This is one of the very depressing murder of a mother by her 23-year-old daughter Rimple Jain in Mumbai. On December 27, there was a dispute between Rimple and her mother. The mother was pushed hard to death out of anger. After killing Veena, Rimple wanted to dispose of the body. She tried to dissolve the body parts using phenyl and acid, but when it didn’t work as fast as she expected it to, she stopped trying it and kept other body parts in the cupboard, packing them in a polythene bag. Rimple and her mother, Veena, lived in the Ibrahim Kasim Chawl in Lalbaug. The bustling 100-year-old chawl is home to scores of families and is also located right on the main road.

She first separated her mother’s hands from the body, after which she chopped off the lower legs and then the thighs. Subsequently, she severed her head and stuffed the torso into a gunny sack, which was placed inside the cupboard that it was recovered from. She would douse the entire house with room fresheners and perfume every day to keep the stench at bay.

Rimple, however, had spent all her money on the cutting machine and started getting food on credit from the Shri Sai Fast Food Centre on the ground floor of the chawl. The eatery manager, Umesh Khavare, is now a key witness in the case, and the police have recovered text messages he exchanged with Rimple. Khavare has told the police that Rimple claimed to have spent all her money on sending Veena to Kanpur for treatment after her fall. As the days passed, Rimple even made Khavare recharge her mobile phone. From January to March 10, Rimple racked up pending dues of Rs 2,006.

She even lied to her boyfriend, who worked as a manager at a Chinese restaurant in her building. She told him that her house was emitting a foul smell due to her bathroom being choked up. She didn’t allow anyone in the house, especially after the chopping of the body. She told her boyfriend that her mother had gone to Rajasthan with her brother. She, however, told the sandwich stall owner that her mother had died and the body had been taken away for last rites.

The constant milling around of her neighbors, as well as her increasing fear of getting caught, kept matricide accused Rimple Jain confined to her house for four months, even as the stench of the rotting, dismembered corpse grew stronger with each passing day. Rimple was getting increasingly paranoid as some of her relatives lived in the same locality and could come visit at any time. In fact, this was exactly how the crime was discovered in the first place: when her cousin visited her, smelled a rat due to her behavior, and informed the cops.

Veena’s prolonged absence had started raising their suspicions as well. To further keep the impression of normalcy alive, Rimple started strolling up and down the common passage outside her house with her phone stuck to her ear every evening, pretending to talk to her mother on the phone. There are always people present in and around the chawl until 2 am, and the tea stall outside the chawl opens up for business at 4 am. Hence, Rimple was unable to find a suitable time to dispose of the corpse, as she feared that she would be spotted and caught.

Her neighbors had already started becoming suspicious after two staffers of a restaurant outside the chawl took Veena to her house following her fall on the morning of December 27, 2022. The staffers had offered to take Veena to a doctor, but Rimple had refused their help. Subsequently, when her neighbors started asking about Veena, she made up a story about her mother having gone to Kanpur.

When police probed the reason, Rimpy said she was scared that her uncle and other relatives had found out that my mother was dead; they would have thrown her out of her Lalbaug home and appropriated her parent’s bank balance and property. That’s why she cooked up a story of her mother’s Kanpur visit instead. Rimple continued to deny killing her 55-year-old mother, Veena. Meanwhile, a police investigation revealed that Rimple decided to dispose of the body and purchased a marble cutter within six hours of her mother’s death.

Rimple was uncooperative in the probe, and police wanted to know from her how exactly she had killed her mother. Also, they wanted to determine the role of six of her close contacts, of which her boyfriend and the sandwich seller are important people yet to be questioned. The sandwich vendor, who has been grilled by cops for the third day in a row, revealed that he knew Rimple’s mother was dead. 

On December 27, when he went to Rimple’s home, he saw the mother lying on the bed. He told Rimple that she was dead, to which Rimple responded positively. However, the sandwich seller denied helping Rimple hack his body. The man went to UP on January 7, 2023, 12 days after the death. Veena Prakash Jain was last seen alive by one of the neighbors on December 26. The alleged murderer, Rimple Jain, lived with her, and after the murder, he used to spray perfumes and room fresheners to suppress the foul smell. A Class 12 dropout, Rimple lost her father around 20 years ago.

Since then, she and her mother have been living alone and mostly dependent on her uncle. Though this is not the first such case, somewhere the relations are deteriorating and bringing such extreme repercussions to their hate and anger. It is getting difficult to understand the psyche of this young generation, and they have become so insensitive in their conduct.