I walked through the front door and dropped my keys. The place was trashed—drawers pulled out, cushions thrown, cabinets hanging open. And then I saw her. Jessica was on the floor, duct tape wrapped around her arms and legs, her face still.
I fell to my knees and shook her. “Jess. Jess, come on, baby. Wake up.
”
Nothing. I grabbed the phone and my voice cracked into the receiver. “I think we’ve been burgled and my wife’s been attacked. She’s got duct tape all over her and she’s like unconscious.
”
The operator told me to take the tape off. My hands were shaking as I ripped it away. Her skin was cold. I couldn’t find a pulse.
What nobody knew that night was how carefully that scene had been built. Or how long my husband had been planning it. To everyone else, Mitesh and I were the perfect couple. We’d grown up in the same tight-knit Hindu community in West Yorkshire, part of the same circle of kids who played together.
I remembered him from those days, and when we both ended up studying pharmacology at De Montfort University, it felt like fate. We moved to Manchester for our master’s degrees. Then my mother died, and Mitesh was there, steady and gentle, giving me a shoulder to cry on. I fell completely in love with him.
We kept our relationship secret for two years. In our community, these things had to be done properly, with your parents’ blessing. When Mitesh finally asked my father for permission to marry me, my father said no. It didn’t matter how I felt or what I wanted.
I insisted the wedding would go ahead anyway. Reluctantly, my father gave his blessing, and in the summer of 2009, we were married. Almost immediately, the man I’d loved was gone. He became controlling in ways I hadn’t seen coming.
When my grandfather was dying, Mitesh limited the time I could spend with him, and after he passed, he wouldn’t let me grieve with my family. He wanted to show that he made the rules. That I had no freedom. That any decision ran through him first.
I stayed. In our community, leaving wasn’t an option that seemed real. You didn’t walk away. You made things work.
And then I discovered his secret. Mitesh was gay. He didn’t even try to hide it for long. He was constantly on Grindr, setting up meetings with men.
He brought them back to our house, to our bedroom, and didn’t care that I knew. He’d married me to look respectable, to hide who he really was, and I was just the front. I tried to get help from our families. I told them what was happening, that he was cruel, that he was unfaithful.
But nobody wanted to hear the truth about his private life. Instead, they suggested I should be a more hardworking wife. There was nowhere left to turn. In 2013, we moved to Middlesbrough.
Mitesh told everyone it was for the pharmacy he’d bought. I knew it was to isolate me from everyone I loved. He rarely let me go back to Leeds to see my family. My dad would visit the shop for an hour now and again, and that was it.
I didn’t have friends up here. At the pharmacy, he treated me like a servant. He spoke down to me in front of colleagues and customers, always negative, never kind. He didn’t respect me.
He didn’t love me. I was just there to make him look good. The violence started around 2017. He threw phones at my head.
He put his hands around my throat. I came into work with bruises on my face and told everyone I’d fallen playing netball. The remote control hit me in the ribs one night because I was watching TV. I laughed it off.
I wanted a baby. That’s why I stayed. We tried IVF, and I held onto that dream so tightly. I didn’t know that Mitesh was secretly taking medication to lower his sperm count.
He was sabotaging every chance we had of having a child, just to keep control over me. In March 2018, a cycle of IVF finally worked. We had three embryos stored. I was so hopeful.
I didn’t know that those embryos were the reason he decided I had to die. Mitesh wanted a family, but he wanted it with his lover, a man named Amit Patel, who he called his soulmate. They’d been together for years. He’d been showing me texts, not caring that I saw them, telling Amit he wanted them to be together and to have a child.
If he divorced me, he’d lose the embryos. The only way to get everything he wanted, the family and his lover, was to get rid of me. He took out a life insurance policy on me worth around two million pounds. I never knew.
He was searching online for properties in Australia, near where Amit lived. He told neighbors I was so gullible and naive that someday someone was going to take advantage of me and murder me. On the evening of May 14, 2018, I was chatting with colleagues at the pharmacy. I was talking about treating myself to a new car.
Then the phone rang. It was Mitesh, asking if I’d left yet. He told them to tell me to hurry up because he needed me to bring something home. I left around half past six.
That was the last time anyone at the pharmacy saw me alive. Mitesh made sure he had witnesses. He went to Romano’s, the takeaway a few doors down, and ordered a pizza. He paid in cash.
He shook the chef’s hand, but his hand was hesitant, and he seemed twitchy, pacing around. He went back to the pharmacy for about half an hour, then returned to pick up his order. At 8:18 p. m.
, he came home. The CCTV he was so proud of was mysteriously switched off. Then he made the panicked call to emergency services. The police arrived to find a staged burglary.
I was dead, strangled and suffocated with a plastic bag. I’d also been injected with a fatal dose of insulin, something that would have been hard to detect unless they were looking for it. He’d wrapped duct tape around my arms and legs—tape that could be traced back to his pharmacy. He’d taken my phone outside and dropped it on the doorstep, trying to make it look like I’d walked in on an intruder.
But the health app on both our phones told a different story. There were two periods of overlapping motion, identical patterns, because the same person was carrying both devices. My phone took fourteen steps outside after I was already dead. His phone recorded frantic activity around the house at the exact time he was ransacking it.
He told police we had a good relationship. He pretended to be distraught. He blamed a burglary gone wrong. He said the scratches under his fingernails came from the gym.
His personal trainer told police that never happened. He hid the CCTV hard drive under a suitcase upstairs, but detectives found it. In November 2018, the trial began. The jury heard everything—the control, the abuse, the secret lover, the insurance policy, the embryos, the plan to rebuild his life in Australia.
Mitesh tried to argue that it was difficult living as a gay Asian man in an unhappy marriage. The judge called it the most primitive of crimes. He was found guilty of murder. On December 5, 2018, he was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of thirty years.
I used to feel sorry for him, thinking we were just struggling with starting a family. I never imagined he was planning my death the whole time. I’m glad.
For myself, and for my family, there’s at least that bit of justice.
