A 75-year-old man from Queens was arrested Wednesday in connection with the murder of his much younger wife — whom authorities say he dismembered before scattering her remains in two parks in Queens, police said Thursday.
Investigators believe Rupchand Simboo killed his 34-year-old wife, Salisha Ali, on July 13 — the last day she was seen alive.
On March 5, workers discovered body parts inside the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Broad Channel, Queens. Police later connected those remains to Ali’s dismembered torso, which had been found months earlier in a park near JFK Airport.
Authorities have not yet determined the exact manner in which the victim was killed.
Police sources said Simboo and Ali met in 2023 and maintained a long-distance relationship until she moved to the U.S. from Trinidad in 2024 and married the man more than twice her age. According to police, the couple lived together in a modest two-family house in South Ozone Park.
Ali was last seen during a FaceTime call with relatives on July 13. Later that day, Simboo reported her missing to police. By that point, investigators believe he had already killed her. Family members reported her missing in August after going weeks without hearing from her.
In addition to murder, police 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 had been working at a restaurant in Queens when she died. She had also been 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 became worried.
On Sept. 22, sanitation workers collecting trash at a Queens park near JFK Airport discovered pieces of a decomposing torso inside a garbage bag.
Department of Sanitation workers conducting roadside cleanup alerted police after they found the bag containing a woman’s remains near 149th Ave. and Brookville Blvd., along the edge of Idlewild Park in Rosedale.
Inside the bag, officers found a woman’s partially skeletonized, decomposing torso, with the head, arms, and legs missing. Police deployed drones to search the surrounding area, but they did not immediately locate any other body parts.
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 tossed it into the truck’s hopper when they noticed a foul odor and alerted 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 help provide clues to her identity, Kenny added. The tattoos included “three names and a flower,” Kenny said.
Kenny said the torso also “didn’t have any wounds or injuries,” which made determining a cause of death difficult.
Police identified the dismembered torso as Ali in October and delivered the heartbreaking news to her family, 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 did not think much of it because “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.
Police found more human remains, later identified as Ali’s, in the wildlife refuge not far off Cross Bay Boulevard in Broad Channel, the only occupied island in Jamaica Bay, around 10:30 p.m. on March 5.
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