Slain dad’s kids accused of spying

One of the adult children told police he had access to his dad’s e-mail through spyware.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Police called to a suburban Philadelphia home early this year found the bloody body of a Boeing engineer in his bedroom.

Nearly 11 months later, the fatal stabbing and bludgeoning of Arunkumar Ingle remains unsolved, but state police this month charged his two adult children with spying on him through a computer keystroke program and a stealth GPS device installed on his car.

Parth Ingle, 22, and his sister, Avnee, 25, were charged with hundreds of counts of unlawful computer use and illegal wiretapping.

The information about the spying had come from the children themselves, who told police in interviews soon after the murder that they knew — through e-mails, pictures and confrontations with their father — that he was having an affair.

Parth Ingle said his mother told him that Arunkumar Ingle was cheating on her in 2003, Trooper Robert S. Kirby wrote in a Dec. 1 affidavit. The two were trying to determine when their father was going to see his mistress and if he was giving her money, Avnee Ingle told investigators, according to the affidavit.

Parth Ingle told police that he installed spyware that copied him in on all his father’s e-mail correspondence, the affidavit said. He even demonstrated the process for police.

A hearing on the charges had been scheduled for today but has been postponed until February at Kirby’s request. He said Monday that police need more time to prepare, given other cases under way.

Kirby said the hearing was not delayed in furtherance of the homicide investigation, but he pledged to make an arrest in that crime as well.

“We’re constantly working on the homicide,” Kirby said. “I’m confident that we are going to make an arrest in this case. I don’t have a time frame.”

Avnee Ingle told police that her parents slept in separate bedrooms and were preparing to separate or divorce. She works at a 7-Eleven store in Delaware owned by her mother, Bhavnaben. Police do not know of any job that Parth Ingle holds.

Messages left Monday at Parth Ingle’s Pottstown home and with his lawyer, John Kusturiss, were not immediately returned. Lawyer Scott Galloway, who represents Bhavnaben Ingle, also did not return a message Monday.

Avnee Ingle’s lawyer said there’s no evidence the young woman hacked into her father’s computers or committed any other crime. She seems numbed by the year’s events — first, her father’s death and now, her arrest on criminal charges, he said.

“She’s just a normal mid-20s person. She doesn’t strike me as anyone with any major hang-ups or problems,” lawyer John Neumann Hickey said Monday. “I don’t get the impression that she was sitting around festering about the father’s affair.”

Ingle’s wife discovered her husband’s body after she and her daughter stopped at the house Jan. 21 on their way to work at the store. The daughter had been in New York and had picked up her mother at her brother’s house, they said.

Arunkumar Ingle, who worked at a Boeing plant in Delaware County, was seeing a Russian woman in Philadelphia named Anna, according to his children’s police statements. The mistress is not a suspect in the slaying, Kirby said.