Burari Deaths: One Family, Eleven Bodies
In 2018, 11 people in the Chundawat family were found dead from what looked like a ritual sacrifice. It left the public with questions: was the family corrupted by a evil guru? Was this a robbery gone wrong? Or was there something even darker at play?
TW: Suicide, child death
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SOURCES
https://www.europeanreview.org/article/29402
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/490008#google_vignette
House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths
https://indianmentalhealth.com/pdf/2022/vol9-issue1/16-Viewpoint-Article.pdf
https://eastsidewriters.medium.com/the-infamous-tantra-traditions-and-sexual-practices-b1747af8f79c
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.neuropsych.11070176
TRANSCRIPT
It was the morning of July 1st, 2018 just after 5:30AM. A milk delivery truck rumbled down a quiet side street in the Burari neighborhood of Delhi in North Central India and stopped in front of a storefront. It was little more than a bodega, but it served as a vital hub for the densely-packed village. Every morning, the delivery truck dropped off a fresh load of milk, and one member of the Chundawat family who owned the store would run out and grab it.
But today, something seemed…off. As the driver unloaded the crate from the back, he saw the shop’s metal grate was still closed and bolted. That was strange. He rapped on the metal door - no answer. He looked up above the store to the apartment where the Chundawat family lived. Maybe they were still upstairs, though it didn’t really look like there was any activity. Well, they’d be down soon enough, he figured. so he left the crate out front and got back to the rest of his route.
Less than an hour later, Mrs. Kaur (Core), one of the Chundawat’s neighbors, was making breakfast in her kitchen when she heard a group of people loudly complaining down on the street, punctuated with rattling knocks on metal.
Downstairs, she found a dozen customers crowded in front of the shop. It still wasn’t open. This had never happened before, the Chundawat’s always opened the store on time, there were 11 of them that lived above the store, one of them was always down to open it, they were the most reliable family in the neighborhood.
This concerned Mrs. Kaur, so she tried calling the Chundawat house. No one picked up. She dialed again. Voicemail.
A sour knot in her gut tugged at her; something wasn’t right. She woke up her husband and sent him across the street to check on them.
He was back only a few minutes later, pale and out of breath. “Call the police,” he gasped. “Immediately.”
Welcome back to heart starts pounding, as always, I’m your host Kaelyn Moore.
One thing that’s always fascinated me is how someone's descent into madness can cause others to follow them. I’ve talked about that in the episode I did on the Ruinerwold secluded family, and more recently in the episode I did about Paul Mackenzie and the Good News International ministries. (maybe have these episodes come on screen)
And today, I want to tell you the story of the Chundawats. A seemingly normal family from India who were harboring a very dark secret.
Maybe you’ve seen the docuseries that came out about this case on Netflix a few years ago, it’s phenomenal. But I want to go beyond it, and I think it’s worth it to stick around to the end to hear some more thoughts and theories about why this happened. And I’m also going to talk about a very similar case that recently happened in India. Some are saying it’s a copycat case, so I’m curious to hear what you all think.
But first I want to shout out everyone who listened to our listener stories episode from last month and is mad at me because they were dog sitting for someone while they listened. I know Kat on Patreon is one of those people, but at least 10 others told me the same thing.
If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, it features a really, really harrowing story from someone who was dog sitting for a friend when she gets the sense that she wasn’t alone in the house, and I truly cannot believe how many of you were dog sitting for someone while you listened to that. I am SO sorry. Listen I fully believe the best way to listen to this show is to put yourself in a spooky setting, like take a walk through the woods, light a candle in your home and turn down the lights, but feeling like your inside one of the stories is terrifying, anyways thanks for letting me know this show is the reason you couldn't sleep!! If an episode has ever particularly scared you, please let me know in the comments, wherever you’re listening, I love hearing about that.
Alright, let’s dive back in, and as always, listener discretion is advised. If you’d ever like more information on the specifics of our listener discretion advisories, you can check the description of each episode.
It took about 15 minutes for the Constable from the Burari police force to arrive at the Chundawat apartment. In that time, the crowd of customers had quadrupled, and more were still arriving. Everyone was confused and becoming more and more concerned. As he pushed his way through to reach the apartment door, he tried to reassure the onlookers and tell them to stay calm. But he had heard about what the neighbor had seen inside of the apartment, and he braced himself for what was to come.
The door was unlocked from the inside; he stepped in and announced himself. “Police! Anybody home?” Nothing. A blank, total silence. The constable took measured steps up to the first level,
At the top of the stairs, he froze. The scene waiting for him was so horrific, it knocked the wind out of him. In all his years with the police, he had never seen anything this gruesome, and he would later tell a reporter for The Hindu that he could only look at the scene for 10 seconds.
Three generations of the family - The 77 year old matriarch, her 3 adult children, two of their wives, and their children, - were dead. 11 people in total. But the scene was unlike anything the constable had ever witnessed. Most of the family were hanging in a neat line. The cloth nooses, made from brightly colored and patterned scarves, had been tied to a metal grate in the ceiling. Stools stood next to their bodies. But The family had been blindfolded and their hands and feet were bound with wire.
In another room, the older matriarch of the family was found lying on the floor next to her bed. She had a scarf tied around her neck in a noose shape, like everyone else.
The scene was so horrible, that when a freelance journalist named Vishal heard the news, he didn’t believe it. He thought it was a hoax.
It wasn’t until he got a text later that day that he knew it was real. Someone had sneaked into the family home and filmed the scene, and the video was starting to go viral. 11 family members, all found dead, in what looked like some sort of demented ritual.
The journalist immediately got to work, tapping out the details in a series of tweets, breaking the news to the public, which caused the story to become an immediate national sensation. Everyone wanted to know: what happened to this family? And most importantly, Who did it?
BREAK 1
Initially, the police treated this as a homicide. The way the bodies were found – each of them had their hands bound with wire behind their backs, they were gagged, and blindfolded – it all strongly suggested that someone had done this to them. One officer thought that the family had been killed and then the bodies were staged after the fact.
One detail that supported this was the positioning of the grandmother. she was found one room over from the rest of the family, and instead of hanging, she was lying on the floor next to her bed. She had a scarf tied around her neck, like everyone else, but when the scarf was removed, the officers found bruising all around her neck that they felt looked like it had been made by a belt buckle. As if she was strangled and then her body staged.
However, as investigators were moving around the apartment, they found no indication of an intruder. If someone had done this to the family, you would think you’d find forced entry or signs of a struggle. But the apartment looked surprisingly, undisturbed for what had happened to them.
It was also hard to imagine that only one or two attackers could subdue 11 people at once. One officer said he thought it would take about two people per family member to subdue, kill, and stage each of them, but that meant that perhaps 22 additional people had been in the apartment, and it just didn’t look like that was the case.
The investigators also noticed that nothing of value was missing from the house. none of their jewelry had been taken, they were all still wearing rings, necklaces, etc. So robbery wasn’t a motive.
And this really puzzled the investigators, right. one officer was so perplexed by the situation that he threw out another theory: if the family wasn’t murdered, had they died by collective suicide?
No, it couldn't be, another officer said. This family had everything going for them. Business was good. The kids were happy. Everything in their lives was trending positive. The family actually USED to be in a bad spot, their business was actually failing around 10 years ago, but they turned it around. And only two weeks ago, they’d thrown a huge engagement party with all of their friends and family in attendance. It just didn’t add up to suicide.
The three adult children that had died in the family actually had an older sister, Sujata, who lived with her husband’s family about 50 miles away. The police had notified her of the tragedy that morning and she arrived at the apartment in Burari around midday, absolutely devastated. It becomes almost immediately clear that Sujata had no indication this was coming for her family.
And as she arrived at the apartment At least 5,000 people flooded the surrounding streets and the police were forced to set up barricades to hold back the crush. the crowd continued to grow, and people started climbing up on balconies and rooftops to try to get a look at what was happening. News cameras followed Sujata as she was escorted by officers through the chaos and reporters clamored to get her statement. Visibly emotional, she pleaded with them, “Please, I have nothing to say. I’ve lost my whole family. They were good people. Very good people.”
Sujata spoke with the police that afternoon, and that’s when they told her they were starting to consider what happened to her family a suicide. Once she heard this news, she shifted from being sad, to being outright angry. On her way out of the station, she looked directly into a news camera, and said there was absolutely no way that they would have done this to themselves. She was certain that something happened to them, someone killed them and She accused the police of using suicide as a cover-up, hiding the truth to protect themselves.
Her accusation rippled through the crowd of spectators, igniting a fresh wave of outrage. More people flocked to the house in Burari, sending a message to the police. They demanded justice. They demanded the truth. But no one was prepared for the reality.
One of the things that Sujata pointed to, which she felt proved this wasn’t a suicide, was the engagement party that was just thrown for her niece who died with the family, Priyanka.
Priyanka was 33, and scheduled to get married at the end of the year. She was a senior executive at a prestigious software company. She was gorgeous, she was in love and about to marry the love of her life, it didn’t make sense that she had taken her life, Sujata thought.
Priyanka’s mother was born into the Chandawat family, and after her husband died, she moved with Priyanka back into her family's home with her 2 siblings and their children.
Two weeks before the family was found dead, they had thrown a huge engagement party for Priyanka and her fiance. Everyone in the family was there, the 77 year old grandmother. Her children that lived in the house, Priyanka’s mother, her youngest brother 47 year old Lalit, and their middle sibling. Sujata came back to town to celebrate, plus all of their friends.
And as Sujata was retelling this story, she remembered that even though everyone was having fun and celebrating, Lalit, her youngest brother, looked a little off at the party. Typically he was in a good mood and acted like a leader of the family, a role that he had taken over when his father died in 2006. The family was so lost without their patriarch, named Bhopal Sing. He was the light of the family, the north star, universally loved by everyone around him. So much so that the whole neighborhood called him Daddy.
Once he had died, however, Lalit filled that role for the family, and was often the one giving advice and guidance. But at the engagement party he seemed very distant and withdrawn, like he had something on his mind.
That information didn’t necessarily help the investigation, though. That lalit was a bit sad two weeks ago. And now With the eyes of India upon them, and accusations of mishandling the case already swirling, the Burari police chief summoned every top cop in Delhi to the scene. Officials decided to hand the investigation over to the Crime Branch, the equivalent of the FBI in America. Everything would be done by the book, every inch of the apartment needed to be scoured and photographed for evidence.
They also had to transport the bodies from the crime scene to the morgue which was an entire production that took hours. Police organized a caravan of 11 ambulances, one for each family member. They had to back each one up to the door of the apartment, one at a time, through the barricaded crowds, doing their best to keep the bodies shielded from view. The news channels documented the entire process with rooftop cameras; one of them even had a helicopter trail the caravan all the way to the morgue.
People were desperate to read the coroner’s report, to get any more information on what happened. And when the report came back with even stranger findings, people really latched onto it.
See The coroner’s autopsy report determined that the Chandawat’s had all died by hanging. A toxicology screen found no sign that they had been poisoned or sedated in any way. These findings ruled out the possibility that the family had been killed and their bodies staged after the fact.
But here’s where it gets really strange. Some of the body's hands had been tied behind their backs so tightly, the wire was digging into their skin. The coroner found wads of cotton shoved in their ears, to muffle out sound.
The coroner went to remove the cloth gags that were tied around the family’s mouths, and he noticed that two of the younger members of the family, both 15 year old boys, had their mouths had been taped shut underneath.
It was starting to definitely look like someone had done this to the family, and one of the bodies held a really important clue.
The oldest of the adult children, 61 year old Bhuvnesh appeared to have fought against his bonds, trying to free himself, managing to work one of his hands loose. This was The sign of a struggle that had been absent from the crime scene itself.
Investigators needed to determine if there was anyone else in the apartment that night. They pulled the footage from CCTV cameras in the alley outside. Luckily, one of the cameras had a direct view of the family’s front door and the recorded footage went back at least 72 hours. It was a vital piece of evidence, allowing the officers to see anyone coming or going. They immediately reviewed it frame-by-frame.
According to the tape, a delivery boy dropped off an order of rotis, a thin flatbread, in the early evening, the day before the deaths. The police sat huddled around a computer going frame by frame, waiting to see the stranger who went into their apartment after this. But that stranger never came, no one outside of the family entered the apartment until the morning of July 1st, when a concerned neighbor came to check on them.
But that’s not all the tape showed.
In clear view of the camera, officers watched Lalit’s wife, 15 year old son, and 25 year old nephew, carry a set of newly purchased stools down the alley and into the house. And they appeared to match the stools found next to the bodies.
The night before the deaths, around 10:30PM, Lalit’s 15 year old son came outside alone. He rolled up the metal door of his father’s plywood shop halfway, then ducked inside. He came out a few minutes later holding a bundle of wire. Then he closed the metal door and went back up to the family apartment. He didn’t look panicked, he didn’t look fearful. He looked like a normal kid just running out of his apartment to grab something.
All of this taken together, the investigators felt confident in ruling out an attack by an intruder. This wasn’t a murder case. Whatever happened that night, the Chundawat family had done it to themselves.
But why?
<<>>
It wasn’t long before reporters started putting together their own theories. One of those reporters was Vishal Anand, the one who saw the video that someone had taken inside of the home and first broke the story to the world.
He was deeply invested in the Burari case, pouring over crime scene photos, videos, witness testimony, all of it. When he noticed something strange.
Eleven pipes. There were Eleven pipes that jutted out from the outer wall of the Chandawat apartment, arranged in a few neat rows. Four extended straight out from the wall; seven were bent, curved downwards. Huh. It was just like the family. Four men and seven women. Then Vishal realized where he recognized the pattern in the pipes from. The pipes on the outside of the wall were in the same position as the bodies hanging from the grate.
At first, it didn’t seem like much, but the more he looked at the photos, the more the number 11 showed up. There were 11 windows in the apartment, 11 iron rods on the front door.
Immediately, he started firing off articles about this coincidence, and this took the whole investigation in a very different direction. The general public started wondering if there was some kind of occult angle to the family. The number 11 was significant in hinduism, after all. Representing spiritual growth. Was this some sick and twisted bastardization of that.
Reporters decided the family must have been following some occult guru, and they scoured the family’s associates to try to uncover them. They even zeroed in on the man who installed the pipe’s daughter after she was photographed wearing red, the color of black magic. Her face was plastered everywhere, and she was labeled incorrectly as an occultist.
And at the same time, the contractors who installed the Burari’s pipes were trying to clear the air. The number 11 was just a coincidence, there was no occult meaning to the number of pipes they installed.
But that would be nearly impossible to prove to the public, because not long after this, a huge bombshell gets discovered inside of the Chandawat’s apartment.
See, The family, like many Hindu families, had a prayer altar in their apartment. And as investigators were re-examining the living space, they found fresh ashes in the sacrificial pyre, suggesting that the family had performed some kind of ceremony or ritual on the night of June 30th, the night before their bodies were found.
One of the investigators got a hunch. She felt like there may have been a religious element to the deaths, and in her experience, those kinds of deaths usually came with some sort of note. But so far, they hadn't found anything in the apartment
So she ordered the investigators to search every square inch for any written material.
And Sure enough, sitting on a nearby shelf, were some notebooks. 11 in total.
They were diaries, with date catalogued entries, spanning back the last 11 years, and the most recent was from June 24th, just six days before the family died.
The oldest entries were from September of 2007, and entries had been made almost daily.
And it would be these notebooks that would start painting a bigger picture for investigators. One that illustrated the real terror that was happening inside of the Chandawat home. And it was much darker than any of the investigators could have imagined.
BREAK 2
The diaries started about a year after the patriarch of the family, Bhopal Sing passed away. I mentioned it earlier, but after he died the family was incredibly lost. Eventually, Bhopal’s son, Lalit filled that role, but the diaries showed a rocky transition.
Every entry provided the day’s instructions for each member of the Chandawat family, dictating everything from what meals to cook to behavioral corrections to major financial decisions. For example, one entry would mention that one of the grandchildren was spending too much time on their cellphone and that behavior needed to be corrected. Another entry would talk about how two of the women in the family needed to make one of the others feel more loved. Another went “Be mindful of your mother’s age and needs. If you are able to keep your parents happy, you are serving God’s wishes.”
Investigators started to believe that, every morning, each member of the family checked the diary for their instructions. And that most of the instructions were coming from Lalit.
That’s because a lot of the entries started holding him in the highest regard. One said “If you want solutions to your problems, then you must follow Lalit’s instructions.” another said “Everything good that has allowed this family to prosper is through the actions of Lalit and his wife, Tina.”
But as the investigators carefully leafed through the pages, they noticed something strange. There were different styles of handwriting throughout. At first, they believed that Lalit was the one writing all of the instructions, but it became clear that at least three people had been writing in them. And handwriting analysis showed that the majority of the notebooks had been written by his two nieces, Priyanka and Neetu.
Perhaps Lalit was giving them instructions each day about what the family needed to be doing, and they obeyed as he was now the end of the family. But how did Lalit go from the son stepping in to fill his fathers shoes, to dictating what each person did every day?
Well, the investigators started asking around the community if anyone knew Lalit very well. And the story they started to piece together of him, was, well, complicated.
It seemed from friends and neighbors that Lalit had an otherwise normal upbringing. That was, they said. Until the accident.
In high school, Lalit had been involved in a bicycle accident that left him with a traumatic head injury. His friends had previously known him as the life of the party, always cracking jokes. He did well in school and was on track to go to college, But something changed after his head injury. he wasn’t able to focus or read for long periods of time. He would fall asleep randomly, often in the middle of a conversation.
His college plans were scrapped, and instead,he opened a plywood shop next door to the family grocery store.
He was just starting to get back on his feet when there was another incident.
In 2003 Lalit was attacked by one of his suppliers, who he was currently in a dispute with. They broke into his store, beat him up badly, and left him unconscious under a pile of plywood in the shop. Then his attackers locked the doors and set the building on fire.
Lalit awoke to smoke and fire all around him, but was still able to get to his feet and make it out of the store. He went back to his family home, but just like the last accident had changed him forever, after the fire Lalit was not the same person. He could no longer speak. His family believed that the smoke inhalation had permanently damaged his vocal chords, but doctors said that’s not really how it works. He shouldn’t have been left completely mute after the incident, unless it was psychological, stemming from trauma.
And yet, after that. Lalit never spoke, not even a single word. Not to his wife, not to his son, not even at his fathers funeral, who passed away three years later.
Lalit never spoke to any of the 10 other people that lived in his home with him, not even as they collectively grieved.
That is, until one day.
A few days after Bhopal’s death, the family was gathered in front of their altar, participating in a group prayer. Suddenly, there was a deep voice in the back of the room reciting the prayer. It almost sounded like Bhopal’s voice was filling the room from the afterlife. It was beautiful, it made the family emotional, and when they all turned around, they saw It was Lalit. he was finally able to speak again. Except his voice had changed. It no longer sounded like it had before the incident. It sounded like his father’s. The rest of the family just listened in shocked silence while Lalit finished the prayer. When he was done, his mother declared, in awe, “Daddy has returned.”
It seems this moment had a profound impact on the family. In the midst of intense grief and loss, Lalit experienced a miracle - the return of his voice. Instead of suffering through confusion, the family regained hope.
Lalit claimed that Bhopal appeared to him in a dream after his death. His father had told him to perform a “puja,” a kind of devotional prayer, to recover his voice. He followed his father’s advice and it worked - he was finally able to speak again. From that point on, Bhopal continued to visit Lalit and gave him more instructions to follow - not just for his son, but for the entire family. That’s how the diaries started.
And the thing was… following Bhopal’s instructions helped the family, at least at first. Before his death, money had been tight, they were living paycheck to paycheck. But The diary instructions turned that around; they made the family more disciplined, and soon they were able to open a second grocery store. The children also started performing better in school. Priyanka found a great job. The family flourished. To their friends and neighbors, this was Lalit’s doing, as the new head of the household. But inside the family, they knew that Lalit was only a conduit and Bhopal was still their patriarch.
But as the investigators kept reading the diaries, the instructions that got the family focused and disciplined, started becoming more concerning, and controlling. The voice of the instructions seemed more harsh and serious than Bhopal Sing was ever known to be in his life. But the family continued to follow instructions, fully believing it was Bhopal speaking through Lalit.
The later entries started taking on a concerning tenor. It seemed like Lalit believed that Bhopal Sing was going to return to the family. Like he was done speaking through Lalit, and he was ready to come back to the family and take his position as the Patriarch.
Then, on June 24th of 2018, the last diary entry was written, dictating the instructions for what Lalit called “the banyan tree ritual.” In Hinduism, the banyan is considered sacred and holds a great deal of significance. Sometimes referred to as “the tree of life,” it can symbolize immortality, interconnectedness, and spiritual growth. But outside of the symbolism, the ritual had no other basis in Hindu practice; it was something Lalit made up himself.
According to the diary, the ritual would reunite them with Bhopal Sing who had been dutifully guiding them for the last 11 years,
The entry was extremely detailed, even specifying that they should begin the ritual at 1AM. “Nothing should be visible. Use dim light. Eyes should be closed and properly blindfolded. Gag the mouth by tying a handkerchief. The bonds must be strong.”
You may or may not know what a banyan tree looks like, but one of their unique features is how they grow roots. Instead of growing up out of the soil, banyan seedlings attach themselves to surrounding branches and trees, then stretch their roots down to the ground to reach the soil. As it grows, it releases dozens and dozens of vertical arms. So this ritual was supposed to symbolize the banyan. Each member of the family was a root, suspended from the ceiling.
The ritual was supposed to last for seven consecutive days, and no one outside the family could be in the apartment when it was performed. It required their total attention and focus.
“God should feel your devotion. Keep the mind absolutely empty. Nothing but infinity. While standing at attention, imagine that the branches of the tree are entwining you. Perform the banyan tree ritual with unity and determination. This will help repent for your mistakes.”
The diary also explained why the grandmother had been found in the next room, lying on the floor. She was old and overweight; she wasn’t physically capable of standing for that long. So instead of tying her noose to the grate in the ceiling, it was attached to the handle of a cabinet. By the time the bodies were discovered, the handle had broken off from her weight.
According to the instructions, one person was responsible for binding the hands and feet of the rest of the family. Lalit likely assumed this role, based on the evidence. While everyone else’s hands were tied behind their back, his were tied in front, suggesting he secured the cord himself.
“Do not panic while performing the banyan tree ritual. The earth might shake or the skies might tremble. Do not let this weaken your resolve. Convince the children to keep chanting. As long as the chanting continues, Lalit will protect each one of you.”
After these notebooks came to light, investigators felt like they had mostly solved the case. They were no longer looking for a murderer or an outside spiritual guru that had corrupted the family. No, that had come from within. Several reports that came out after this discovery compared the Chandawats to a cult. Lalit had positioned himself as a “savior” of sorts, and enforced obedience from the other family members, and then had convinced them to commit mass suicide. It had threads of Heaven’s Gate or Jonestown.
But unlike those two groups that had been studied and are now pretty well understood, Investigators still had so many questions about the Chandawats. Like, the timing. It seemed like Lalit had switched a flip within the last few weeks of diary entries, like he had all of a sudden shifted gears. Another question was, did Lalit really believe that Bhopal was speaking through him, or was he simply manipulating the family into following him? And also, did the family know they were going to die? By some accounts, it didn’t seem like it. They maybe thought if they performed this ritual that they would survive and Bhopal would be back.
And that’s when the theories started to arise.
Some people believe that when Lalit started speaking again holds an important clue. They believe it wasn’t a miracle, that he chose that specific moment after Bhopal’s death to speak again, and that it was extremely calculated. If his vocal cords had been so damaged in the attack – whether by smoke inhalation or physical trauma – that he lost the ability to speak for years, then spontaneous healing seems very unlikely. Instead, the damage was probably short term; the heat and chemicals in a fire can cause severe inflammation that takes a few weeks to resolve. But even once Lalit could speak again, he chose not to.
But why be calculated and manipulative in speaking if he had the ability to? Well, some doctors believe that Lalit wasn’t thinking right, and that his brain injury from the bicycle accident clouded his mind.
A 2012 study suggested a link in patients who suffered a moderate to severe TBI, that is Traumatic Brain Injuries, and later developed a psychotic disorder. The study found that this was more prevalent in men, and the symptoms could develop anywhere from a year to ten years after the brain injury occurred. The most common symptoms were persecutory delusions and auditory hallucinations. Patients were more likely to develop psychotic disorders if their TBI was associated with cognitive impairments, most commonly in memory and executive functioning.
This study came out after Lalit had his TBI, so doctors would not have known to check him for this. And anyways, We have no idea if this applied to Lalit, if he was hallucinating his father’s voice, or if it was all an act. Whatever the truth, he clearly reached a breaking point in June of 2018. But what caused it?
That was always one of the big questions in the case - why would a family that seemed to have everything going for them die by collective suicide. Unfortunately, the diaries didn’t provide a clear answer either.
But it was theorized that Priyanka’s engagement party might have been the catalyst. Even though Lalit was the one who had arranged the marriage and thrown the lavish party, perhaps it wasn’t until he was standing in that room, surrounded by people making wedding plans, that the reality sunk in. Once Priyanka was married, she would move out of the apartment. It’s possible he was afraid what her departure might do to destabilize the family; afterall, she was a key part of the diary system. Many of the entries were in her handwriting, dictated to her by Lalit.
Or, perhaps he was afraid that once she was outside the house, living a life that wasn’t governed by Bhopal’s instructions, she would have an awakening. She would realize that it wasn’t normal to live this way. And perhaps she would convince others in the family of this as well.
Friends and relatives had remarked on how quiet Lalit was at the engagement party - distant. The following week, he missed several days of work, claiming he was sick. He spent entire days in his room sleeping.
The last question they had was, how could an entire family allow this to happen, if only one of them is leading the charge, and that person is divorced from reality. Especially with how well educated the family was, Priyanka had graduated college and had an amazing job, one of the other grandchildren was working towards a masters degree in forensic science. Well, there are a few theories.
For one, the family's life DID start improving because of Lalit’s instructions. It was like they were constantly being reinforced that this was the absolute right thing for them, and that Lalit was a great new leader of the family.
Another theory is something called Folie a Famille (Follie a Fahmee). Maybe you’ve heard of Folie a Deux, where someone can “catch” another person's delusions. Well, Folie a Famille is when an entire family can catch one family member's delusions.
It’s not a widely studied phenomenon, but I did find a 2010 paper by two researchers in India, Ashish Srivastava and H.A Borkar. In their paper, they describe a family in India headed by the father, a 40 year old with Paranoid Schizophrenia and Antisocial Personality disorder. He believed that people in his community were trying to kill his family, which consisted of him, his wife, and their three children.
Three years after the onset of his symptoms, his family also started to experience delusions and exhibit symptoms of Paranoid schizophrenia. He was eventually brought in for treatment, and within 2 months the rest of his family members stopped showing symptoms, though they never received any formal treatment. It seemed like being separated from the father was enough.
This is probably the closest case study we have to the Chandawats. It was another family in the region, who shared the same beliefs, and was also living with a patriarch with mental illness, though that’s still alleged in the Chandawat case technically. But, the researchers brought up in their case study that the family was INCREDIBLY isolated. The father did not let his wife or children see anyone outside the home, and they said that was typical in cases of Folie a Famile.
But that was not the case for the Chandawats. They owned a business, they had friends, neighbors, and customers. Some of them went to school. They had plenty of contact with the outside world, which makes Folie a famile a bit less likely.
When the case was closed, they were labeled as “accidental deaths.” It didn’t seem appropriate to call them suicides, because it didn’t appear the family thought the ritual would kill them. But it wasn’t really murder either; they had all participated willingly.
Once the truth of the Burari deaths was uncovered, the rabid demand for an explanation basically dried up. Once the shock wore off, it was seen as nothing more than a bizarre tabloid drama. And eventually The tabloids moved on, without much consideration for the deeper questions.
Like, how was the family able to hide this from everyone, the friends, their neighbors, their relatives, for over a decade? The kids went to school, they had social media, they were living in the modern age – and yet it doesn’t seem like any of them questioned their lifestyle.
Recent commentary on the case highlighted an even simpler truth: there’s such a strong cultural resistance toward any conversation about mental health, that it was easier to accept that Lalit’s connection with Bhopal was a product of divine blessing, rather than consider that he was showing symptoms of a psychological disorder.
And because of that, even today we don’t really know the truth – whether or not Lalit was actually having hallucinations, or if he was an opportunistic manipulator. We don’t know his true motives behind the diaries.
And as long as that reluctance exists, it leaves the door open for future, similar tragedies.
Just last year, in September of 2024, a father and his four daughters died by collective suicide. However, unlike the Burari case, there were clear warning signs ahead of the tragedy. The father had been consumed by severe depression for the better part of a year, following the death of his wife. The family was said to have completely disconnected from the outside world; they stopped talking to their neighbors and they rarely left the house. Their bodies were only discovered when someone complained about the smell coming from their apartment.
Some looked at this as another tabloid headline, another salacious story similar to the Chandawats. But others said no, this is a sign of mental illness and if we don’t take this seriously as a community, these kinds of stories are going to keep happening. And slowly but surely, psychologists in India like Rachana Jori trying to open people up to more conversations about mental health. She is a professor at Ambedkar University who was actually interviewed in the Netflix documentary on this case about her thoughts on the mental health aspect of the Chundawat’s death. and I hope for Rachana’s sake, and everyone else trying to speak up about mental health, they’re able to make a real difference.
That’s all I have for you this week. Join me here next week as we jump from India to Japan, where I’m going to tell you some ghost stories from Okinawa that kept me up at night, specifically ones that took place on a military base there, so you wont want to miss that.
And, before I leave, I wanted to shout out Radio Nemo who had me on for an interview recently. Jimmy mac and Lindsay Lawler had me on to talk about how Heart Starts Pounding got started and how I come up with episodes. You can find that on youtube by searching Radio Nemo Heart STarts Pounding.
Alright, I’ll see you all in here with me in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters here next week, and until then, stay curious.