A planned wedding at a palace. A birthday picnic at a historic fort. An alleged failed attempt to kill a groom-to-be. And then, after his death, a heartbroken social media tribute asking why he had left her.
On June 18, a 26-year-old Pune businessman named Ketan Vishal Agarwal fell 400 feet into a gorge at Lohagad Fort, a landmark site in Maharashtra.
His fiancée, Siya Goyal, told the Lonavala rural police that Ketan had slipped while the two were trekking. Strong winds. A moment of lost balance. A tragedy, she said.
The police registered an accidental death report.
Then they started looking closer.
What they found through mobile records, 2,004 phone calls between Siya and another man, a switched-off internet connection, a missing passport, and a visit to the victim’s home four days after his funeral suggested it was not a tragic accident. It was a plan. Carefully drawn up. Attempted twice. And, on the second visit to the same fort, completed.
On Tuesday, Siya Goyal and her alleged lover, Chetan Babulal Chaudhary, were taken into custody. Both confessed, police said.
The day after Ketan died, his body was recovered from the gorge. The day after that would have been Siya’s birthday.
KETAN AND SIYA: THE COUPLE EVERYONE THOUGHT WAS HAPPY
Ketan Vishal Agarwal was the director of a family-run real estate business. A resident of Gahunje in Pune district, the 26-year-old had a name and a future. Since February, he also had a fiancée.
His engagement to Siya Goyal had been an arranged match. The two got engaged early this year, and from the outside, the relationship seemed to be heading exactly where families hoped.
The Agrawal family had booked a grand palace in Udaipur, Rajasthan, for the wedding ceremony that was supposed to happen in November.
Two special aircraft had been arranged for guests to travel. Forty rooms had been blocked at a luxury resort in Mahabaleshwar for Siya’s upcoming birthday celebration on June 20.
Ketan’s mother went shopping with Siya. They went out for dinner. “I met her many times,” Ketan’s mother later told reporters. “We went shopping and out for dinner together frequently, yet it never crossed our minds that she could be this kind of person.”
Ketan was known as an experienced trekker, a detail that would later make the “accidental fall” story harder to believe.
THE OTHER MAN: WHO IS CHETAN CHAUDHARY
While the Agrawal and Goyal families were making arrangements for a future together, Siya Goyal was already in a relationship with someone else.
Chetan Babulal Chaudhary, 22, lived in Kondhwa, Pune. He ran a small shop. He and Siya had known each other for about a year, according to Superintendent of Police Sandip Singh Gill.
Between January 1 and June 18, Siya and Chetan had exchanged 2,004 calls. In those six months, they had spoken for a combined 238 hours.
The police investigation established that Siya was unwilling to marry Ketan. She did not want to end the relationship with Chetan. And rather than simply saying no to a wedding she did not want, she and Chetan allegedly decided on something else entirely. Ketan Agarwal, they decided, needed to be removed.
“If she didn’t want to get married, she could have simply refused; we would have cancelled the wedding immediately,” Ketan’s father, Vishal Agrawal, said later, his voice thick with grief and disbelief.
MAY 31: THE FORT, AND THE BIRTH OF A PLAN
On May 31, Ketan and Siya visited Lohagad Fort together. It was presented as a casual outing. A trek, a day out at one of Maharashtra’s most celebrated historical landmarks. The fort sits at an elevation of roughly 3,400 feet, its walls rising above lush greenery, its gorges dropping sharply hundreds of feet below.
It was during this visit, police claim, that Siya first conceived the idea of what would happen here.
The fort’s geography was not incidental to the plan. The steep gorges, the remote terrain, the possibility of a fall being passed off as an accident.
Siya came back from that May 31 visit and, investigators believe, began discussing what she had seen with Chetan.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE STOLEN PASSPORT
Before the first murder attempt, there was the Bali trip that never happened.
After the engagement in February, Ketan had planned a pre-wedding holiday to Bali. Four people were to travel together. The bookings were confirmed, the dates were set, and on the morning of the departure, the group headed to the airport.
The couple reached Mumbai airport and were preparing to board their flight.
