Sheena Bora Case: The Daughter Introduced as a Sister, and the Mystery That Is Still on Trial

On the evening of 24 April 2012, Rahul Mukerjea got a message from his girlfriend’s phone. Sheena Bora was breaking up with him. Then she stopped answering.

Rahul did what anyone would do. He went to the police to report her missing. According to his later account, the police stations he went to sent him away. Sheena’s family said she had moved to America. Her office got a resignation email. Her flat was given up. And for more than three years, almost nobody asked where she had gone.

She had not gone to America. Prosecutors now say she was dead within hours of that text, and that the people who sent it were her own family.

Nobody has been convicted in this case. Indrani Mukerjea, Sanjeev Khanna and Peter Mukerjea are accused and deny the charges. Everything below about how Sheena died is the prosecution’s account, not a court finding.

To understand the case, you have to understand the family, and that is not easy. Even the people in it seem to disagree about who was related to whom.

Indrani Mukerjea was born Pori Bora in Guwahati. As a young woman she had two children, Sheena in 1987 and Mikhail in 1988, with a man named Siddhartha Das, who says the couple never married. Around 1989 or 1990 she left both children with her parents in Guwahati and moved to Kolkata.

There she married Sanjeev Khanna in 1993 and had a daughter, Vidhie. She also built a career. Her recruitment firm, INX Services, hired staff for STAR India. That is how she met Peter Mukerjea, the British-born head of STAR India and one of the most powerful men in Indian television. She divorced Khanna and married Peter in 2002. Together they later launched INX Media.

Around 2006, Sheena and Mikhail moved to Mumbai. Indrani did not introduce them as her children. She introduced them as her younger brother and sister. Sheena studied at St Xavier’s College, then worked at Reliance Infrastructure and, from 2011, at Mumbai Metro One.

And then Sheena fell in love with Rahul, Peter’s son from his first marriage. On paper, he was her stepbrother. To the people who believed the cover story, he was dating his stepmother’s sister. Either way, prosecutors say, Indrani did not approve.

On 23 May 2012, about a month after Sheena vanished, villagers found a badly burnt body in a forest at Gagode Khind, in the Pen area of Raigad district, south of Mumbai.

What happened next is one of the most damaging parts of the whole story. The local police did a post-mortem on the spot and sent samples to JJ Hospital in Mumbai. But they did not register a murder case. Pen officer Suresh Mirge later said his superintendent told him to make only a diary entry. A constable said staff had wanted a murder case filed.

The remains were never identified. Years later, experts found animal bones among the 2012 samples. The doctor who did the spot post-mortem told The Quint he had forgotten everything. A state inquiry recommended further action, and we could find no report that anyone was ever punished.

If the police had treated that body as a murder in 2012, the case might have broken three years earlier.

The case broke by accident. On 21 August 2015, Khar police in Mumbai arrested a man named Shyamvar Rai for carrying an illegal pistol. Rai had once been Indrani Mukerjea’s driver.

Police say that in custody he started talking about something much bigger than a gun. Within days, Indrani was arrested in Mumbai and Sanjeev Khanna in Kolkata. On 29 August, police dug up a skeleton at the Raigad site.

The news stunned India. A woman who had sat at the top of the country’s TV industry was accused of killing her own daughter, a daughter most of her friends had never known existed. On 26 August, Mikhail Bora confirmed publicly that Sheena was Indrani’s daughter, not her sister.

Mumbai Police Commissioner Rakesh Maria was leading the case himself. Then, in the middle of it, he was moved out of the job, and on 18 September the state handed the case to the CBI. Peter Mukerjea was arrested in November 2015.

Shyamvar Rai later became the prosecution’s approver. That means he was pardoned in exchange for testifying about a crime he says he took part in. His account is the spine of the CBI’s case, and the defence says it cannot be trusted.

In court in 2017, Rai said Indrani drugged Sheena’s drink in a car in Mumbai on 24 April 2012 and then strangled her while Khanna held her by the hair. Rai said he held her mouth and that she bit his right thumb. The body, he said, was put in a bag, kept in a garage overnight, then driven to the forest near Pen and burnt with fuel.

Rai also testified that Indrani had first talked about killing both Sheena and Mikhail as early as 2009.

Why would a mother do this? The CBI says Indrani objected to Sheena’s relationship with Rahul. A later charge sheet added a money angle: it alleges that Indrani worried family property could pass to Sheena and Rahul if they married, cutting out Vidhie.

Mikhail says his own drink was spiked the same evening. Indrani and Khanna also face an attempt-to-murder charge over that. Peter Mukerjea is accused of conspiracy. The CBI says he stayed in touch with Indrani around the time of the killing while he was abroad, and later misled Rahul by email.

She bit my right thumb.Shyamvar Rai, testifying in 2017

Charges were framed on 17 January 2017: murder, criminal conspiracy, kidnapping and destroying evidence, for all three accused. All three pleaded not guilty.

Then came the long wait. Peter Mukerjea got bail in 2020. The Bombay High Court noted that, apart from the approver’s statement, there was no reference to him in any evidence. It also noted his four years in jail and recent heart surgery.

Indrani got bail from the Supreme Court in May 2022. She had spent six and a half years in jail, and only 68 of 237 listed witnesses had been examined. The judges said the trial was not going to end any time soon. Rai, the approver, got bail that August, even though the CBI argued an approver should stay in custody until the end.

By April 2026 the CBI told the Supreme Court that 49 witnesses had been examined, 73 dropped, and only two or three were left. One judge put it simply: the case cannot be kept pending.

The bones that went missing. In 2024, prosecutors told the court they could not find the remains recovered by Pen police back in 2012. Then an email surfaced from the brother of a forensic expert, who is in a civil dispute with her, claiming she had them. Within hours, the CBI said the bones had been in its own store room in Delhi all along. The CBI says its case does not depend on those bones. The court ordered an inquiry into the email; we found no report of its result.

The DNA. In 2019, a forensic scientist testified that DNA from the 2015 skeleton matched Indrani’s blood and showed she was the biological mother. Another expert later testified that a skull-to-photo comparison matched Sheena. The defence disputes the DNA report.

Vidhie’s evidence. In September 2025, Vidhie told the court she recognised Sheena’s voice in a phone call recorded between 26 and 30 April 2012, days after the night the CBI says Sheena died. She said she had listened to it hundreds of times. She also said she exchanged emails with Sheena until 2013, called the statement the CBI attributes to her forged, and alleged that her stepbrothers took over Rs 7 crore in assets after Indrani’s arrest. All of this is her testimony, and the court has not ruled on it.

Mikhail’s letters. In September 2026, Mikhail wrote to the court saying he feared for his life, attaching photos he said Indrani had posted online. Indrani’s lawyer called the claims false and frivolous. The court asked the CBI to respond.

Because no court has ruled yet, nothing here is settled. These are the big claims, what supports them, and where they stand.

In August 2015, the Sheena Bora case swallowed Indian news. It had everything television loves: money, power, a glamorous accused, a secret daughter, and a family tree nobody could draw. Every day brought a new leak from the investigation.

Many journalists were uneasy about it even then. Writing in Scroll, Kalpana Sharma said the media was devouring every scrap the police threw out. When the case moved to the CBI, a senior state official complained that the coverage had created an impression of deliberate delay.

Years later, the story came back on Netflix. The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth, a four-part series, was due out in February 2024. The CBI went to court to stop it. On 29 February 2024, the Bombay High Court dismissed the CBI’s plea, saying it found nothing in the series that would prejudice the trial. Indrani is the only accused who took part. Vidhie and Mikhail are interviewed.

As of October 2026, the trial is in its last stretch before Special CBI Judge J.P. Darekar in Mumbai. In March the Supreme Court gave a final nine-month extension and said it would not entertain any further requests, which points to a deadline around mid-December 2026. In September, the CBI’s investigating officer was giving evidence.

Indrani, now a British national, has asked several times to travel abroad, partly to change a will registered in Spain. In May 2026 the trial court refused, saying the risk that she might not come back could not be ruled out.

Outside court, she has told her own story. Her 2023 memoir, Unbroken, maintains her innocence and insists Sheena is alive. Peter published a memoir too. Vidhie wrote a book, and later told the court it was not based on her personal knowledge.

A verdict could come within weeks. Until then, all three accused are presumed innocent.

Strip away the glamour and the Sheena Bora case is about a young woman nobody went looking for. Her boyfriend was turned away by the police. A burnt body was found and filed away. Her own family, by the prosecution’s account, told the world she had gone to America, and the world believed it.

What happens next depends on an approver who admits his own part, a set of DNA results the defence disputes, and a witness who says she heard Sheena’s voice after the date she supposedly died. It is a hard case for any judge.

But whatever the verdict, the failure of 2012 is already proven. If a burnt body in a forest had been treated as a murder that May, Sheena Bora’s family would not have waited fourteen years for an answer.