By Candace Rondeaux
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 22, 2006

When Divya Mandanapu disappeared from her Ashburn home a little more than two years ago, it was her husband who gave police the information they needed to figure out what happened.

Yesterday, Loudoun County Commonwealth's Attorney James E. Plowman told a jury that Praveen Mandanapu admitted strangling his wife and dismembering her body June 12, 2004, because he was "overcome with his own guilt and thought he should die for what happened and for what he did to his wife."

On the first day of what is expected to be a week-long trial, Mandanapu's attorney countered that his client's statement had been coerced.

Mandanapu, 34, a computer programmer who immigrated to the United States from India a decade ago, was charged with first-degree murder days after he allegedly used a meat cleaver to dismember his wife's body in the garage of their house and then stuff her body parts into suitcases. He allegedly threw the suitcases into dumpsters in Loudoun and Fairfax counties.

An apartment complex maintenance worker emptying trash discovered a suitcase holding Divya Mandanapu's nearly decapitated body in a dumpster in South Riding, five miles from the couple's home. Initially, authorities knew only that the body belonged to a woman of Middle Eastern or Asian descent who had shoulder-length black hair.

"It was a mystery," Plowman said. "They didn't really know what they had or who they had."

The picture became a little clearer, Plowman said, after Divya Mandanapu's co-workers at the Leesburg branch of Middleburg Bank reported her missing. But after an off-duty Clarke County sheriff's deputy discovered Praveen Mandanapu -- semiconscious after swallowing a handful of fireworks, pills and other substances -- slumped over the steering wheel of his 1997 Honda, authorities began focusing on him as a suspect.

After his arrest June 17, 2004, Praveen Mandanapu admitted to killing his 28-year-old wife and, during nearly 10 hours of interviews with Loudoun detectives, told investigators where they could find other parts of her body, Plowman told the jury.

During his opening statement yesterday, Mandanapu's attorney, James G. Connell III, hinted that investigators used coercive tactics to extract the statement from his client. Connell acknowledged that Mandanapu had argued repeatedly with his wife before she was killed over money she was sending to her family in India. But Connell said Mandanapu was genuinely distraught when his wife threatened to leave him and later dismayed by her disappearance. He said Mandanapu had been at work the day his wife was killed and had left several messages on her voice mail, saying he was looking for her. The messages were left in his native tongue of Telugu.

Connell said that Mandanapu, devastated by the breakup of his five-year marriage, drove to Pennsylvania, where he purchased the fireworks he would later use in his suicide attempt. Shortly before he was found on the side of the highway, Mandanapu taped a heart-shaped photo of him and his wife to the steering wheel of his car and then wrote a seven-page suicide letter, Connell said.

"I'm done," Mandanapu wrote. "I'm overwhelmed. I should not be pardoned."

Connell contends that authorities misinterpreted Mandanapu's statements and miscast him as the killer. The defense attorney said former Loudoun County sheriff's investigator Mike Grau exploited Mandanapu's distraught state to get him to confess. He pointed out that Grau resigned in late 2004, shortly after he accidentally shot and wounded his wife and before he was accused of stealing guns from the sheriff's property room. Grau is on trial on the theft charges.

Connell said Grau had a history of bad police work and became aggressive when Mandanapu begged to be put to death during the interview.

"Please seek the death penalty for me," Mandanapu said, according to a transcript of the interview cited in court yesterday. "Please help me to go to my wife. I love her so much."

Prosecutors are expected to play video and audio of Mandanapu's statement for the jury later this week.