In a shocking revelation in the probe into a Telangana man's murder a month after his wedding, police have found that Tejeswar's wife Aishwarya and her lover Tirumal Rao discussed the Raja Raghuvanshi honeymoon killing in Meghalaya and considered making a similar plan to eliminate Tejeswar and keep the cops guessing.

According to Gadwal police chief T Srinivasa Rao, Aishwarya and Tirumal Rao have told them during questioning that they had initially planned to kill Tejeswar in the same manner as Raja Raghuvanshi. The plan was simple: Aishwarya would convince Tejeswar to take her out on a bike. On the way, the hired killers would attack them. Tejeswar would be murdered, and Aishwarya would flee with Tirumal Rao. The cops, they thought, would be confused and chase a murder-cum-kidnapping angle.

This is exactly how the Raja Raghuvanshi case played out, where Raja's body was found and his wife, Sonam, remained missing for days before police eventually unearthed her role in the conspiracy. Aishwarya and Tirumal Rao, however, have said they discussed the plan but later shelved it and considered other options.

Police have also found that 23-year-old Aishwarya got her neighbour Jagan to install a GPS device on her husband's bike so that he could be tracked and murdered when the opportunity arose, the cops have found. A total of eight people, including Aishwarya, Tirumal Rao and her mother Sujatha, have been arrested in the case. 

Tejeshwar's rotten body was found in a field at Panyam in Andhra Pradesh's Nandyal district on June 20, two days after his family in Telangana's Gadwal reported that he was missing. The family suspected his newly-wed wife Aishwarya's involvement in the killing. As police from the two adjoining states got to work, the probe revealed a grisly crime that snuffed out an unsuspecting young man's life.

According to the officials part of the probe, there were as many as five failed attempts on Tejeswar's life, and he survived all, till luck ran out and he ended up dead in a canal.
 

A Mother-Daughter Love Triangle

Cops have found that Aishwarya's mother, Sujatha, worked as a sweeper at a Non-Banking Financial Company. There, she met an officer, Tirumal Rao, and the two started a relationship. Later, when Sujatha went on leave, Aishwarya replaced her. She, too, had a relationship with Rao. The bank officer was married, and police found that he had also planned to get his wife killed.

When Sujatha found that her daughter was involved with Rao, she pressured her to end the relationship and marry Tejeshwar, whom she had known for a while. Aishwarya refused. Sujatha managed to bring her around and reached out to Tejeswar. A wedding date was fixed, but Aishwarya went missing. Then she returned and told Tejeswar that she was incognito because her mother did not have the money to pay dowry. She insisted that she wanted to marry him. Tejeswar's family advised him against this, but he agreed to the May 18 wedding.

The Plan -- And The Murder

Tejeswar's family members have said she was constantly on the phone with Rao, even during her wedding. Her call records revealed that they exchanged over 2,000 phone calls between February and June. Rao, police said, found the killers to eliminate Tejeswar. Three people had approached him for clearing loans, and he told them they would get the loan -- and some more money -- if they completed the hit job.

A police officer showed CCTV footage of Tejeswar, who worked as a land surveyor and dance teacher, getting into a car. "The killers took him in a car on the pretext of surveying a land. He was on the seat beside the driver when they slit his throat and subsequently stabbed him in the stomach," said Gadwal police chief T Srinivasa Rao. The killers, police said, showed the body to Tirumal Rao over the phone and then disposed of it in the canal. "The plan was to bury him in the layout of a land they had gone to survey in Kurnool, but noticing some people there, they dumped it in a canal. But there wasn't enough water in it. We used cell phone signals to track Tejeswar's location. By the time we found the body, it was putrefied. A tattoo on his arm saying 'amma' in Telugu helped us identify the body," said the district police chief.

Escape Plan That Did Not Work

Rao and Aishwarya had hoped that Tejeswar's body would not be found and he would be reported missing. They also had an escape plan. According to reports, Rao had taken a Rs 20-lakh loan and booked tickets for himself and Aishwarya to flee to Ladakh.

Even after Tejeswar was killed, Aishwarya stayed at her in-laws' home, ostensibly to avoid raising suspicion. This did not work. As soon as Tejeswar went missing, his family approached the police and shared their suspicions about Aishwarya and Rao.

As Gadwal cops worked overtime to trace Tejeswar's whereabouts, they got a tip-off from police at Kurnool in the neighbouring Andhra Pradesh that villagers had found a body in an agricultural field. The Telangana cops rushed to the spot and confirmed it was Tejeswar's. Rao's father, a retired cop, allegedly tried to protect his son from the police, but to no avail.