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20 years for strangling lover

Ashwath Rao

Professor Vijay Gupta faced the judge, then turned his penetrating eyes at Dr Kevin Anderson to scream: "He's not a man. He's worse than an animal. He's a disease to society -- worse than AIDS."

Gupta, a professor at University of California at Los Angeles, has been saying similar things for over a year since the murder of his pregnant wife, 33-year-old Dr Deepti Gupta.

"I was brought up to forgive and let people live," the engineering professor had said in an earlier interview. "But how I can forgive someone who took my wife from me, and the mother from my baby girl? And how can I forgive someone who makes his victim appear like the culprit?"

On Thursday, during Anderson's trial, he continued in the same vein. "There's no cure for him. He should be put in a cage."

A few minutes later Anderson offered an apology in the Pasadena, California, courtroom.

It was a "terrible, terrible tragedy for everyone involved", he said as he looked at his wife Heidi and several friends. "I can't even begin with words to say how I feel about what has happened in the last year and a half."

"It's beyond sorry. It's beyond the word that has been used a lot here: remorse. Those are good words, but it just goes so much deeper than that," he said while apologizing to Gupta and his family. But Judge Terri Schwartz would not believe his words.

"The way Dr Gupta looked at Mr Anderson was as a mentor, after he took her under his wing, so to speak," she said. "She had every reason in the world to trust this man and that led to her untimely, tragic death."

Anderson said he wanted to rehabilitate himself and once he served the (lighter) sentence he would treat patients in poorer parts of Orange County. But Judge Schwartz said she could not believe the magnitude of the tragedy and sentenced 42-year-old Anderson to 20 years in prison.

Five years of the sentence was for knowingly terminating Deepti Gupta's pregnancy. "While you are not a danger to other members of the public, you could be a danger to someone you might be in a relationship with," Schwartz told Anderson.

Gupta ridiculed the plea for parole. "Come on, stand up if you still feel this man should be on parole," he yelled at Anderson's supporters, who turned their heads away.

About a month ago, the court had rejected Anderson's appeal for bail, with the judge agreeing with the prosecution that he may flee the country. "This is a classic murder case," Judge Schwartz told Anderson on Thursday. "This is not an unusual case."

A jury had found Anderson, who had admitted killing his lover Deepti in the Angeles National Forest on November 11, 1999, guilty of second-degree murder a few months ago.

The forest is a few minutes drive from the hospital where he worked. Deepti Gupta's home was about an hour's drive from the park too. The prosecution argued that he had lured Deepti to an isolated spot under the pretext of stargazing, and then killed her with his Snoopy tie because she had confronted him the previous night and told him that she was expecting his baby.

He tried to blow up her vehicle, but failed. He was arrested a few miles from the scene of the crime after his own vehicle got bogged down in mud -- and the police arrived on the scene alerted by a passing motorist who had watched Anderson attempting to push Deepti's car off a cliff.

The jury also heard graphic details of how he had carried a "murder kit" with a rope, tie, gloves, gasoline and matches for several weeks before he killed Deepti.

Anderson swore in the court that an argument broke out between him and Deepti, and he strangled her in rage. She had threatened to tell his wife about their affair and threatened his daughter, he said. It was not a premeditated murder, he declared. Had he been found guilty of premeditated murder, he could have faced the death penalty.

Vijay Gupta, who has also filed a civil suit against Anderson, says he does not want Anderson's money. His purpose is clear: "I want peace for my soul -- and my wife's," he says. He wants Anderson to suffer the maximum.

"There is no justice, perhaps," he says, sorely disappointed that Anderson is not headed for the electric chair. But "he will rot in hell -- forever."

He does not fault his wife for the affair. "He [Anderson] overpowered her, he charmed her, he lured her," he says. "At one point she must have given in, but she did not care for that man. She never wrote him love letters. It was all one-sided."

She did not confide in him because she must have felt ashamed and guilty. "Rape victims often take many years to come out in the open and tell what happened," he says.

Gupta also says Anderson and his lawyer Michael Abzug have portrayed his wife as a nasty, short-tempered person. "She was a wonderful mother, a wonderful wife," he had told rediff.com "She had a very busy schedule but she was always there when we wanted her."

On Thursday, he sought to rehabilitate her image. He sought to show videos of Deepti playing with their daughter, who is now three. But the judge refused the request saying she had already decided about the sentence.

Deputy District Attorney Marian Thompson, who had unsuccessfully sought to try Anderson for double murder, is upset by Schwartz's decision. She told a local newspaper that Prof Gupta needed to respond to the defence's unfavourable portrayal of his wife.

Gupta believes he will have an opportunity to present "a true picture" of his wife in the civil case. Meanwhile, he says, he just does not know how long he will go on telling his daughter that her mother has gone to "jai, jai."

"She still keeps asking me why it takes her mother such a long time to come back," he says, fighting back the tears.

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