Prince William County jurors began deliberating Tuesday in a murder case against a Manassas husband who admitted to dismembering his wife in 2024 after he claimed she committed suicide.
Defendant Naresh Bhatt, 39, took the stand last week to say that seeing his wife Mamta Kafle’s lifeless body triggered his PTSD; hence, he began cutting apart her body in a state of shock.
Kafle’s body has never been found and her manner of death has not been determined, but prosecutors argued the story is a ruse to cover up the husband’s homicidal intentions.
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“The defendant murdered Mamta Kafle. The defendant dismembered Mamta Kafle, and the defendant got rid of her like garbage,” Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Sarah Sami said in court Tuesday.
“Now the defendant wants you to believe his story, his made-up crazy story,” she added. “From the moment that Mamta went missing, all he did was lie. He lied to every single person. And it’s hard to keep up with lies. They start slipping up.”
Mr. Bhatt’s defense team countered by saying that if the jury has any reasonable doubt about his culpability, it can’t convict him.
The six-week trial has gone into ugly details about the marriage between Mr. Bhatt and Kafle.
Kafle’s brother, Mahesh, testified that his sister sent him photos of her face with a black eye and a bloody nose in December 2023 — seven months before her disappearance in July 2024.
Sarita Neupane, Kafle’s friend, also testified that the victim shared the pictures with her and said Mr. Bhatt would beat her.
Mr. Bhatt admitted the couple’s marriage was on the rocks in the months leading up to her death. Fights would lead him to threaten divorce, while Kafle threatened suicide, he said.
But the defendant said he never physically abused his wife.
Dr. Barry Rosenfeld, a psychologist who was called as a witness by the defense, said Mr. Bhatt showed signs of PTSD.
Although Dr. Rosenfeld said panicking and not knowing what to do were normal reactions of someone suffering from post-traumatic stress, cutting up someone’s body was out of the ordinary.
During Mr. Bhatt’s testimony, he described how he was shaking uncontrollably at the sight of his dead wife on July 30, 2024.
He said he found her around 4 a.m. with a pill bottle and vomit on her body. Mr. Bhatt also said containers of insecticide were open near her remains.
He said he began acting as if he were on autopilot.
“Like extreme pain or trauma and that I was unable to think. I don’t know I was anything; I wasn’t thinking anything at all. Full body kind of moving … or automatically moving,” the defendant said Monday.
Mr. Bhatt said he tried resuscitating her for almost an hour, but never called 911.
He dropped the couple’s daughter off with a babysitter, the defendant said, then bought gloves so he could chop up Kafle’s remains over the next day.
Prosecutors shared surveillance footage of Mr. Bhatt disposing of the trash bags, which the defendant said were his wife’s belongings, not her body parts.
Prosecutors also called Mr. Bhatt a liar during their cross-examination of him.
The confession to dismembering Kafle contradicted the husband’s original report to police, when he said she had run off to Texas or New York.
Mr. Bhatt’s testimony essentially gave the jury an easy out to find him guilty of two charges of concealing and defiling a dead body.
If convicted of both, absent a murder conviction, the defendant faces up to 10 years in prison.
If convicted of murder, Mr. Bhatt faces up to life in prison.
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