Body of killer doctor’s sixth victim exhumed from farm

Santosh Pol misled the police on where he had disposed of the body

The Satara police on Friday exhumed the body of a sixth victim of Santosh Pol, the so-called ‘doctor’, from his farm. Pol has confessed to having killed six persons, five of them women, between 2003 and 2016.

However, the discovery of one Vanita Gaikwad’s body adds a further twist to the serial murders by Pol, who had apparently confessed to the police that he had dumped Gaikwad’s body near the Krishna river bank after killing her in 2006.

Victim was neighbour

“When we checked the records of unsolved murders and missing persons’ complaints for a decade-long period, we did not find any record of a woman’s body being retrieved from near the river bed during the period in which Pol is believed to have killed Gaikwad. So, we decided to call his bluff and as expected, Pol failed to lead us to the spot where he claimed he had left the body,” said Sandip Patil, Superintendent of Police, Satara. The reasons for Pol’s false statement and the exact motive behind Gaikwad’s murder are now being investigated.

Forensic medicine team

Teams of police personnel and forensic experts reached the farmland to retrieve the body for examination. The search team had to fell a tree planted by Pol below which he buried the corpse. The remains were sent for DNA testing around 3:30 p.m.

“A forensic team from the KEM hospital, Mumbai aided the police in the investigation,” said Mr. Patil, adding that he had apprised Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis of the investigation.

Gaikwad, stayed close to Pol’s single-room residence near his poultry farm and had disappeared on Raksha Bandhan day in August 2006 after she reportedly stepped outside to ‘tie a rakhi’ to her brother.

Meanwhile, Pol’s murder spree could date back to some time before 2003 as the police are following up on three more missing persons’ cases and the victims’ may have crossed paths with the killer.

They are Vishnu Dhage and Deepali Sanas, who disappeared in 2001 and 2002 respectively, and Santosh Gawande who has been missing since 2010.

According to police sources, both Gawande and Dhage used to visit Pol’s clinic in Dhom.