Virginia Jury Convicts Husband Who Admitted Dismembering His Missing Wife's Body
Naresh Bhatt testified he found his wife dead and panicked, cutting up her body with a saw before throwing it away. A jury didn't buy it, convicting him of murder in a case where her remains have never been found.
A Prince William County, Virginia jury convicted Naresh Bhatt of first-degree murder this week in the death of his wife, Mamta Kafle Bhatt, whose body has never been recovered more than two years after she disappeared.
Jurors deliberated for several hours before returning the verdict Tuesday afternoon, finding Bhatt guilty not only of murder but of concealing a dead body and defiling a dead body, according to WUSA9's courtroom reporting. Bhatt stood silently as the verdict was read. Sentencing is scheduled for March 12, 2027.
His own account
The case turned heavily on Bhatt's own testimony. He told jurors he came home in July 2024 to find Kafle Bhatt, 28, already dead, and that he tried unsuccessfully to revive her before moving her body to the bathroom, according to detailed trial coverage from the Kathmandu Post, which has closely followed the case within Nepal's diaspora community. Bhatt said he used a saw and knives to dismember her body so he could dispose of it in a trash can, stopping partway through because he lacked the physical strength to continue. He maintained throughout the trial that she had died by suicide and that he panicked and hid her death out of fear he would be blamed.
"WE TRIED TO REVIVE HER, BUT I COULDN'T. I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO."
Prosecutors told a very different story. They argued Bhatt killed his wife around July 30, 2024, pointing to forensic blood-pattern evidence, his digital search history in the days around her death, and surveillance footage that, taken together, they said showed a deliberate killing rather than a panicked cover-up of a suicide. Court TV's trial coverage noted the defense leaned almost entirely on reasonable doubt, arguing the state never proved a homicide occurred at all.
A case built without a body
Securing a murder conviction without ever recovering the victim's remains is rare, and legal analysts following the trial said the prosecution's reliance on digital and forensic evidence — rather than physical remains — made this a genuinely difficult case to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury ultimately found that threshold had been met.
Bhatt's defense team is expected to appeal, continuing to argue the state's case was built on circumstantial inference rather than direct proof of a homicide. For Kafle Bhatt's family, the verdict closes one chapter of a painful two-year search for answers — even as her body itself remains missing.