She Was Buried In Her Own Home For 3 Years: The Page 3 Murder That Shocked India

Shakereh Khaleeli was beautiful, wealthy and born into one of Karnataka's most influential families. The Bengaluru socialite and real estate developer lived in a sprawling home, travelled the world and moved among the city's elite.

Then, in April 1991, she disappeared.

For three years, her second husband, Murali Manohar Mishra, better known as Swami Shradhananda, offered one explanation after another. Shakereh was travelling. She had gone away. She would return.

All the while, the truth lay buried beneath the home in which he continued to live.

In May 1994, police tore open the courtyard and dug several feet into the ground. What they found inside a coffin-like wooden box would turn the disappearance into one of India's most horrifying murder cases.

Shakereh's skeletal remains were lying on a mattress. One of her hands was still gripping it.

Investigators believed the final movement of her life had been an attempt to claw her way out after she was buried alive.

The murder, later revisited in Amazon Prime Video's 2023 docuseries Dancing on the Grave, was a story of wealth, deception and a secret hidden beneath the ground for nearly three years.

Born Into Wealth And Influence

Born in 1947 into an affluent Indian-Persian family, Shakereh was the granddaughter of Sir Mirza Ismail, the former Dewan of the princely states of Mysore, Jaipur and Hyderabad.

Her family was known for its influence, real estate interests, business connections and philanthropy. Shakereh grew up in a world of privilege and inherited considerable wealth.

At 18, she married Indian diplomat Akbar Mirza Khaleeli. She accompanied him on several international postings during his career in the Indian Foreign Service before eventually settling in Bengaluru.

The couple had four daughters. Shakereh later entered real estate development, but her marriage to Khaleeli began to fall apart. They divorced in the mid-1980s.

By then, another man had entered her life.

The Godman Who Won Her Trust

Shakereh met Murali Manohar Mishra in 1982.

A school dropout from a modest background, Mishra had reinvented himself as Swami Shradhananda. He presented himself as a spiritual figure and reportedly claimed to possess extraordinary powers.

According to accounts of the case, he initially drew close to Shakereh by helping her deal with property-related matters. Over time, he gained her confidence and became deeply involved in her life.

Soon after her divorce from Khaleeli, Shakereh married Shradhananda in 1986. Her family strongly opposed the relationship, but she went ahead with it.

The marriage gave Shradhananda access to a life far removed from the one into which he had been born. He was now living with a wealthy socialite and had access to her properties, money and social standing.

But the relationship reportedly deteriorated. The couple frequently fought over finances and Shakereh's bond with her daughters.

Prosecutors would later argue that Shradhananda's interest in her had never been spiritual or romantic. It was driven by greed.

Then Shakereh Vanished

In April 1991, Shakereh stopped being seen.

There was no farewell, no clear travel plan and no convincing explanation for why a prominent woman had suddenly cut herself off from her daughters and friends.

Whenever her family asked questions, Shradhananda allegedly changed his story. He claimed she had travelled elsewhere and continued to insist that she was alive.

Days became months. Months became years.

Shakereh's daughter Sabah refused to accept the explanations. She approached the police and later filed a habeas corpus petition, pushing the authorities to establish what had happened to her mother.

Shradhananda, meanwhile, reportedly continued living lavishly in Bengaluru. The woman whose wealth had transformed his life was nowhere to be found, but he managed to keep suspicion at bay for nearly three years.

The case finally broke open in 1994.

Horror Beneath The Courtyard

Following a Karnataka Police sting operation, Shradhananda led investigators to a section of the courtyard at the couple's home.

Police began digging.

Several feet below the surface, they struck a wooden structure. It was a coffin-like box, sealed under the courtyard.

Inside lay Shakereh's skeleton on a mattress.

Investigators reconstructed a death more terrifying than the disappearance itself. According to the prosecution's case, Shakereh had been drugged and placed inside the box. The lid was shut, the box lowered into a pit and the ground filled over it.

But the position of her remains suggested that the drugs may not have killed her.

One skeletal hand was still clutching the mattress beneath her. Investigators believed she had regained consciousness inside the box and realised where she was.

Trapped in darkness, with the lid above her and several feet of earth beyond it, she appeared to have struggled before suffocating.

The courtyard of her own home had been turned into her grave. For nearly three years, Shradhananda had lived above it while telling her daughters that their mother was away. He also hosted dance parties above her grave.

The Evidence That Cornered Him

The investigation became a landmark in Indian criminal history.

It was the first case in the country in which the exhumation of a body was recorded on video. It was also among the earliest criminal trials in which DNA evidence and videotaped exhumation footage were accepted by an Indian court.

The prosecution argued that Shradhananda had carefully inserted himself into Shakereh's life, gained control over her wealth and then plotted to remove her permanently.

The crime, prosecutors said, was not an act of sudden rage. It had been planned, executed and concealed with extraordinary calculation.

The grave beneath the courtyard was central to that calculation. Shakereh had not merely been killed. She had been hidden within the very property where anyone searching for her might come to ask questions.

Death Sentence, Then Life In Prison

In 2005, a Bengaluru sessions court convicted Shradhananda of murder and sentenced him to death.

The trial court found the killing to have been meticulously planned and held that it warranted capital punishment. The Karnataka High Court upheld the sentence later that year, describing the murder as one of the "rarest of rare cases."

In 2008, however, the Supreme Court commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment without remission.

The court described the case as "a man's vile greed coupled with devil's cunning" and ordered that Shradhananda remain in prison for the rest of his life.

Years later, the Supreme Court also declined to entertain his plea seeking parole.

The Murder That Returned To The Spotlight

More than three decades after Shakereh was killed, the case reached a new generation through Dancing on the Grave, a four-part true-crime docuseries directed by Patrick Graham and produced by India Today Originals for Amazon Prime Video.

Explaining why the team returned to the old case, producer Chandni Ahlawat Dabas told India Today, "Despite being 30 years old, we felt that this was a crime that needed to be shared because it's such a mystery even today."

Journalist Imran Qureshi, who covered the investigation, said it was the manner of the killing that stunned the public.

"The murder shocked people primarily because of the manner in which she was killed - the fact that she was buried alive," he said.

The series also interviewed Shradhananda, giving the convicted murderer an opportunity to speak about the case decades later.

"I think it's very important that we hear his side of the story, more so because we never heard from him in the past 30 years. Moreover, he gave us invaluable insights into Shakereh's character," Graham said.

But spending time with Shradhananda only hardened the filmmaker's view of him.

"The more time we spent with him, the more it became clear to us that his feelings were not genuine," Graham added.

Shakereh's murder still endures in public memory because of what was found beneath that Bengaluru courtyard: a wealthy socialite reduced to a skeleton inside a wooden box, one hand frozen around a mattress in what investigators believed was her final struggle to escape.

For three years, people searched for her above ground.

She had been beneath her own home all along.