Snake on a Plane

"Then you have the issue of passengers who might need to be re-accommodated or rerouted, as I'm sure many people were making onward connections from Delhi. And that's best-case, with the plane returning to Newark. I have heard that long-haul diversions to more remote locations — northern Canada, Russia — can run well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Night had fallen in Phoenix on March 30. Personnel from the Medical Examiner's Office finally had lifted Navi Kaur's body out of the tub and taken it to the morgue.

Her autopsy would show that she died of severe blunt-force trauma to her face and body. Kaur's assailant had beaten her, strangled her, tried to suffocate her with a pillow and stuck her in the tub (it's uncertain, according to the postmortem, if she was dead or alive at that point).

Though Canadian police were ready to arrest Raju if Flight 82's pilot landed there, Palombo says his ACTIC contact told him that Continental had decided not to land in Canada and the plane already was eastbound across the Atlantic.

"So," the sergeant says, "we're thinking that with the total lack of cooperation from Continental that this operation was going to be a total loss. We started to transition to, 'What do we do if this plane gets all the way to India?'"

But the cops had one last chance at nabbing Grewal short of India.

Mike Palombo says he learned from ACTIC "that the FBI was coordinating with the Air Force to land the plane at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. I'm thinking that we're on really good grounds, because the Air Force base is like a consulate, like American soil, and we wouldn't have to worry about extradition. But Continental just wouldn't land."

FBI spokeswoman McCarley reiterates that, "to my knowledge," the agency wasn't involved in this part of the operation.

By now, Interpol, a sprawling multinational agency similar in concept (but far larger) than ACTIC, was involved in the chase and had fashioned an international arrest murder warrant against Raju Grewal.

Palombo says the FBI generated a plan to take Grewal into custody as he exited the plane in New Delhi and then hold him in an airport concourse before he cleared customs and officially entered India. (On this point, the Phoenix sergeant and the FBI spokeswoman finally agree.)

The idea was to put Grewal back on the next plane to the States with an FBI agent and a State Department representative as escorts.

But none of those plans panned out, as Indian authorities immediately took their allegedly murderous native son into custody.

The machinations involving Grewal's possible extradition are in their earliest stages, and attorneys familiar with the process say years may pass before Grewal is returned to Maricopa County for trial.

Navi Kaur's murder made bigger news in India and Canada than in Phoenix, where it occurred.

"The Mysterious Phone Call That Changed A Life," was the headline of a story in Toronto's Globe and Mail, referring to Kaur's pronouncement to Grewal's husband shortly before her murder about wanting a divorce. (It could have been titled "The Phone Call that Ended A Life.")

The Hindustan Times wrote that Raju Grewal had told Indian interrogators he had been planning to commit suicide after visiting his parents back home.

"He told us that he loved his wife very much," the paper quoted a senior police investigator as saying, "[but] on the fateful day, he killed her in a fit of rage. He slapped her so many times that she lost consciousness and, after that, he strangled her."

The investigator said Grewal had described how the ceiling fan collapsed during the suicide attempt at Redwood Lane. The suspect also claimed that he had been the victim of domestic violence, not vice versa.

None of the news accounts referred to the troubling behind-the-scenes clash between law enforcement and Continental Airlines, though Continental's abiding corporate concern became evident to irate Phoenix police a few days after Grewal's arrest.

Detective Davis contacted a Continental ticket agent at Sky Harbor to get some routine biographical information for his report on the murder case. The agent had sold Grewal the one-way ticket from Phoenix to Newark a few hours after Navi Kaur's murder.

Wrote Davis, "Before I could say anything to [the agent], she told me she would love to cooperate in this investigation, but she was told by her employer not to talk to me about it. She said she did not want to lose her job."

That anecdote speaks volumes to aviation expert Rusty Aimer, the former Continental pilot.

"This incident has all kinds of big-picture implications for the public," Aimer says. "Most important is that an airline and a pilot did not respond in a timely manner or at all to a legitimate request from law enforcement. I'd love to know exactly what Continental told the pilot about the fugitive on board and about the serious concerns that the police had with the guy."

New Times asked Continental spokeswoman Julie King for a response to that, among other queries. She politely declined to elaborate on her brief, earlier e-mail.