(Her name is being withheld because an Indian court has threatened to jail journalists for revealing any information about her or her family. The court says this is necessary to protect the family’s dignity, though the girl’s name was already given out by police officers and is all over social media.)

After she was killed and her body dumped in a ditch, investigators say two other police officers, both Hindu, destroyed evidence. Before the girl’s dress was turned over to a crime lab, the officers tried to scrub it clean.

But it didn’t work, and investigators said they had “clinching” DNA evidence. They also said that all eight suspects confessed.

Few, if any, Hindus in Rasana accept this. On a recent day, several Hindu elders took me to the temple, a little pink building at the edge of the woods. The floor was cleanly swept concrete, the walls decorated with wrinkled, brightly colored posters of Hindu gods.

“Look,” said Suresh Sharma, a villager who helped Mr. Ram at the temple. “There’s no way the girl could have been locked in here, people coming and going all the time.”

But that in itself seemed hard to believe. Only a few houses use the temple, and many were deserted.