209. Murder in Room 1701 | Wendy Albano

The Desi Crime Podcast

The episode recounts the investigation into the 2012 murder of American interior designer Wendy Albano in Bangkok. It follows the flight of

Key takeaways

• Ritesh Sanghvi used the identity Rananjay Jain to operate a mobile phone shop in Gangakhed, Maharashtra.
• The suspect utilized a rotating supply of SIM cards and handsets to maintain untraceable communications via a human switchboard.

Main topics

• The murder of Wendy Albano
• Ritesh Sanghvi's manhunt and evasion

Notable quotes

The cameras can tell you who did it. What they cannot tell you is why...

Conclusion

A gripping exploration of how a sophisticated fugitive's attempt at to

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) There is a man in Gangakhed who runs a mobile phone shop. And if you walked past it in the summer of 2014, you wouldn't have looked at it twice. You see, Gangakhed is a small town of about 50,000 people on the banks of the Godavari River. It is in the driest, most forgotten corner of Marathwada. Sugarcane country, temple country. And the shop itself, Kaveri Mobiles, is exactly what a phone shop in a town like that should be. Glass counter, a wall of covers and chargers, a soldering iron in the back, and a quiet young man behind the counter who fixes your screen, sells you a recharge, and Speaker 2 (0:34) never quite makes conversation. Speaker 1 (0:36) His name, everyone in Gangakhed knows, is Rananjay Jain. He rents Speaker 2 (0:40) a Speaker 1 (0:40) small room nearby. He has a beard, he wears pathanis, he keeps to himself. And in the two years he has been there, he has done absolutely nothing worth remembering. He has no bank account. He gets no visitors. He is, by every available measure, the most boring man in Marathwada. Which is why what happens on the morning of Sunday, September 28, 2014, makes no sense at all. Because on that morning, a team from the Mumbai Crime Branch, the same unit that hunts gangsters and contract killers, a team that has spent the past month knocking on doors in South Bombay, dressed as courier delivery boys, walks into Gangakhed and picks up the phone repair guy. And when they put him in the vehicle for the 500-kilometer drive back to Mumbai, they're not calling him Rananjay Jain. They're calling him by a name that has been sitting in an Interpol file for two and a half years. A name a United States senator once wrote to Hillary Clinton about. A name attached to a woman on a bathroom floor on the 17th floor of a luxury tower in Bangkok. Three... thousand kilometers away, in a case that two governments had all but given up on. This is the story of that man. This is the story of the fugitive of Maharashtra. Speaker 1 (2:38) Hi everyone, welcome to the Desi Crime Podcast, a show where we dive deep into some of the craziest stories from around South Asia. I'm Speaker 2 (2:46) your Speaker 1 (2:46) host Aaryan and I'm Speaker 2 (2:47) Ishwara Speaker 1 (2:47) and the case that I have for you today is one that mysteriously stretches across borders yet somehow has completely been lost from the annals of Indian crime history. Speaker 2 (2:57) Aaryan, what an insane description. Hillary Speaker 1 (2:59) Clinton mentioned. We Speaker 2 (3:01) were beginning in a place I'd never heard of in a tiny what seems like really modest mobile phone repair shop. There are hundreds and hundreds of those in a 10 mile radius. radius in India and from that we've jumped to Hillary Clinton and an Interpol notice and a woman in Bangkok insane never heard of this before there is this Speaker 1 (3:16) theory about I think it's called the four person or five point contact theory where you know everybody in the world by a difference of five people it used to be five people now it's four people the number of Speaker 2 (3:28) hours I've spent thinking of my connections to people and actually every single time found one every single time Speaker 1 (3:35) like my favorite is what is my connection to donald trump and i can get there within two two people and Speaker 2 (3:40) usually it's so funny you find that one person in your life who's famous enough yeah Speaker 1 (3:45) yeah to get Speaker 2 (3:46) you there and for me usually having studied in shivnagar school it oftentimes used to go through a connection of shivnagar when i was younger it was so funny Speaker 1 (3:53) But yeah, so this case, Aishwarya, I went down a whirlwind I had never ever explored. And I think you're going to find this case super interesting. Let's get Speaker 2 (4:02) into Speaker 1 (4:02) it. Speaker 2 (4:03) But before we get on with the episode, we need to let you all know that you can now get early access to all Desi Crime episodes on Amazon Music. To get your fix a whole three days before anyone else, go download the Amazon Music app today. Speaker 1 (4:15) It is half past three in the afternoon on Monday, February 13th, 2012, and a housekeeper at Frasier Suites Sukhumvit is doing her rounds. Frasier Suites is not exactly a hotel, it is a serviced residence, 32 stories and 185 apartments on Sukhumvit Soi 11, which, if you have ever spent a night out in Bangkok, is a street you already know. Rooftop bars, neon, a permanent low hum of a place that has never once considered going to bed. And Frasier's suite sits right in the middle of it, full of expat executives on long postings, the kind of building where a 24-hour reception desk watches a steady parade of suitcases roll past at every hour and thinks nothing of them. The maid lets herself into an apartment on the 17th floor, and she finds the guest on the bathroom floor, an American woman. 51 years old, in a bra and black trousers, with multiple stab wounds to her chest and torso and dark marks pressed into her neck. Within the hour, the Lumpini police are in the room. And here is what they find, or rather what they don't find. No forced entry. In the police's own words, no signs of a struggle, a phrase I'm going to come back to because I don't fully believe it. They cannot even say whether anything was stolen. The body goes to the Chulalongkorn Hospital, where the coroner works backwards and lands on a time of death of roughly 7.30 the previous evening, which means the woman has been lying on the bathroom floor in a fully-staffed 185-apartment tower with a rooftop bar doing brisk Sunday business over her head for 20 hours. And in 20 hours, not one person came. The victim's passport says Wendy S. Albano of Tampa, Florida. The American embassy is informed and somewhere in the small hours of Florida time, a phone rings in the home of a family that will spend the next decade waiting for an answer. The investigation, at least at the start, moves fast. Because honestly, this is not a difficult case. This is a building made of... CCTV cameras. The footage shows Wendy checking in on February 9th on a booking made over the internet and it shows she was not alone. Staying with her on the hotel's own records is a brown man somewhere between 25 and 30 years old. He had submitted his passport during check-in and his citizenship is that of India. The cameras show the two of them going out together on Sunday and coming back at around 7 in the evening, side by side. That is the last time a lens sees Wendy Albano alive. One hour later, the same cameras catch the man alone, crossing the lobby with his luggage, calm as a Tuesday checkout, and at 11 that night, Thai immigration stamps him out of the country at Suvarnabhumi airport. From the coroner's estimated time of death to wheels up, the entire window is about three and a half hours. By the time the maid's master key turns in that lock, the only suspect in the murder of Wendy Albano has been in India for the better part of a day. Thai police announce a warrant and contact Interpol, the international police. And on February 16th, the story detonates across international press for... All the reasons you would expect. A wealthy American woman, a luxury tower, a foreign suspect and CCTV footage. Her family releases a single line. We are devastated by the loss of a kind, caring and loving mother, daughter, sister and friend. Her daughter, Jenny, tells the Tampa Bay Times, quote, I love my mother dearly. And that is where the easy part of this case ends. The cameras can tell you who did it. What they cannot tell you is why a 51-year-old interior designer from South Tampa was sharing a service department in Bangkok with a 25-year-old computer seller from Bombay in the first place. For that, you have to understand who Wendy Albano was and what had happened to her in the four years before she got on that plane. Speaker 1 (8:14) I want to introduce you to Wendy through the people who actually knew her. Because in this story, almost everyone who gets to define her is either a policeman repeating what a killer said or a headline writer reaching for the word socialite. Her memorial guestbook, however, has 50 entries written by classmates and sorority sisters and business partners who were not performing for anybody. And it is a far better source than any newspaper. Wendy Greenwald grew up in Broward County, Florida and graduated from Nova High School in 1978. She was part of the gymnastics team, National Honor Society, and by every account, impossible to dislike. One classmate remembers her as, quote, brains, beauty, athleticism and an infectious smile. Another writes that her particular talent was making whoever she was talking to feel comfortable and that he cannot recall her even saying a bad word about anyone. She went on to the University of Florida, where she pledged to Chi Omega in 1980, a sorority, and took a degree in advertising. And from that point, she built the career she would run for the next 20 years. Wendy Albano Interiors, high-end residential design, first in California and then in Tampa, where a client list reportedly included the baseball player Derek Jeter and Tino Martinez. Which tells you nothing about her taste and everything about her market. Because in 2000s Tampa, decorating f***ed. for Yankees was about as high as the ladder went. The guest book gives you the texture of her character that the client list cannot. Her business partner, Gail Apple, writes a message that reads less like a tribute and more like an inside joke shouted into the dark. She remembers the two of them arriving an hour late to their very first meeting with Derek Jeter because Wendy had painted her nails red, smudged them on her white blouse,