Honeymoon, Engagement, Marriage: Inside India's Spousal Murder Cases of 2025-26
A bride who allegedly hired contract killers for her own honeymoon. A fiancée accused of tearing up her partner's passport, failing once with a "there's a snake" excuse, then succeeding four days later — on her own birthday. A wife and her lover accused of dismembering her husband and sealing him in a cement drum, with their daughter born during the trial. A model found dead at her marital home five months into a marriage, with injuries no one could explain. This is a verified, source-by-source account of the real cases — what is established fact, what remains an allegation, and what India's courts have actually decided, updated to the most recent reporting available.
Why These Cases, Why Now
In the space of about fifteen months, a string of Indian cases involving a spouse or fiancé(e) dying in suspicious circumstances drew national coverage: a honeymoon in Meghalaya that ended in a gorge, a body dismembered and sealed in cement in a Meerut house, a trek at a fort near Pune that police say was the second attempt on a young man's life carried out during his fiancée's own birthday celebration, and a young model found dead at her marital home in Bhopal five months after her wedding. Each became a byword almost overnight. Each also got compressed, in the retelling, into something simpler and more dramatic than what police, chargesheets, and courts have actually established — and each has moved substantially since it first broke. This piece tracks all four to the most recent verified reporting, as of June 26, 2026.
Three of these cases (Meghalaya, Meerut, Lohagad) involve an alleged lover acting alongside a spouse or fiancée; the fourth (Twisha Sharma) is a dowry-harassment case under CBI investigation with no alleged third-party lover, included here because it belongs to the same news cycle and illustrates a different, more statistically common pattern of marital violence in India. As of this update: the Meerut trial is in its final stages; the Meghalaya High Court is still weighing whether to overturn Sonam Raghuvanshi's bail; the Lohagad Fort case is barely a week old; and the Twisha Sharma case remains an active CBI probe with both accused in judicial custody. None has reached a final verdict.
The Verified Cases
Each case below is built from police statements, chargesheet reporting, and named news sources. Where police allegations and proven facts diverge, that's noted explicitly — "allegedly" and "police say" are doing real work in this section, not decoration.
Raja Raghuvanshi, 29, and Sonam Raghuvanshi, 25, married in Indore on May 11, 2025, and left for a honeymoon in Meghalaya around May 20-21. They trekked down roughly 3,000 steps to the double-decker living-root bridges at Nongriat village near Cherrapunji (Sohra), staying overnight. The next morning they checked out and began heading back. Sonam's last traceable phone call, to her mother, was around 1:43 PM on May 23; both phones went dark afterward, and their rented scooter was later found abandoned near Sohrarim. Their families filed a missing-persons report the same day.
On June 2, a National Disaster Response Force drone located Raja's badly decomposed body in a gorge beneath the Wei Sawdong Falls; his brother identified him by a tattoo. Investigators recovered a bloodstained weapon, a woman's shirt, a smartwatch, and phone fragments near the site, along with a black raincoat found in a nearby village. Sonam herself went missing for roughly two weeks. On June 8, she surrendered at the Nandganj police station in Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh; police took her into custody the next day, and she reportedly confessed to her role in the murder on June 11.
Police allege that Sonam had been in a relationship with a man named Raj Singh Kushwaha — described in some reports as an accountant connected to her family's business — since before her marriage to Raja, and that the two conspired with hired men to kill him during the honeymoon, with Raja allegedly killed in Sonam's presence by three other accused: Akash Singh Rajput, Vishal Singh Chauhan, and Anand Kurmi. Eight people in total were arrested. A 790-page chargesheet was filed on September 6, 2025, before the Judicial Magistrate First Class court in Sohra, naming Sonam and the four men above as primary accused under BNS Sections 103(1) (murder), 238(a) (causing disappearance of evidence), and 61(2) (criminal conspiracy). The chargesheet reportedly details three separate failed attempts on Raja's life before the one that succeeded. Murder charges were subsequently framed by an additional district judge. Sonam has pleaded not guilty and is contesting the case; three of the other accused were granted bail earlier in the proceedings, while Kushwaha's bail plea has been rejected.
Additional reporting has surfaced details that sharpen the timeline further: police say Sonam posted from Raja's phone or social accounts after the murder to delay suspicion, and that she briefly returned toward Indore-area contact with Kushwaha before her eventual disappearance and surrender. These specifics come from police and chargesheet-based reporting rather than court findings, and should be read as allegations under an unresolved case.
On the night of March 4, 2025, Saurabh Rajput, a former Merchant Navy officer, was killed at his rented home in the Indiranagar area of Meerut. He and his wife, Muskan Rastogi, had a love marriage and a daughter born in 2019; reports describe growing financial and marital strain in the relationship. Police allege Muskan, then 28, and a man identified as her partner, Sahil Shukla, drugged Saurabh before killing him, then dismembered his body and sealed the remains inside a blue plastic drum filled with cement. The two reportedly went out for a walk afterward to avoid suspicion, then left for Kasol in Himachal Pradesh.
The case surfaced publicly around March 17, after Muskan reportedly confessed to her own family, who alerted police; the matter was registered at Brahmpuri police station. Muskan and Sahil were arrested on March 18 and sent to judicial custody the following day, where they have remained since. A chargesheet — reported at roughly 1,000 pages (some accounts cite up to 1,400) and citing around 34 witnesses — was filed in May 2025 before Additional Civil Judge (Senior Division) Anuj Kumar Thakur, charging both under BNS Sections 103(1) (murder) and 238(a) (causing disappearance of evidence). The trial entered its evidence stage through 2025, with statements from roughly 22 witnesses recorded; for security reasons, following an earlier crowd incident, the accused were mostly produced in court virtually.
In November 2025, while still in custody, Muskan gave birth to a daughter at Lala Lajpat Rai Memorial Medical College and named her Radha; Saurabh's family has publicly demanded a DNA test. On April 21, 2026 — only the second physical (non-virtual) court production since the case began, and roughly thirteen months after the killing — Muskan and Sahil were brought before the District & Sessions Court in person, with Muskan carrying her then six-month-old daughter. It was the first time the two had been brought face-to-face in court since their arrest. The next day, both recorded statements under Section 313 CrPC: Muskan reportedly denied nearly all of the prosecution's specific claims against her — that she bought the knife, the drum, the cement, or any sedative — while still admitting she travelled to Kasol with Sahil after the killing. Sahil indicated he intends to call defence witnesses; Muskan said she does not. As of mid-June 2026, the trial remains before the District & Sessions Court, Meerut, moving toward defence evidence and final arguments, with no verdict yet delivered.
Muskan's own parents have publicly distanced themselves from her — her father has said she should face the death penalty, and she is reportedly being represented by a government-appointed defence counsel because her family declined to fund a private one. Saurabh's mother, present at the April 21 hearing, was reported in tears demanding the death penalty for both accused.
Ketan Vishal Agarwal, 26, a director in his family's Pune-based real estate business, died after falling into a valley while at Lohagad Fort, a hill fort in Maharashtra's Sahyadri range, on June 18, 2026. He and his fiancée, Siya Goyal, 19 (also reported as 20), had gotten engaged in February, with a lavish wedding already planned for November — a venue booked in Udaipur at a reported cost of around ₹3 crore, with total wedding spending expected to reach roughly ₹5 crore. Siya called police herself, saying Ketan had slipped and fallen while taking photographs. Police initially treated it as accidental, given Ketan was described as an experienced trekker — but his family grew suspicious specifically because Siya had insisted on celebrating her own birthday at Lohagad that day, overriding Ketan's original plan for a resort party, and pushed for the investigation to continue.
According to Pune Rural Police SP Sandeep Singh Gill, the deeper investigation uncovered a relationship between Siya and a man named Chetan Chaudhary, who she had reportedly known for about a year (some reports trace it to a Diwali gathering); the two are alleged to have exchanged roughly 2,000 phone calls since then and to have met at a café to discuss the plan. Investigators allege Siya did not want to go through with the marriage but, rather than calling it off, conspired with Chaudhary to kill Ketan instead — reportedly because she wanted to continue her relationship with Chaudhary without forcing an open break with her family over the engagement.
Police have laid out a more specific sequence of events than initial reports suggested. On May 31, Ketan and Siya visited Lohagad together; investigators believe this is when Siya first considered killing him, after seeing him sitting near the cliff edge. In early June, Siya, Ketan, and two others were due to fly to Bali for a pre-wedding photo shoot; the trip was aborted on June 6 after Ketan's passport went missing at a Mumbai airport. Police allege Siya herself tore up the passport and discarded it in a hotel bathroom — a detail that drew suspicion partly because cash in the same bag was left untouched. After the Bali trip collapsed, the couple went to Lohagad instead; according to Ketan's father, Siya pushed Ketan there on June 14, but he managed to grab hold of a tree, after which Siya told him she had spotted a snake and claimed she had been trying to save him. Ketan, his father said, "didn't realise for a second that his fiancée's intentions were evil."
Four days later, on June 18 — Siya's birthday — the couple returned to Lohagad at her insistence, reportedly after she video-called Ketan's mother to help convince him to agree to celebrate there instead of at the resort he had booked. Chaudhary arrived separately on a two-wheeler. Police allege that once the group reached a secluded part of the fort, Chaudhary and Siya struck Ketan with an object before pushing him from the edge. Investigators say a man in a hoodie — conspicuous on a 33°C day — caught on nearby CCTV footage helped lead them to Chaudhary. Both Siya and Chetan were arrested, have been charged with murder and criminal conspiracy, and reportedly confessed during interrogation. As of June 26, 2026, both remain in police custody, extended to June 29, with the investigation ongoing and no chargesheet yet filed.
Because this case is so recent, expect details to keep shifting: police custody runs only through June 29, no chargesheet has been filed, and several of the more granular claims above (exact call counts, the precise wording of the alleged conspiracy, the full timeline of the May 31 and June 14 incidents) currently rest on police statements to reporters rather than tested court evidence.
This case differs from the three above in an important way: it is not, on current evidence, framed around an extramarital affair. It belongs here because it is the other major spousal-death case dominating the same news cycle, and because it shows a different — arguably more common — pattern: alleged dowry harassment inside a marriage, rather than a lover-driven conspiracy. Twisha Sharma, 32, a former Miss Pune titleholder and model-actor, married Samarth Singh, a Bhopal resident, in December 2025. Five months later, on May 12, 2026, she was found dead — hanging — at their matrimonial home in Bhopal.
Her family — including her brother, Major Harshit Sharma, and sister-in-law Captain Dr. Rashi Abrol, both serving in the Indian Armed Forces — alleged she had been subjected to sustained dowry harassment by Samarth and his mother, Giribala Singh, a retired Bhopal district judge. The case escalated quickly: Samarth reportedly fled after Twisha's death and was arrested in Jabalpur roughly ten days later. Madhya Pradesh's state government recommended a CBI probe, and the Supreme Court of India took suo motu cognizance of the case, citing concern that the accused's connection to the judiciary (Giribala's background as a judge) might affect a fair investigation, and directed the CBI to take over from Madhya Pradesh Police.
The CBI's filings have alleged a dowry demand of ₹2 lakh during the wedding's vidai ceremony, complaints that the dowry given was "not up to their standard," and — more gravely — that Twisha was forced into an abortion after a claim was raised that the pregnancy was not her husband's. A first post-mortem at AIIMS Bhopal recorded the cause of death as antemortem hanging by ligature, but also noted multiple injuries on her body, including at the wrist and elbow, that her in-laws reportedly could not explain; a second post-mortem was later conducted on May 25. The CBI has said some of those injuries appeared not to have occurred while her body was being taken down, and that medical findings suggested they were sustained before death.
The Psychology Behind These Killings
A caution before anything else: nobody outside a courtroom, with access to a full investigative file and (where relevant) a forensic psychiatric evaluation, can responsibly diagnose what was happening inside Sonam Raghuvanshi's, Muskan Rastogi's, or Siya Goyal's mind. This section does not attempt that. What it can do is set these cases against published criminology and forensic psychiatry research on intimate-partner homicide generally — research built on hundreds of cases, not three — and note where these cases do or don't fit recognized patterns.
Forensic psychiatric literature on intimate-partner homicide draws a sharp line between reactive killings — sudden, often alcohol-fuelled violence during a confrontation — and premeditated ones, where the perpetrator plans, rehearses, and sometimes fails before succeeding. A widely cited typology review in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law found that across studied samples of male intimate-partner-homicide offenders, the large majority of cases were reactive or "undercontrolled," with only a minority showing clear premeditation. That makes the cases catalogued here — three documented attempts in the Meghalaya case, two in Lohagad, monthslong preparation in Meerut (sedatives obtained in advance, a knife purchased ahead of time) — statistically unusual within the broader literature, not the norm even for partner killings. Indian courts treat this distinction as central: premeditation is one of the clearest aggravating factors weighed at sentencing, precisely because it signals the killing was a chosen course of action rather than a loss of control.
A South African forensic-psychiatric study of people referred for evaluation after an intimate-partner-homicide charge found that infidelity, separation, and jealousy were among the most commonly cited motives, alongside a documented history of prior violence in the relationship. The same study found that most such defendants — particularly male, employed, and more educated defendants — were found both fit to stand trial and criminally responsible, meaning courts did not find a clinical mental illness that diminished responsibility. That detail cuts against a common assumption in true-crime coverage that a perpetrator capable of this kind of planning "must" be diagnosably disordered; the research instead suggests calculated self-interest — protecting money, status, or a second relationship from the cost of an open separation — is a more common driver than mental illness.
The elaborate cover stories in these cases — cement and a sealed drum in Meerut, a remote gorge and a faked theft narrative in Meghalaya, a snake excuse and a grieving Instagram post in Lohagad — are not unusual for premeditated intimate-partner homicide specifically. Forensic literature on post-offense behavior in these cases consistently finds that perpetrators who planned the killing also tend to plan its cover story, because the same psychological process — calculating costs and consequences — that produced the original plan continues afterward. This is different from a sudden, reactive killing, where post-offense behavior is often disorganized or immediately reported. Investigators in all three lover-involved cases here have pointed to this same logic: the sophistication of the cover story was, ironically, one of the things that eventually drew suspicion.
None of this licenses confident claims about what any specific accused person was thinking. It does mean that when these cases get described in viral coverage as inexplicable, sudden eruptions of passion, that framing is usually wrong on the research — what the pattern actually shows, where proven, is closer to slow-burn calculation than sudden loss of control.
Why No Death Penalty, Why Bail, Why So Slow
Strip away the speculation and one fact stands out: of the cases above, not one has reached a verdict. That is not unusual for India's criminal courts — it is close to the norm. But "the system is slow" isn't a satisfying answer on its own, so this section breaks down the four things people ask about most: why courts hold back on death sentences, why bail keeps getting granted in such serious cases, why forensic and police work takes so long, and why no dedicated law exists for cases like these.
India hasn't abolished capital punishment, but the Supreme Court's 1980 ruling in Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab restricts it to the "rarest of rare" cases — and that phrase is not just rhetoric, it's a binding sentencing framework. The Court held that death can only be imposed when life imprisonment is "unquestionably foreclosed," meaning a judge must find that no other sentence could possibly fit the crime, after weighing aggravating factors (premeditation, brutality, vulnerability of the victim) against mitigating ones (the accused's age, background, mental state, capacity for reform, absence of prior criminal history). Machhi Singh v. State of Punjab (1983) added that the crime must "shock the collective conscience" of society to qualify. This is a deliberately high bar, set precisely so capital punishment isn't handed out routinely even in brutal murder cases — research from Project 39A at National Law University, Delhi, examining capital sentencing across Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra trial courts between 2000 and 2015, found significant inconsistency in how judges apply the standard, which if anything makes courts more cautious about reaching for it, not less.
None of the cases catalogued above have reached the sentencing stage yet, so no court has had occasion to rule on whether they qualify as "rarest of rare." Family members of victims in more than one case have publicly demanded death sentences — that is a normal reaction, but it is not how Indian sentencing law works. A trial court must first convict, and only then can it weigh whether the "rarest of rare" threshold is met; appeals to the High Court and Supreme Court, plus a mandatory mercy-petition process if a death sentence is upheld, typically add years even after a death sentence is handed down.
Bail decisions in India turn on procedure as much as on the gravity of the underlying charge — which is exactly what the Meghalaya case illustrates. Indian criminal procedure requires that an arrested person be clearly informed of the specific grounds and legal section under which they are held; this isn't a formality, it's tied to the constitutional right against arbitrary detention. When police paperwork is inconsistent or omits the actual murder section, as the Shillong court found in Sonam Raghuvanshi's case, a court can find that the defect alone caused "prejudice" to the accused's defence — independent of how strong the underlying evidence against them is. Bail orders like this aren't rulings on guilt; they're rulings that the state didn't follow its own arrest procedure correctly, and Indian courts have repeatedly held that procedural compliance cannot be skipped just because a charge is severe. It cuts both ways, though — the same legal system that granted Sonam bail on a paperwork defect also saw the Madhya Pradesh High Court cancel Giribala Singh's anticipatory bail in the Twisha Sharma case once the CBI presented specific allegations of evidence tampering, showing that bail orders are reversible when the state makes its case properly on appeal.
This part has a concrete, well-documented answer, and it isn't unique to these cases. India's forensic science laboratories are structurally overloaded: a 2021 review (cited in the India Justice Report and forensic-policy literature) found that caseloads in disciplines like DNA analysis, toxicology, and document examination run at four to five times sanctioned capacity even after past capacity revisions. A Project 39A survey of 30 forensic labs nationally found that 40% of sanctioned scientific posts were vacant, with two in three of those vacancies in core scientific roles — the people who actually run the tests. Labs default to contractual hires to fill the gap, which research links to weaker supervision and slower throughput. None of the cases above were waiting on exotic forensic work — toxicology in Meerut, DNA/identity confirmation in Meghalaya — but even routine analysis competes for space in a system already running far past capacity.
The scale of the backlog: Forensic workload in core disciplines runs at 4-5× sanctioned lab capacity nationally. Roughly 40% of sanctioned scientific posts at India's forensic labs are vacant. India's new criminal codes (BNSS) now make a forensic expert's crime-scene visit mandatory for any offence carrying 7+ years' punishment — which include all the cases discussed here — meaning forensic demand is set to rise further as the system already struggles to keep pace.
This backlog has a second-order effect worth naming plainly: the same delay that can keep a guilty person out of prison longer can also keep an innocent one locked up awaiting a report that would clear them. According to the India Justice Report 2025, 76% of all prisoners in India are undertrials — people not yet convicted of anything — a figure projected to keep rising. A pending forensic report is frequently the difference between a chargesheet being filed on time (keeping an accused in custody) or a bail application succeeding by default because the state couldn't complete its case within statutory deadlines. Slow forensics doesn't reliably favor either victims or the accused; it just adds years to outcomes on both sides.
India's substantive criminal law — murder, conspiracy, evidence destruction — already criminalizes everything alleged in these cases; what's genuinely missing is a framework for catching the build-up before it turns fatal. There is no dedicated statute that treats a spouse or fiancé(e) raising fears of an unwanted marriage, or a pattern of unexplained "accidents," as a flag requiring formal protective intervention the way some countries' domestic-violence laws do. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, is civil in nature and offers interim protection orders, but its evidentiary weight inside a later criminal trial is inconsistent across states. The dowry death provision (Section 304B, now restructured under the BNS) only applies within seven years of marriage and only where dowry harassment specifically is shown — it wouldn't, for instance, cover an unmarried engagement like Lohagad. The recent shift from the IPC/CrPC to the BNS/BNSS (2023-24) is itself still being absorbed by courts and police, which adds short-term procedural friction even where the new code's substance is sound — exactly the kind of cross-referencing seen in the Meghalaya bail order, where confusion between old and new section numbers became the basis for relief.
Bail and Procedure
The Meghalaya bail order shows how a single documentation lapse — wording in an arrest-grounds form, missed across her first three bail attempts before succeeding on the fourth — can outweigh the gravity of a murder charge at the bail stage.
Custody Without Conviction
Muskan Rastogi and Sahil Shukla have been in judicial custody since March 2025 — long enough for Muskan to give birth in custody that November — with no trial verdict reached by mid-2026, despite a filed chargesheet and framed charges.
Long Chargesheets, Slow Trials
Both the Meerut (around 1,000 pages, ~34 witnesses) and Meghalaya (790 pages, five primary accused) chargesheets reflect extensive forensic and digital evidence-gathering — but length does not translate into trial speed.
High-Profile ≠ Fast-Tracked
None of these nationally covered cases have been formally fast-tracked to a verdict faster than India's broader murder-trial timeline, which the NCRB's own 2023 figures put at well under a 10% conviction rate relative to the total murder caseload moving through trial in a given year.
It's worth being precise about that last figure, since it's easy to misstate: the 7,181 convictions out of 2,72,198 pending trials in 2023 does not mean 97% of murder defendants are acquitted — most of those cases were still pending at year's end, not concluded. The murder conviction rate calculated specifically among cases where trial had concluded was 37.7% in 2023. The more telling number is the sheer volume sitting in the pipeline at any given time, which is what produces the years-long waits seen in the Meerut and Meghalaya cases.
What the National Data Actually Shows
NCRB does not publish a category for "infidelity murder" or "spousal murder" as such — the closest official categories are murder generally, dowry death, and cruelty by husband or relatives. Here is what the most recent published data actually says.
National Crime Records Bureau — Selected Figures
| Metric | Figure | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Total cognizable crimes registered nationwide | 58.9 lakh (down from 62.4 lakh in 2023) | 2024 |
| National murder rate (per 100,000 population) | 2.0 | 2023 |
| Murders under trial in courts | 2,72,198 cases; 7,181 convictions that year | 2023 |
| Overall murder conviction rate (trials concluded) | 37.7% | 2023 |
| Dowry death cases registered nationwide | 5,737 | 2024 |
| Cases of cruelty by husband or his relatives | 1,20,227 (42.3% of all crimes against women that year) | 2024 |
| Total crimes against women | 4,41,534 | 2024 |
Source: National Crime Records Bureau "Crime in India" reports, as cited in NCRB-sourced reporting from The Print and aggregated figures via Wikipedia's "Crime in India" entry. These are the most recent published national figures available; NCRB's full 2024 report had not released every category by the time of writing.
Patterns Worth Naming Carefully
These four cases are not a statistical sample — drawing a confident national "profile of the perpetrator" from them would be exactly the kind of overreach this piece is trying to avoid. But a few things are visible across the cases as reported, and are worth stating modestly rather than dressed up as data science.
A lover, not solo action
In three of the four cases — Meghalaya, Meerut, Lohagad — the accused spouse or fiancée is alleged to have acted with a romantic partner outside the relationship. In Meghalaya, hired men are alleged to have delivered the fatal act; in Lohagad, police allege Siya herself, alongside Chaudhary, struck and pushed Ketan directly — a more hands-on allegation than the Meghalaya case. The Twisha Sharma case has no alleged third-party lover; it is a dowry-harassment case implicating the husband and mother-in-law directly.
Repeated, documented attempts
Both Meghalaya (three failed attempts per the chargesheet) and Lohagad (a failed push on June 14, four days before the fatal one on June 18, plus a possible earlier point of intent on May 31) involve more than one alleged attempt — undercutting any framing of these as single impulsive acts.
Evidence-destruction and cover stories
Both Meerut and Meghalaya involve a deliberate attempt to conceal the body or evidence — cement and a sealed drum in one case, a remote gorge and missing jewellery in the other, separately charged under BNS Section 238(a). Lohagad instead involved an elaborate cover story (a self-reported "accident," a snake excuse, a grieving Instagram post) rather than physical concealment.
Bail outcomes diverge from public assumption
Sonam Raghuvanshi's bail after roughly ten months in custody surprised much of the public commentary built around her case, which had largely assumed continued detention. It is a useful corrective against assuming a case's outcome from its initial coverage.
What this piece deliberately avoids doing is assigning a single shared "motive" — infidelity, forced marriage, financial gain, dowry, or otherwise — across all four cases as if they were variations on one script. The Lohagad case, as police have described it, centers on an unwanted arranged engagement; the Meghalaya case centers on an alleged extramarital relationship and contract killing; the Meerut case centers on a wife's alleged affair and a particularly gruesome method of concealment; the Twisha Sharma case centers on alleged dowry harassment within an existing marriage, with no third-party lover alleged at all. Treating these as one undifferentiated "infidelity murder epidemic" — as some viral framing has — flattens real differences between cases that matter both legally and for understanding what's actually happening.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's Actually Known, and What Isn't
Four cases — Meghalaya, Meerut, Lohagad, and the Twisha Sharma case — became national shorthand for a supposed epidemic almost as soon as they broke. The underlying facts, when checked against police statements, chargesheet reporting, and court orders, are serious enough on their own terms: a husband's body in a gorge after three failed attempts, a husband's remains in a cement drum with his daughter born to his accused wife mid-trial, a fiancé pushed from a fort on his own fiancée's birthday after a failed attempt four days earlier, a young woman found dead at her marital home five months into a marriage with unexplained injuries on her body. None of that needs invented statistics to be alarming. It needs accurate, regularly updated reporting, which is harder to produce than a single dramatic round number, but is the only version of this story that holds up under scrutiny.
What can be said honestly: India's murder trial system is slow, by its own published numbers. Procedural defects can and do produce bail in serious cases, even after multiple failed bail attempts — and can just as easily be reversed on appeal, as the cancellation of Giribala Singh's anticipatory bail shows. None of these four cases have reached a verdict — Meerut is closest, heading toward final arguments; Meghalaya is waiting on a single reserved High Court judgment; Lohagad is barely a week old and still entirely in the custody-and-investigation phase; the Twisha Sharma case remains an active CBI probe with custody extended into late June. The language used to describe these cases — "infidelity epidemic," "317 dead," "honeymoon murders" as a genre — often outruns what investigators have actually proven in court. This piece was last updated June 26, 2026, and will be revised again as the Meghalaya High Court rules on the state's bail appeal, as the Meerut trial moves to final arguments, as the Lohagad investigation produces a chargesheet, and as the CBI's probe into the Twisha Sharma case develops.