Father killed his family in their 21-room mansion. Just days before, his wife’s life insurance policy was changed
The parents’ siblings are now battling over the life insurance policy in court
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The $1.25m life insurance policy of Teena Kamal was altered just days before her husband killed her and their daughter in a murder-suicide in the family’s 21-room Massachusetts mansion.
Rakesh Kamal, 57, sent a fax, bearing his wife’s signature, to life insurance company Genworth on Christmas Eve 2023, asking for the beneficiary assignments to shift, the Boston Globe reported.
Before this fax, in the case of Teena’s death, Rakesh was the primary beneficiary and their daughter Arianna, an 18-year-old Middlebury College student, was the backup beneficiary. In the fax, both Rakesh and Arianna were in the primary slots while Rakesh’s brother Manoj Kamal was moved to the backup slot, the Globe reported.
Just four days after Genworth received the fax, Rakesh fatally shot his wife of 30 years and his teen daughter before turning the .40-caliber Glock 22 on himself in their seven-figure home in Dover, Massachusetts.
Manoj made the gruesome discovery and raised the alarm.
Manoj filed to collect the life insurance money weeks after the brutal deaths. The move sparked contentious legal proceedings. Genworth told the Globe that it had “received correspondence” from Teena’s brother Sandeep Bedi “raising concerns” about the insurance policy, given the timing of the change.
The insurance company asked a federal court in April to determine the “proper beneficiary of the proceeds payable” due to the “potentially conflicting claims,” giving both brothers until August 2 to respond.
Bedi claimed that Manoj had loaned Rakesh “a substantial sum of money,” the outlet reported.
The mysterious deaths of the Kamal family pushed Rakesh’s financial issues into the public spotlight.
After his death, a Maryland company claimed Rakesh owed it more than $760,000 after it had loaned his company money in 2022. He was supposed to have paid back the amount in four months — but it never happened, according to the outlet.
On top of this, Bedi loaned his brother-in-law half a million dollars — but he didn’t tell his sister, who did not know of her husband’s financial woes, Bedi told Globe in January. She believed her family was “rolling in money,” he said.
The outlet had reported in January that the Kamals bought the sprawling Dover property in 2019 for nearly $4m after borrowing money from the builder. They agreed to repay the mortgage in just two years, a feat they did not achieve and instead landed deeper in debt.
The family was threatened with foreclosure — and eventually, in December 2023, eviction. That’s when the tragedy unfolded.