The Code Case

In August 2018, Jeet Thakur Sahai was called by his former principal Mr. Bharat Sen in Dehra Dun. Jeet had studied at the Wilson School there between 1994 and 1998. The school had separate hostels for boys and girls and a murder happened in the girl’s hostel. The girl who was murdered was Maia Singh, who was a Grade 11 student.

Dehra Dun Police were investigating but Mr. Sen wanted Jeet to help out as well. Jeet met Mr. Sen and the chief police investigator, Inspector Ritesh Arya. The girl’s hostel had been sealed by the police and none of the 150 girls living there were allowed to leave. Inspector Arya’s colleagues including female constables were interviewing the girls as well and helping with the investigation.

Jeet: “How did Maia die?”

Ritesh: “She was stabbed close to her heart. She bled to death. We are doing an extensive search of all rooms as well as all girls who lived at the hostel.”

Mr. Sen: “I would like the culprit to be caught as soon as possible.”

Jeet: “Yes, sir, of course. Ritesh, I think we should also get a computer expert and search the emails of all the girls. That may help us with the investigation.”

Ritesh: “Our expert, Mr. Navin Mascrenhas, is coming to the hostel in another hour and will start the extensive sweep of emails. Mr. Sen, we have your authorization to check the girls’ emails, correct?”

Mr. Sen: “Yes, and if you need me to fill any paperwork for that, I will do so too. Thanks. “

Mr. Sen and his colleagues notified all the girls and they were told to provide their email addresses and passwords. In such a situation, if they did not provide the email addresses passwords, then they would be contravening school policy as well as interfering in a police investigation.

After getting all the email addresses ad passwords along with a list of girls for each grade, Jeet helped Navin look through the thousands of emails.

Jeet: “Even though, we look at all emails (especially in the last two months), let us pay more attention to the girls from Grade 11.”

Navin: “Sure, that is good. There are 43 girls in Grade 11, out of whom 29 live in the hostel.”

Jeet: “So, our focus should be on those 28 girls. The 29th one, Maia, is dead.”

Navin: “Yes, I agree.”

As they looked through the thousands of emails over many hours, Jeet found one email from Pallavi Chandokh to Gunjan Bhatia. It just had ‘PDLD VLQJK’ as text and nothing more.

Navin was not sure what that meant so Jeet looked at it, while Navin looked through more emails.

Jeet spent more than two hours trying to find out what the text meant. It was probably a code. Finally, after a lot of trial and error with letters and numbers, he found out that it meant MAIA SINGH. Each letter of the name was actually the third letter from the original name’s letter, so M became P, A became D, and so on.

Jeet explained this to Navin and Ritesh.

Ritesh and his team further investigated Pallavi and Gunjan and found out that they had a big argument with Maia in regards to an exam. They planned on cheating and Maia had overheard. It was late at night and Maia mentioned that she would tell the school authorities the next day. In a moment of rage they planned it and sent this email as code; then later that night they went to her room telling her that they would not cheat, but they ended up murdering her.

They thought they would get away because there were so many students and it would not be easy to find the culprit and it would be a long investigation.

However, Jeet’s cracking of the code helped in them being caught.

Pallavi and Gunjan were arrested and would be tried in court soon. Mr. Sen thanked Jeet, Ritesh and his team, and Navin.

Jeet soon returned to Delhi to resume his work in a few days.