A 75-year-old Queens man was arrested Wednesday for the murder of his much younger wife — whom he is accused of dismembering before scattering her body in two Queens parks, cops said Thursday.
Police believe Rupchand Simboo killed his 34-year-old wife, Salisha Ali, back on July 13 — the day she was last seen alive.
Body parts were found inside Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Broad Channel, Queens, on March 5. Those remains were soon linked to Ali’s dismembered torso found in a park near JFK Airport months earlier, police said.
It has not yet been determined how the victim was murdered exactly.
Police sources said Simboo and Ali met in 2023 and had a long-distance relationship until she moved to the U.S. from Trinidad in 2024 and married the septuagenarian more than twice her age. The couple lived together in a modest two-family house in South Ozone Park, according to cops.
Ali was last seen on a FaceTime call with relatives on July 13. Simboo reported her missing to police later that day. By then, police believe he had killed her. Family members reported her missing in August after not hearing from her for weeks.
In addition to murder, cops charged Simboo with obstructing government administration and concealment of a human corpse. His arraignment in Queens Criminal Court was pending Wednesday.
Relatives told the news site Documented in December that Ali was working in a restaurant in Queens when she died. She was also training to become a home health aide. Ali spoke daily with her mother and three daughters back home and when she stopped calling, her family grew worried.
On Sept. 22, pieces of a decomposing torso were found in a garbage bag by sanitation workers picking up trash at a Queens park near JFK Airport.
Department of Sanitation workers doing roadside cleanup called police after finding the garbage bag containing a woman’s remains near 149th Ave. and Brookville Blvd. on the edge of Idlewild Park in Rosedale.
Inside the bag was a woman’s partially skeletonized decomposing torso, with the head, arms and legs missing. Police used drones to canvas the area but no other body parts were immediately found.
The garbage bag containing the body was found in some brush “about 100 feet south of the street,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters following the discovery. Sanitation workers had just thrown it into the truck’s hopper when they smelled a foul odor and alerted the police, he said.
The corpse’s head and limbs had been methodically sliced off.
After her death, “a knife was used to cut through the soft tissue, and a saw was used to cut through the bone,” Kenny said.
The victim also “had several unique and identifying tattoos,” that could provide clues to her identity, Kenny added. The tattoos included “three names and a flower,” Kenny said.
The torso, Kenny said also “didn’t have any wounds or injuries,” making determining a cause of death difficult.
Cops identified the dismembered torso as Ali back in October and gave her family the heartbreaking news, relatives said.
“We were shocked when we got the news. It is very horrific. This is something you would hear about in movies,” Ali’s relative told the Trinidad Express. “You never thought it would happen to our family.”
When Ali stopped making her daily calls, the family didn’t think much of it, since “people who knew her in the US” said “they were seeing her about,” the relative told the Trinidad Express. “We didn’t think anything had happened to her, but just said she wanted a break from the family,” the relative said.
Cops found more human remains later determined to be Ali’s in the wildlife refuge not far off Cross Bay Boulevard in Broad Channel, the only occupied island in Jamaica Bay, about 10:30 p.m. March 5.
