Manoj Verma killed Beleza Cardozo and robbed valuables worth Rs 1 lakh; he has told the police that he needed the money for his ailing wife, son.The Shivaji Park police have claimed to have solved the murder of housewife Beleza Cardozo, with the arrest of a 26-yearold man from Uttar Pradesh. The police said the accused, identified as Manoj Verma, had done some carpentry work at the victim’s house, which was undergoing renovation.While Verma has confessed to killing Cardozo for money, he has told the police that he wanted to spend it on his ailing wife and new-born baby. Verma was picked up from Basti, 80 km from his hometown.“He had planned to hand over the money, about Rs 1 lakh, to his wife and flee,” said a police officer.Verma was brought to Mumbai on Wednesday and placed under arrest. The Shivaji Park police have booked him under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code.Around 9 am on November 4, the police said, Verma went to Cardozo’s house on the second floor of Louis Court Apartments in Shivaji Park. He told Cardozo that he had come to collect his final payment of Rs 3,000 for the carpentry work he had done at her home.Cardozo, whose husband works in merchant navy and her children are settled in the UK, lived alone in the flat at Louis Court.According to DCP Mahesh Patil, Cardozo asked Verma to sit and offered him water.“He went inside to keep the glass and returned with a spade that was lying in one of the rooms since the house was being renovated. He hit Cardozo on the head with it. As the victim lay profusely bleeding, Verma robbed some of her jewellery and mobile phone.”Patil said Verma had worked at Cardozo’s place and thought that she had kept a lot of money in the house. Since the victim knew him, he decided to rob and kill her.“Verma had hoped to get much more money but could not manage to open the cupboard after its handle broke. When her phone began ringing incessantly, he panicked and fled without attempting to open it,” Patil said.After the murder, Verma was in Mumbai for two days, and even went to his rented home in Dharavi to collect his belongings. But he realised that the police were on the lookout for him. “He then went to a relative’s home in Thane and finally left for his hometown,” said a police officer.The investigators narrowed down their search to Verma after they questioned all the persons who had worked in Cardozo’s flat and found that the carpenter was missing. A raid at Verma’s Dharavi tenement gave them access to his photograph and PAN card which had details about his native place.A three-member team led by API Anil Jadhav left for Uttar Pradesh in search of him.“The team did not go to his home directly to ensure that he was not alerted. They managed to nab him from Basti where he heading home in a public transport vehicle,” an officer said.