TV Executive Arrested for Murdering the Daughter She Had Been Passing Off as Her Sister
In a real weird murder case that’s only getting weirder by the day, cops in India have arrested a prominent television executive on charges that she murdered her own daughter. Except, apparently no one knew it was her daughter, because she’d been pretending they were sisters.
It all started Tuesday night, when police arrested former STAR TV exec Indrani Mukerjea on charges that she paid her driver to murder her sister, Sheena Bora, three years ago.
(The driver reportedly confessed after he was arrested on an unrelated matter. It’s still unclear if he admitted to the actual killing or just of disposing of the body, which may have been found but was never identified.)
But I digress—the next day, authorities had to correct the charges, because it turns out Sheena wasn’t Indrani’s sister. She was Indrani’s secret daughter.
And that wasn’t the only edit Indrani allegedly made to her family tree: she had a son, Mikhail Bora, who she had reportedly been passing off as her brother.
But wait—it gets weirder.
See Indrani is married to Peter Mukerjea, the former CEO of News Corp-owned Star India. The couple have one child together, who they actually acknowledge. But Peter also has a son from a previous marriage named Rahul.
According to reports, Rahul started dating Sheena, the stepsister he thought was his step-aunt, just a few months before her death. And Rahul wasn’t the only one the pair fooled: Peter was also under the impression Sheena was his sister-in-law.
Still, despite the myriad of interfamilial connections, they may just be strange, in-need-of-therapy red herrings—because according to Variety, cops think it all came down to money.
Embezzled money, that is. According to reports, the Mukerjeas cofounded a successful media company called INX Media. But upon its 2009 sale, some cash was missing: an audit “found that large sums of money had been extracted by the former owners and disbursed into the accounts of close relatives.”
A dispute over control of the money placed in Sheena Bora’s accounts may have led to arguments with Indrani Mukerjea and Bora’s death, Indian papers allege.
But whatever the motive, Mikhail (Indrani’s brother-son) tells the Indian press he has no doubt: “Indrani killed my sister Sheena.”
