Snake on a Plane

He was 32-year-old Avtar Grewal, known as Raju, a slender native of India who had been living near Vancouver, British Columbia.

As the big bird soared to its cruising altitude, a veteran Phoenix police sergeant sitting in a van on a street in suburban Ahwatukee was making a series of urgent cell phone calls.

Sergeant Mike Palombo has a cool-under-pressure reputation (he was a key supervisor on the Baseline Killer case), but the escalating situation was testing his patience.

"I began to express my concerns to Continental about [its] lack of cooperation with us," Palombo tells New Times. "I said I did not think it was a big deal for [the airline] to turn a plane around and get a homicidal and suicidal lunatic into custody."

The "lunatic" to whom the sergeant was referring was Raju Grewal.

Inside a two-story home on East Redwood Lane, the battered body of a clothed woman was face-down in a bathtub filled with bloody water.

She was 30-year-old Navneet Kaur, Grewal's wife of two years and a project manager for Assist Technologies, a Scottsdale firm that provides touch-screen technology for pharmaceutical clinical trials.

The normally tidy home near Pecos Road and 40th Street was like "helter skelter," according to one eyewitness, a reference to the Manson Family carnage in 1969.

Blood was seemingly everywhere, chairs and tables were overturned, knives strewn about, a ceiling fan in the master bedroom pulled from its moorings, and a long piece of yellow rope fashioned into a noose nearby.

On a couch in the family room was a note written and signed by Grewal.

It said, "I killed this selfish bitch who tortured me for two years. Made my life hell. Now I will kill myself."

Evidence at the scene suggested Grewal's chosen mode of self-destruction had been hanging from the ceiling fan and cutting himself with a razor blade (in which order is uncertain).

But he was more adept at murder than at suicide, and he made a run for it instead. Grewal had a 14-hour head start on police by the time they tracked his whereabouts by accessing credit-card records and other legwork.

Flight 82 had taken off late for New Delhi, and still was in U.S. airspace as Sergeant Palombo and others pleaded with Continental officials to get the plane back to Newark, where authorities could collar their murder suspect. But police reports, interviews with key players and other data show that Continental Airlines officials rebuffed the requests.

Sergeant Palombo says an officer from the multiagency task force ACTIC (Arizona Counter-Terrorism Information Center) told him that Continental officials expressed a continuing concern about the significant cost of turning the plane around.

Airline officials allegedly wanted to know who was going to pay for thousands of dollars of fuel that Flight 82 would have had to jettison to return safely to Newark or another nearby airport so soon after departure.

A Continental representative declined repeated requests to answer specific questions about this disturbing and previously unreported clash between law enforcement and the nation's fourth-largest airline.

That spokeswoman, Julie King, wrote in a May 24 e-mail to New Times that "because of a variety of legal issues, Continental does not identify specific passengers on our flights unless required to by law or subpoena. The normal procedure in these types of situations is for local law enforcement to work with immigration authorities to detain the suspect upon arrival, which is what happened in this situation."

But Continental's lack of cooperation with police, especially in this security-heightened, post-9/11 environment, continues to vex law enforcement officials and most of the aviation-safety experts contacted by New Times for this story.

To them, it's not the point that Raju Grewal was taken into custody without incident by New Delhi authorities when Flight 82 landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport, about 14 hours after takeoff.

(Grewal remains jailed there as the process of extraditing him to Phoenix to face a first-degree murder charge moves at a glacial pace.)

Mary Schiavo, a respected aviation law attorney, author, and former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, says that "beyond the altruistic motivation of helping law enforcement because they pleaded for help, we're talking here about an airline that aided and abetted the flight of a felon, and possibly hindered an ongoing investigation. Back when I was a federal prosecutor, I would have taken this to a grand jury for consideration as a criminal act.

"Can you imagine if this had been an Islamic guy from Saudi Arabia? I don't think they would have been saying, 'Oh, this guy just killed his wife, so let's let him go to New Delhi.' Instead, they blew off their obligations to the safety of their passengers, especially in this post-9/11 world."

Schiavo, a South Carolinian and private pilot who wrote the prescient 1997 book Flying Blind, Flying Safe, also says "this man had just been willing and able to take another person's life and apparently had made an effort or two at taking his own.

"What if he had decided to commit a suicidal act on the plane? We have seen people set fires in bathrooms on planes, take hostages in desperation by pretending to have a weapon and what have you. The only right thing for Continental to have done is land that plane as soon as possible."

By the accounts of her friends, coworkers, and family, Navi Kaur usually hid the desperation and unhappiness of her life as Raju Grewal's wife.

A sensitive soul whose natural beauty was equaled by her estimable mind, the native of India had been living in the States for years. But she remained close to her family, and to her homeland's cultural norms.

In 2001, she married an Indian man she had known for all of three days, after a meeting arranged by family members.

The ex-husband, who lives in Phoenix, told the Toronto Globe and Mail after the murder that he had known within days after marrying Kaur that her strong-willed, independent personality spelled trouble for the union.

The couple divorced in 2005, with Kaur assuming ownership of the home on East Redwood that later would be the site of her murder. That year, she met Raju Grewal in a meeting apparently arranged by Grewal's sister, who knew Kaur's parents.

Kaur came from a prominent family — her father is a retired Indian Police Service superintendent — and they were eager for her to marry fellow divorcé Grewal.

Dutifully, she did so at a ceremony in India later that year.

But Kaur soon confided to friends that Grewal tried to control her every move once he had slipped the wedding ring on her finger.

For starters, he wanted his new wife to quit her top-drawer job in Scottsdale to be with him in Canada. Though he had been an accountant in India, Grewal had worked in Vancouver for a few years as a truck driver and forklift operator.

But Kaur declined to make the move, a relentless source of humiliation to her new husband. The couple spent little time together, just swapping weekend visits every few months.

A neighbor and close friend of Kaur's named Sravanthi Sankranthi later told Phoenix police that long absences from Grewal did not made Kaur's heart grow fonder.

Shortly before she died, Kaur told Sankranthi that Grewal's incessant phone calls from Canada would make her teeth chatter with stress. She expressed concern about her husband's mental health, saying he was depressed and irrational at times, especially about the state of the strained marriage.

Gina Wilkins, who was Navi Kaur's manager and good friend, later told a detective that Kaur had spoken with Grewal by phone on the night before the murder.

Kaur confided in Wilkins that she had told her husband she wanted a divorce.

Wilkins said Kaur told her that Grewal had responded, "If you want a divorce, tell me in person because you might as well kill me."

Raju Grewal apparently made plans to fly to Phoenix the following day, March 29. Terrified at having to face her husband in person, Kaur expressed her fears to Wilkins a few hours before she was supposed to pick him up at Sky Harbor International Airport late that afternoon.

Wilkins said she implored her friend to seek refuge at a cousin's home in the East Valley, but Kaur said that Grewal would track her down.

Wilkins last spoke to Kaur by cell phone about 5:25 p.m., at which time she offered her own home as sanctuary from Raju Grewal. Kaur thanked her but said she already was on her way to the airport.