It was a typical evening for a family of five, with twin daughters and a son, at their apartment in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. The family had dinner and went to their rooms to sleep. The mother and six-year-old son slept in one room, while the 11-year-old twin daughters slept in another room.
In the morning, the mother received the shock of her life when the police arrived at the door of their apartment in Kidwai Nagar. While she was sleeping peacefully with her son in one room, her husband killed their daughters by slaughtering them in another room.
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After the children were brutally slaughtered, the man, Shashi Ranjan Mishra, 45, called the police helpline number to report the crime.
“We received a call on 112 at around 4.30 am from the accused himself,” Deputy Commissioner of Police (South) in Kanpur, Dipendra Nath Chaudhary, told HT, adding that the motive was not yet known.
As shocking details of the case emerged, the accused’s wife, Reshma, said the family ate meals together before the father took the children to his room and spoke on the phone for a long time. While watching the CCTV feed from outside, she saw him take his daughter to the bathroom at around 2.30am, then come back and turn off the light. She went to sleep and was not aware of the killings until the morning.
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It all seems to have happened within a couple of hours, as Reshma saw him taking one of the girls to the bathroom at 2:30 am on CCTV, and then the police received the call at 4:30 am.
“Hang him now”
An inconsolable mother, Reshma from Siliguri in Bengal, wants her husband to be hanged for killing his daughters. According to police investigating the case, Mishra became increasingly unstable after his mother died a few months ago. He drank alcohol, took sleeping pills, and suffered from depression, especially after his mother died.
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“He had said earlier that he was going to end his life,” she told police, adding that he had even talked about death with the children.
Police said Mishra admitted to mixing sleeping pills into the children’s food, rendering them unconscious before suffocating them and then slitting their throats with a cleaver he had bought the day before, PTI reported.
PTI reported that Reshma and Mishra got married in 2014, but things became more troubled over the years and they allegedly became increasingly suspicious and accused her of infidelity and installed surveillance cameras around the house. In one of the CCTV footage from her room, she saw Reshma Mishra taking her daughter to the bathroom around 2.30 am, coming back and turning off the light. She went to sleep and did not learn about the murder until the morning.
She was effectively banned from his room, while the girls mostly stayed with him, and he asked his wife on several occasions to leave with their son and let him raise the girls alone.
Mishra has been unemployed for some time now because he quit his job to start a business. Reshma, who previously worked in a beauty salon, was also unemployed.
Police link the incident to possible depression or a psychological condition. It is being investigated whether he is receiving any psychological treatment.
