Delhi: Man held after 40 years on the run in 1986 wife murder case

In a breakthrough in a four-decade-old murder case, the Delhi Police has arrested an 82-year-old man who had allegedly killed his wife in 1986 and been on the run since then, an official said on Thursday.

The accused, Chandra Shekhar Prasad, a native of Bihar’s Nalanda, was apprehended from a factory storeroom in Nangli Poona area of outer north Delhi, where he had been living under a false identity, he said.

The case dates back to October 19, 1986, when Prasad, then 40, allegedly murdered his wife at their Shakarpur residence in east Delhi by crushing her head with bricks over suspicion of an extramarital affair.

“During the incident, he and his accomplices also held a domestic help at gunpoint before fleeing the scene,” he said.

An FIR under sections 302 (murder) and 34 (crime committed with common intention) of the IPC was registered at Shakarpur police station, but the accused evaded arrest and was declared an absconder by a court in 1987.

The case remained unsolved for nearly 40 years due to a lack of leads and the absence of modern investigative tools at the time.

Police said tracing the accused posed significant challenges as there were no digital records, photographs, Aadhaar data or mobile trails from that era, and his age had advanced from around 40 at the time of the crime to about 82 now.

A team of the crime branch reopened the case and began tracking the accused through a mix of human intelligence and technical surveillance.

“Investigators found that his children were settled in Delhi and Bihar, and discreetly monitored suspected mobile numbers linked to the family. Field verification in Nalanda confirmed that Prasad was alive and occasionally visited during family or religious events,” the officer said.

Acting on inputs about one such visit following a bereavement, police mounted surveillance and tracked his movement to Delhi. On April 22, a trap was laid, and the accused was arrested from a factory premises in Alipur.

During interrogation, Prasad confessed to the crime, stating that he frequently quarrelled with his wife over suspicions about her character and killed her in a fit of rage before fleeing.

Police said that during his decades-long escape, he constantly changed locations, living in Bihar, Punjab, Haryana and Delhi. He worked as a rickshaw puller in Punjab’s Patiala and even took shelter at an ashram in Haryana to avoid detection. Further investigation is underway.