The police arrested the daughter Yoshita, who had dropped out after Class 12, and her boyfriend Yash Shitole, 23, who has completed an Industrial Training Institute course, for the murder. Gokhale had lost her husband two years ago.

As per the report, on April 1, Yoshita and Shitole called an ambulance to their home and rushed Gokhale to Pune’s Sassoon General Hospital. They told the doctors that Gokhale had sustained a head injury after she fell in the bathroom. She was pronounced dead by the doctors and the matter was reported to the police.

“After the autopsy, doctors opined that the death had occurred due to an injury to the head. We had some suspicions about the story narrated by the girl… We spoke to their relatives and nothing suspicious was revealed initially. A couple of days later, some relatives took the girl to Mumbai to stay with them. Meanwhile, we were in touch with the relatives,” The Indian Express quoted Senior Inspector Manisha Patil as saying.

“Our probe revealed some visits of the girl’s boyfriend to the house and some suspicious transactions from the mother’s account over a period of time totalling Rs 2 lakh. On Monday, we initially questioned the girl and later her boyfriend. Their interrogation revealed the sequence of events,” Patil added.

Patil further said that Yoshita and Shitole had spent the money they had withdrawn and were afraid that Gokhale would soon find out about the withdrawals. “The two hatched the plan to murder her. They gagged her with a scarf while she was asleep and then bludgeoned her with a hammer. They tried to pass it off as death resulting from an accidental fall. The two have been arrested for murder and destruction of evidence,” Patil said.