BHOPAL: A blood-stained rough book of a 10-year-old boy, filled with untidy homework, maths sums, Hindi notes and hurried signatures of a tutor, became the thread that unravelled what police in Madhya Pradesh’s Raisen district feared was a near-perfect blind murder case.The decomposed body of a man, with hands and legs tied and mouth taped shut, was found stuffed inside a sack under Sirwara Bridge near Nagin Mod on the Bhopal-Jabalpur highway on May 7. The corpse was nearly unrecognisable and had no phone, wallet, or identity proof on it. Police suspected the killers murdered the victim elsewhere and dumped the body near the highway to ensure it was never identified.The only clues were a small bag lying nearby, a grocery receipt from Saikheda town in Narsinghpur district, and a child’s rough book. Investigators initially believed it belonged to a school student but soon realised it was not a regular school notebook. Different subjects were written randomly across pages, and each page carried short check marks and signatures — suggesting it was being used during private tuition classes.Pictures of the notebook were circulated across local school groups, tuition circles and residents’ WhatsApp groups in Saikheda. Police teams went door to door, carrying photocopies of the pages, asking residents, shopkeepers and tutors if they recognised the handwriting or signatures.“The notebook did not even have a proper name or address. It looked ordinary, almost useless, but that became the centre of the investigation,” Raisen SP Ashutosh Gupta told TOI.After days of searching, a private tutor identified the signatures as his own. Investigators then traced the child’s handwriting to one of his students and reached the family’s house — only to find it locked and abandoned for several days. That sudden disappearance turned the rough book from a weak clue into the strongest lead in the case.Police tracked the family through informers across multiple cities before rounding them up in Ujjain. “When the accused were detained, they initially claimed the rough book could have been dumped by anyone. But forensic analysis had already found blood stains on it. They eventually broke down during questioning,” Gupta said.Police later identified the victim as Pappu alias Veer Jat of Rajasthan. The rough book belonged to the 10-year-old, son of the main accused, who, along with Arun Patel and Harnam Singh Kirar, was arrested for the murder.Police said it was a case of a love triangle. The boy’s mother had murdered her new lover, Pappu, with the help of her old beau Arun and another accomplice.
