Finally — Rajesh and Nupur Talwar Charged in Daughter Aarushi's Murder

Four years after fourteen-year-old Aarushi Talwar was found dead in her Noida home, the case that had consumed India's imagination took its decisive legal turn: in May 2012, a special CBI court in Ghaziabad moved to put her parents, dentists Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, on trial for murder.

The facts that brought the case here were as tangled as they were tragic. Aarushi was found with her throat slit on May 16, 2008. The family's domestic help, Hemraj, was initially treated as the prime suspect — until his body was found on the terrace the next day. The investigation lurched through the Uttar Pradesh police and then the CBI; by 2010, the agency's closure report named the Talwars themselves as suspects while finding insufficient evidence for a watertight case. The court disagreed with the closure and ordered the couple to stand trial.

Nupur Talwar had surrendered in April 2012 after the Supreme Court rejected her bail plea; both parents were in judicial custody as the court framed charges and the trial began in June.

The case had everything that makes for national obsession — wealth, a murdered child, botched forensics, media trial — and it divided the country. Were the Talwars victims of a shoddy investigation, or guilty parents protected by privilege? The trial that began in 2012 would convict them in November 2013 — a verdict the Allahabad High Court would overturn in October 2017, acquitting both for lack of evidence. The murders remain officially unsolved.

This article summarizes contemporaneous reporting from May 2012 and the subsequent judicial record. It reports on legal proceedings, not findings of guilt.