The hunt for B S Gogoi: A murder in Tamil Nadu, a vanishing act and, three decades later, a police team in Assam

Indian Express

23-04-2025

On a December morning, at Ranipet, near Vellore in Tamil Nadu, Deputy Superintendent Jaffer Sadik opened a thin, fading file from 1994. Case registration number: 525/94.
The case details had been written in tidy handwriting, the evidence clipped, labeled, drafted and well-documented. A woman named Jayasri, 22, had died in a fire. Her charred remains were found inside a government quarters at INS Rajali in Arakkonam in Ranipet district. Her husband, Chowdhary, a Navy sailor from Maharashtra, had confessed to his role in the killing, landing him a life term. But there was a second name — B S Gogoi. Police believed it was Gogoi who carried out the killing, on Chowdhary's orders, for a sum of Rs 30,000 and a train ticket. Then he vanished. And the file remained open for 31 years.
DSP Sadik, a 30-year-old officer newly posted in Arakkonam town, noticed the file was perfect – clean, well-drafted and tidy. 'Everything was there. I wondered why the case was never cracked though the file had all the evidence, statements, even a photograph of Gogoi,' he says.
Sadik and his boss, Ranipet SP Vivekananda Shukla, also newly posted to the district, decided to track Gogoi down. 'The man had simply walked out of the naval base and never returned. No trace,' says Shukla.
What followed would take 80 days, three police teams, and just one AI app from the Android Play Store – at the end of which, on April 18, the Ranipet police arrested Gogoi from Dibrugarh in Assam for the murder of Jayasri, his colleague Chowdhary's wife.
A native of Assam, Gogoi, was then 24. A Grade II sailor, he was posted at INS Garuda, the Navy's air station in Kochi, where Chowdhary too was posted. While Chowdhary was later transferred to INS Rajali in Ranipet, Gogoi remained in Kochi.
According to the case details, in Ranipet, Chowdhary's marriage to Jayasri was unravelling. He had found out that his wife was a Class 8 dropout while his family had claimed she had completed her SSLC (Class 10). Fights followed, but the families of Chowdhary and Jayasri 'did not help the young couple'. So he reached out to his friend Gogoi.
Gogoi, records show, took the train to Arakkonam, entered the quarters on March 19, 1994, allegedly struck Jayasri with a hammer, and set her on fire. She was dead before the flames consumed her. Gogoi left the same night.
Gogoi's original photograph in the case files and the AI-generated picture of an older Gogoi. (Express Photo)
In Kochi, he allegedly deposited Rs 30,000 – the amount that Chowdhary had given him for carrying out the murder – in an SBI Ernakulam branch. That was the last evidence the police had, before the trail went cold.
'We began with naval records, old bank accounts, and train tickets. Sadik and team looked up the documents Gogoi submitted for his INS Garuda job and used the details to pull out voter lists of Assam's Dibrugarh district, where he once lived. In 2004 and 2008, police teams had gone to Assam looking for him and came back empty-handed. Still, we suspected he was in Assam,' says Shukla.
So they dug deeper. The voter list in Assamese was painstakingly translated into English using Google Lens – line by line, page by page. Police teams filtered entries by the surname Gogoi. Then by age — anyone who could be 55-60 now.
'Luckily, we had his mother's name in his documents. And we found that she voted at a school booth in Chabua, in Dibrugarh, in the recent Assembly elections. That was our breakthrough,' says Sadik. And we found that one Bhaskar Jothi Gogoi — not B J Gogoi — had also voted in the same school booth. It was almost certainly the same man. He had changed his name in all the documents, but the mother's name was the same on every ID document,' says the DSP.
The police needed confirmation. They turned to AI. 'There was a passport photo in the original case file,' says Sadik. 'So we tried AI face-aging apps. Just some random app from Play Store. One of them gave us an 80% match,' says Sadik.
Ten days later, the police team landed up in Assam and teamed up with the local police. 'It wouldn't have been possible without their help. They quietly questioned people,' he said.
In his Dibrugarh neighbourhood, Gogoi was a friendly tuition teacher who ran a home coaching centre and owned four rental buildings. His daughter and son were both in college. But behind the facade of a family man was a carefully buried past.
'After 1994,' Gogoi told one of the investigators, 'I trained myself.' He became a skilled chess player, took up arm wrestling, and even earned a black belt. Over the years, he told the police, he immersed himself in legal literature — studying loopholes, exploring procedural nuances, and understanding how the law treated absconders and convicts differently.
Nobody, except his mother, knew his past. Even his wife was told that he had left the Navy because he didn't like the job.
After the Tamil Nadu police landed in Assam and shared his old photo along with the new AI photos of an older Gogoi, he was summoned to the local police station along with four other suspects — all 'Gogois'. Police say he was confident until he saw the Tamil Nadu officers. 'The moment he spotted South Indian faces among the officers, he knew he was in trouble,' says an officer who is part of the probe.
'The first thing he said was, 'Do you have summons?' We told him we have more than that,' says the officer.
Police say Gogoi had told his wife and mother that if the police ever came, it would be for deserting his post at INS Garuda. It was only on April 18, the day before the Tamil Nadu police took him into custody, that the family learned of the burden he had carried within himself all these years.
At the Arakkonam magistrate court on April 22, Gogoi was measured and polite. When the magistrate asked why he fled, he replied, 'I didn't get any summons.' He showed no regret.
Not until around 10.30 am, when the magistrate signed the remand order, stating Gogoi would be sent to Vellore Central Prison until April 28. Gogoi asked the officers if he could get a moment alone. 'He chose a corner, sat on the floor of the courtroom, his back to the wall. And he cried for about half an hour. After a few minutes, he told us, 'I'm okay now… Let's leave',' says DSP Sadik.
The case will go to trial now. Police say the original evidence – photographs, statements, bank deposit slips, train records – stands strong.
DSP Sadik says he is now trying to trace the retired officer who drafted the original file — then DSP K P Natarajan. 'Whoever he was, he documented everything perfectly. He knew this day might come.'