A Virginia man has been charged with murder more than four months after his wife disappeared and a significant amount of blood was found in their suburban Washington home, authorities announced Monday.
Naresh Bhatt, 37, was indicted by a Prince William County grand jury and faces one count of murder and one count of defiling a corpse, according to online court records.
The body of Mamta Bhatt, 28, has not been found. But investigators matched her DNA to blood found in the couple’s home, Manassas Park Police Chief Mario Lugo said at a news conference Monday evening.
“From the beginning we believed she had been murdered,” Lugo told reporters.
Investigators executed their first search warrant when Naresh Bhatt was home with the couple’s baby and discovered blood in the bedroom and bathroom, Lugo said.
He added that evidence shows that Bhatt dismembered his wife’s body, giving rise to the defilement charge.
“I think we have a strong argument for not having the body,” Lugo said.
Police also said his conflicting statements to police, the media and the public raised red flags, CBS affiliate WUSA-TV reported.
“We stood still and listened and that was one of the things. We tried to see what he was saying to the crowd, but that’s not what he told us was going on,” Chief Lugo said.
Chief District Attorney Tracey Lenox did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press seeking comment on the new charges against Bhatt, who is already in jail awaiting trial on separate charges in the case.
The investigation has drawn international attention to the small community in Northern Virginia, where homicides are rare. The disappearance of Mamta Bhatt, a pediatric nurse, spurred community members and her family in Nepal to work together to find out what happened.
They posted on social media, organized community events and held a rally. Within days, community members began putting public pressure on her husband.
Three weeks after her disappearance in late July, Naresh Bhatt was charged with concealing a dead body and placed in jail, where he remains. A prosecutor had said in court last summer that the amount of blood found in the home indicated injuries that were not survivable.
Olivia Diaz/AP
The investigation continued after Mamta Bhatt’s death. But in September, Lenox, the public defender, argued that Naresh Bhatt was still entitled to a speedy trial for concealing a corpse. The trial on these charges was scheduled for next week.
According to law enforcement experts, cases of disembodied murder are not unheard of. And while prosecuting them can still be difficult, they have become easier in recent years thanks to new types of evidence such as DNA, cell phone location information and surveillance cameras.
Tad DiBiase is a former federal prosecutor and author of the 2014 book, “No-Body Homicide Cases: A Practical Guide to Investigating, Prosecuting and Winning Cases When the Victim is Missing.”
He keeps an overview of murder cases without a body on his website. On September 2, DiBiase noted that there was an 87% conviction rate after 604 trials in the US.
“Searches – we did over ten. We did grid searches – searches with K9s,” Lugo previously told WUSA-TV. “In terms of search warrants and subpoenas, I think we probably exceed 30 that we’ve filed and received information on.”
