NEW DELHI: The

of

Tiwari was cracked with the help of a questionnaire that police prepared based on the inconsistencies in the first statement given by his wife,

. She kept on changing the version of events and aroused suspicions.

After the Crime Branch took over the case, they questioned the family members, including Tiwari’s stepbrother Siddharth and mother Ujjwala. Siddharth, it was discovered, stayed in the rear on the ground floor with limited access to the portion used by Tiwari. The probe thus narrowed down to Shukla and the two household helps.

During initial questioning, Shukla claimed Tiwari’s death was to due to a heart attack and cited his medical history. However, she could not explain why his nose was bleeding. Teams led by inspectors Abhinendra Jain and Mukesh Antil were alert to Shukla’s behaviour and activities during this time, while two women cops made sure she never ventured out of sight at any point during the day.

The first lie that the Crime Branch nailed was Shukla claiming that she and Tiwari had talked till 2.30am. The post-mortem report indicated that the death occurred around 1am (two hours after his meal) and Shukla was caught on CCTV footage going to the room at 12.45am.

Then small things like her deleting chats on the phone fuelled police’s suspicions. When they confronted her with the inconsistencies in her statement, she did admit being near Tiwari’s room at the time of the incident, but it was only when the autopsy details about the injury marks on Tiwari’s body were placed before her that she confessed to strangling and smothering him.

Shukla apparently told the investigators that she was unhappy at the relationship between her husband and a woman relative and said that during his stay at Kotdwar recently, her husband angered her by not calling her. She had earlier complained about his behaviour to his mother, but she hadn’t paid it much attention.

She claimed she decided to eliminate Tiwari on April 15, when she noticed the woman relative in her husband’s Honda City car on his return from Kotdwar. After the murder, Shukla returned to her room, but checked the body every few hours. She also thought up the story of having watched a crime serial on TV till early morning.