A Family of 11 Died in a Mass Suicide Three Years Ago. A New Netflix Series Shows Why It’s Not Over Yet.

When Gurcharan Singh left his house for his customary morning walk on the morning of July 1, 2018 in the Burari locality in northeast Delhi, India, he did not expect the day to become permanently etched not just in his memory but in that of the whole country collectively. 

His neighbour, who usually accompanied him for the walk, was nowhere to be seen. The neighbour in question owned a shop nearby, which, also uncharacteristically, had not opened its shutters.

Singh went over to check on his friend and, to his surprise, found the front door open. What he saw the moment he stepped in shook him to the core. 

Ten members of the family across three generations were hanging from the ceiling, blindfolded, gagged, and with their hands tied behind their backs. An 11th member – the oldest woman in the house – lay strangulated in a corner of the room. 

Much like the rest of the country, Leena Yadav – the Mumbai-based filmmaker behind critically acclaimed films including Parched and Rajma Chawal – was also shocked at the headlines she read on the incident. 

“It was something that greatly disturbed me,” she told VICE. “But then it became weird, and the media spun multiple narratives out of it. But none of them had any answers.” 

Yadav then went looking for answers of her own, which led to the three-part true crime documentary series House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths, which was released on Netflix last week. Apart from India, the series is also trending in Pakistan and most countries in South Asia. 

Yadav remembered the shock of the incident soon wearing off in India as the news cycle moved on super quick, and TV channels chased the next big scandal. “One forgets to dig deeper when these things happen. But this was an exceptional case; nothing of this sort was ever recorded by the cops.”

But the story stayed with Yadav, who then took it to Netflix at the end of 2018. Netflix had entered the country just two years prior, and they were enthusiastic about having her dig into this story. “I told them I’m a film narrative person and that I’ve never made a documentary,” said Yadav. “But with this case, I couldn’t possibly make a film narrative, so I went into the project as a student.”

Yadav consciously stayed away from researching the case any further before the filming began. The idea was to peel the layers to the story as the interviews took place with those connected to the case – from the Burari family’s neighbours, friends and extended family to cops, journalists and psychologists. The production covered a total of 400 hours of interviews, and having those conversations was “emotionally draining” for the crew. 

“This was a front-page headline for weeks but not even a single report or article had covered the case as an analytical piece,” said Yadav. “My approach was not a whodunit but a whydunit.”

As the documentary progressed, Yadav started piecing together the story of what led to that fateful day. Was it then really a mass suicide, a case of shared psychosis, or murder? She insisted that the case has no black-and-white answers, but that whatever the cops had discovered until then only skimmed the surface. 

Yadav explained how, even though the cops were officially investigating the case as one of shared psychosis – a mental disorder characterised by shared delusion among two or more people in close relationship – the “delusion” in this case was not just between two or three people, but a staggering 11 family members. They included children, women and men aged 12 to 80. Everyone who knew them insisted that they were high-functioning, sociable people who appeared to be doing well. Basically, they said, nothing seemed amiss.

“So, it’s not like they were this strange family living in isolation,” said Yadav. “The whole idea of the documentary was to highlight that it’s easy enough for all of us to look at a case like this and pretend this doesn’t happen in our families. But this case is just an exploded view of the secrets all of us hold, the truths we like to hide, and the traumas we ignore.” 

The biggest challenge for Yadav was getting to the truth. Initially, all the subjects clearly wanted to hide the uncomfortable bits, she said, as all of them kept saying the victims were “good people.” For Yadav, this was a major red flag. 

“How can everyone have only good things to say about them? Weren’t they humans? I discovered only later that this is in continuation of the front that all of us put up, that the secrets of the house should remain inside. We are taught from childhood to not wash our dirty linen in public.” 

The second episode in the series, titled “Diaries,” forms the crux of the story as it charts the breakthrough in the investigation when cops found diaries in the house written over 11 years and, eerily enough, written in the third person. The diaries had detailed instructions on how every single member of the family is supposed to go through life, where they are to invest their money, and detailed instructions for “mass salvation” including how hangings should be conducted.

“When the case was in the news, I refused to believe that children in the family as young as 12 and 13 could have agreed to be a part of this,” said Yadav. “But this had been happening for 11 years, so naturally, it had become a part of their lives since the day they were born. That delusional world was all they saw and it had become normalised for them.” 

The last diary entry is of the macabre “Banyan Tree” ritual that commanded the family members to hang themselves in a formation resembling the hanging roots of a banyan tree, on the premise that their deceased patriarch would save them from dying. Police investigations at the time, gleaned from the diaries, had revealed how the primary source of all the delusion was a relatively young family member with a history of untreated trauma. 

“We now know that there was one family member behind this who had his own history, but that’s just the surface. I’d like to believe he was just the trigger; it doesn’t explain everything. Perhaps the other ten family members had their own history that made them so vulnerable? We don’t have all the answers,” explained Yadav. 

She hopes that if this series prompts even a single family to sit together and discuss their traumas, the purpose of the documentary will have been achieved, even if it means overcoming the initial shock at the apparent bizarreness of it all. 

“When we were making this film, our first impulse was fear, too. Every single member of the team, including me, had nightmares at some point during the filming. It was an emotionally draining process for all of us. The reaction of the audience is actually mirroring the graph we went through. I believe this documentary isn’t necessarily about the case. It is about us.” 

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, help is available. Call 1-800-273-8255 to speak with someone now or text START to 741741 to message with the Crisis Text Line.

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