MELBOURNE: For over a week, no one had noticed the dying homeless Indian-origin woman in the bushlands of a quiet Sydney suburb. It may not have made a difference if someone had — she had sustained 80% burns in an acid attack. Monika Chetty, 39, died 27 painful days later at a hospital. But police know little more now than they did then, six years ago. Now, in its third public appeal, the state government of New South Wales, Australia has announced a $500,000 AUD reward for leads in what has been a blind case so far. The inquest will begin in a week.
“The brutality was unlike anything I had seen in all my years as an officer,” Andrew Booth, investigating officer in the case, told TOI. “Medical reports suggest she had been in that condition for seven to 10 days before she was found, without any pain management,” said Matthew Newton, acting superintendent of Liverpool Police Station.
But tracing suspects, motives and any part of the narrative that preceded the attack has been difficult. She had been a nurse for only two years before giving it up to take “odd jobs”, which police did not get into the details of. She had been evicted from her house, was in and out of public housing and had been living in her car in Liverpool when she was killed. Her family, who are from UP and Bihar and had moved to Australia in 1988 from Fiji, has rarely appeared before the media. And she had divorced her husband, Ronald Chetty, six years before she died. They had three children.
Given the nature of the attack, police believe there was a personal motive. In her statement, Monika had told the police she had refused to share a smoke with a stranger at Bigge Park, a water playground, after which he attacked her. “We strongly believe she told the initial investigating police a story about Bigge Park to protect herself or those she loved from reprisal,” detective-inspector Dean Johnstone had said at a press conference in 2018.
The “reprisal” could have to do with an angle police have been pursuing — a marriage visa scam she was allegedly involved in. An investigative journalist from ABC News, Hagar Cohen, has done extensive work on tracing the network of young people Chetty was allegedly offering her visa services to — for a sum of money (around $40,000AUD), she could find an Australian match for an immigrant to help them stay on in the country.
Like Gokul Mochi, a student from Gujarat. “Mochi’s account was that he wanted to settle in Australia on a skilled migration visa when his student visa expired. But immigration laws in Australia changed around the time. His friends at an Indian restaurant he was working at told him about Chetty,” said Cohen. He would pay her in instalments of $1,000 and had managed to pay off $30,000 when Chetty died. Immigration officials soon got a hold of him and had him deported. Cohen went on to meet several like Mochi. “In the months leading up to her death, Chetty had been approaching a number of people, asking if they were interested in a marriage-for-visa arrangement.”
Her husband, however, did not know anything about her life. “She was in sporadic touch with her husband and children. But her whereabouts and source of income were not known (to them),” said Booth. While Liverpool residents and members of the Indian community in Sydney did offer to help her, she had reportedly declined. “What was bizarre about Monika’s situation was that she did not want any help. A women’s refuge offered her food, shelter, blankets etc, but she refused that help as well,” said Cohen.
After all these years, the coroner’s inquest, held when a death is suspicious, will begin on November 23. “The inquest comes late because the police were still working on all lines of inquiry and closing them off,” said Booth. “All evidence we have collated so far will be looked at for cause of death and lines of inquiry that need to be followed will be formalised … We all want answers to this horrific, personal crime.”