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Deepti No Mystery: Murdered Woman's Hubby

Professor Vijay Gupta is not a masochist.

Despite the advise of a local Hindu guru and several of his friends, he attended, practically every day, the trial of Kevin Paul Anderson, the doctor who would be found guilty of murdering his colleague and lover, Deepti Gupta.

"I went to the court to look into the eyes of the monster that took away my wonderful wife from me, the devoted mother from our daughter," Gupta says.

He also wanted to look into the eyes of Anderson and his family who were trying to defame Deepti, Vijay Gupta says.

Gupta is one of the best-known engineering professors in America, and a teaching star at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"It wasn't easy to be teaching, looking after my daughter who constantly asked when her mother will return from the heaven, and go to the court," he says.

Gupta went to the Pasadena, California court many times last year, carrying the sweetest memories of his wife even though by then it had been widely known that she had an affair with Anderson.

Deepti was 33 and Anderson, also a married man, was 42. She was also expecting a child from Anderson. In fact, the prosecution says Anderson killed her soon after she revealed him about the pregnancy -- and refused to abort the child.

Anderson, who was given a 20-year sentence last week for killing Deepti and the unborn baby on November 11, 1999, has said he is going to appeal the verdict. He had offered to work for the poor in exchange for a lighter sentence. He will also face a civil suit by Gupta filed on behalf of his three year old daughter, Divya.

"They will try to tell more lies about my wife," Gupta says, with his voice heavy with emotion. "But I will fight to have her reputation retrieved -- and show the world that she was a victim of sexual harassment." While newspapers are carrying stories with headlines such as 'Questions Linger Over Murder', to her husband she is no mystery. Gupta also says he knows there are other women out there who are victims of Anderson's sexual predation. His battle against Anderson is not only in behalf of his own daughter and his dead wife but also on behalf of those victims, he adds.

The defense portrayed Deepti Gupta as a headstrong woman who went after Anderson with a singular passion and threatened to tell his wife about their affair and harm his daughter. Her last words were that she knew where his daughter went to school, Anderson told the court.

The Guptas led a joyless marriage, attorney Michael Abzug told the jurors; they were so busy with their career, they had their first baby through artificial insemination, the jurors heard. He said Deepti felt she was trapped in her marriage -- and saw Anderson as her savior.

"A good argument could be made that she intentionally impregnated herself with his child and tried to use that to serve her best interests," he told reporters.

Many people in the Indian community also wonder if she cared about her husband and daughter at all.

But Vijay Gupta and Deepti's spiritual adviser, Pandit Sharma, see a different picture. And so does the prosecution.

Castigating the defense, deputy district attorney Marian Thompson, said any attempt to show Deepti as a monster won't wash away the magnitude of Anderson's crime. She would have loved to see him sentenced on premeditated murder; she had intended to ask death penalty for Anderson. But the jury convicted him on second-degree murder, buying the defense argument he killed her on the spur of the moment, when his rage went berserk.

Pandit Sharma, who found Deepti's message on his answering machine the day she was murdered in a lonely part of the National Park near the hospital she worked, describes her as a "very good person", who gave in to Anderson after saying 'no' to him many times. Anderson has testified they had sex three times -- the last time being the night before the murder.

The message she had left for Sharma said she was going to the forest -- and she was very afraid.

"Had I been there when the message came through, I would have asked her not to go," he says with a heavy sigh. "But I had been traveling -- I got to hear the message only after a few days of her murder."

Deepti wanted to make a break from Anderson, Sharma says. "At the same time, she wanted to keep his child too," he says, adding, "I didn't know what kind of arrangement she wanted." He asserts she told him she did not want to leave her husband.

Prosecutor Thompson isn't sure what exactly Deepti had in mind by telling Anderson about the pregnancy.

"I think she wanted him to be a responsible man, to what was right," she told reporters. "Whatever that may be."

Deepti had gone to India a few months before her murder, and visited the Vaishnavo Devi shrine, Sharma says.

Vijay Gupta says she insisted on going alone.

"It just shows how troubled she was and that she was asking for special blessings," he says, adding that he had not gauged her emotional turmoil.

Her husband never suspected the affair, Sharma says, ridiculing those who say that Gupta looked the other way -- till it was too late.

"He trusted her fully," he says. "She was a busy doctor -- and if she came home late, he thought she was busy with her patients."

Vijay Gupta says she was far busier than his own self.

"Her patients speak very highly of her," he says. "And when she came home, there was so much warmth and affection."

"I almost felt useless in her presence."

Is Vijay Gupta in total denial?

Sharma, who had known of the affair a few months before Deepti was killed 16 months ago, does not want to answer the question.

But he says he had advised Deepti to get away from Anderson.

"I told her I knew of many good Indian doctors in nearby cities who could help her get a job," he says. "She should have acted faster."

But he too believes in Vijay Gupta's assertion that Anderson had an overpowering effect on her.

Gupta says she did not confide in him even after she decided to break up the relationship. "Like in rape incidents, some women often blame themselves for what happened," he says. As he looks back on what happened in the past 16 months, he says, "My wife is no mystery to me."

Sharma does not deny the marriage did not have problems, though he won't go into details. But he hastens to add: "There are so many marriages with problems. And yet people live together."

But Abzug has asserted that Vijay Gupta had verbally abused his wife during her first pregnancy and she wanted to leave him. "Why else would she want to take up with my client?"

Vijay Gupta, who grew up in Mumbai and Deepti, who grew up in Kanpur, had an arranged marriage. Deepti and Anderson had planned to start a business but the plan died when his wife suspected the two were having an affair.

Gupta went with his wife to Anderson's home to convince his wife otherwise. He told her about how Indians take matrimonial vows carefully, with a sacred passion. And yet the business did not take off.

In fact, when Deepti's body was discovered in the forest, thanks to a passing motorist who had seen Anderson trying to ignite her car and push it off a cliff, there was speculation that he had murdered her over a business deal that had gone sour. It took the investigators a few weeks to discover the affair -- and the passionate love notes Anderson had written to Deepti.

Did she ever write to Anderson, Vijay Gupta asks, adding that the so-called affair was one-sided.

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