 2010. His mother-in-law was staying with the family for some months after coming from Birganj in Bihar to care for the pregnant Archna.