Behind his fluent Punjabi, carpentry work and quiet life, a savage secret

NEW DELHI: For over a decade, his neighbours in Ludhiana knew Joginder Singh as a quiet, soft-spoken carpenter. He carried an Aadhaar card, voted in local elections and spoke Punjabi with the fluency of a native.On Monday, the carefully constructed life of the 58-year-old came crashing down when crime branch sleuths of Delhi Police reached his doorsteps. In a flash, Joginder turned out to be Yoginder Singh, who had killed his wife in Delhi in 1992 and jumped parole eight years later.On the morning of March 15, 1992, police found a woman’s body on a mattress at a rented house in southwest Delhi’s Pillangi village. She had been strangled. The landlord’s brother caught Yoginder, who hailed from Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh and worked at a furniture shop in south Delhi, after a brief chase as he attempted to flee.By 1997, a court had sentenced Yoginder to life for the murder. In June 2000, Delhi High Court granted him a four-week parole. He walked out of the prison gates and never returned. Yoginder constantly changed locations — moving through mountains of Himachal Pradesh and villages of Bihar and West Bengal before reaching Karnataka — spending two to three years in each state.In 2012, he decided to set-tle down in Punjab. Reinventing his identity, he became Joginder Singh and changed his father’s name from Jai Prakash to Jaipal. He mastered fluent Punjabi to blend in and procured a new Aadhaar card and voter ID under his assumed name.For the next 14 years, he led an nondescript life and worked as a carpenter, convinced that Yoginder, the man who had killed his wife, was dead to the world.However, for Delhi Police, the trail didn’t go cold. Acting on a tip-off, it began verifying the identities of over 500 people across UP and Punjab. Towards the end of last Dec, a team spent 10 days undercover in Ludhiana, tracking a man who matched the description of the murderer but had a different name.“On Jan 5, the cops finally decided to press the button. When Yoginder sensed their presence in his locality, he attempted to flee on a motorcycle. Following a high-speed chase through the streets of the bustling area, he was finally tackled to the ground,” said DCP (crime) Sanjeev Kumar Yadav.Yoginder has been sent back to Tihar Jail to serve out his life sentence.