Toyah Cordingley trial: Family and friends of Rajwinder Singh, 40, describe his last contact
Rajwinder Singh abandoned his three young children and wife without explanation in a country where she didn’t speak English and didn’t understand how to access their bank account, a court has heard.
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The wife of Rajwinder Singh has broken down in the witness box at his murder trial, describing the sudden way he left his family earlier in 2018, several months before he ultimately fled to India and left them for good, with no further contact or explanation.
Sukhdeep Kaur, Mr Singh’s wife, gave evidence yesterday at her husband’s trial, where he has pleaded not guilty in the Cairns Supreme Court to the murder of Toyah Cordingley, 24, on October 21, 2018.
The court was told Ms Kaur and her two sons and one daughter, who were aged 1, 5, and 8 in 2018, had not seen or heard from Mr Singh for more than six years.
Mr Singh’s demeanour changed as his wife gave evidence; he was rocking, fidgeting and touching his beard.
Ms Kaur looked down as she walked past Mr Singh and into court, positioning herself in the witness box with her back to her husband.
She attended court wearing a floral dress and a black shawl, draped over her face and head, which she bowed through most of her evidence.
Both Justice James Henry and Crown prosecutor Nathan Crane asked Ms Kaur to please look up and face the jury as she spoke.
Ms Kaur, assisted by a Punjabi interpreter, said she and Mr Singh had lived in nearby villages in the north of India when they met and married in 2009.
She said they had met just once before they were married, and moved to Australia later that same year, initially living with Ms Kaur’s sister at Kurrimine Beach.
The court was told Ms Kaur worked on a banana farm and Mr Singh had a student visa, initially studying horticulture before switching to nursing.
Around 2013, they secured permanent residency visas, she said, and bought the two-storey brick home in Innisfail they had been renting.
Under cross examination by defence barrister Brydie Bilic, Ms Kaur agreed Mr Singh had left her once before around April 2018, and had not told her where he was going.
Ms Kaur began crying when she told the court she had asked Mr Singh to come home.
“He didn’t want to come home and he asked you for a divorce,” Ms Bilic asked, to which Ms Kaur replied “yes” before crying.
Eventually, he did return to the family home, the court was told.
On the day of Ms Cordingley’s violent death – October 21, 2018 – Ms Kaur said Mr Singh left the house in his blue car with his father, but didn’t tell her where he was going.
She said she did not see or hear him return to their family home after she went to bed around 8.30pm, but when she looked into his bedroom the next morning, she saw he was asleep there.
They spoke briefly in the kitchen that morning – the day Ms Cordingley’s body was found by her father with multiple stab and cutting wounds in a shallow sand grave at Wangetti Beach – and Ms Kaur said she asked him where he was going that day.
He replied that he would be home the next day and left carrying a “little handbag”.
Some three days later, Ms Kaur told the court she went to the Innisfail Police Station to report her husband missing as she had heard that a “young Indian man was killed in an accident in Tully” and she was worried about her husband because he had not answered her calls or been home in two days.
“I asked them (the police) to find my husband for me,” she said.
He never returned, the court was told, leaving Ms Kaur, who did not speak English at that time, with their children and his parents, who also lived in the house.
She said she did not know how to access their bank accounts, their home ultimately went “bankrupt”, and they had to move, the court was told.
Under cross examination by Ms Bilic, Ms Kaur told the court she had not washed the clothes Mr Singh was wearing the last day she saw him, nor had she noticed any injuries to his face, hands, arms, neck, legs or body.
She said Mr Singh was not known to use or carry a pocketknife or fishing knife.
“The whole family is vegetarian; no one goes fishing,” Ms Kaur said.
Mr Crane showed Ms Kaur and the jury a series of photographs of Mr Singh and his children, taken during a “sightseeing” tour, possibly earlier in 2018, where they had taken photos of the children at a lookout and at the “balancing rocks” along the ocean on the way to Port Douglas, not far from Wangetti Beach.
Rajkaran Singh, the friend who took Rajwinder Singh to the airport the day Toyah Cordingley’s body was found, has told the court his friend appeared to be “carrying a lot of stress” that day.
“He was looking stressed and so I kept asking ‘is everything fine … you look stressed. Is everything fine with you wife and family’?” Rajkaran Singh told the court.
He said Mr Singh answered that “everything is fine”.
Rajkaran Singh said that, earlier that day, Mr Singh asked if he could take him to the airport, and he agreed as he had the day off.
Mr Singh told Rajkaran Singh he was heading to Sydney to visit his sister and had a return ticket to come back in four to five days time.
Rajkaran Singh offered to pick him up on his return, but the offer was turned down.
Mr Singh had been rostered to work that day at Innisfail Hospital the court was told.
Lesley Harris, the Director of Nursing and Midwifery at Innisfail Hospital in 2018, told the court Rajwinder Singh had worked at the hospital for six years as an enrolled nurse between 2012 and 2018.
He failed to show up for his rostered morning shift on October 22, 2018, but was usually a punctual employee, she said.
The court was told that, a week later, on Monday, October 29, Mr Singh left a voice message on Ms Harris’s phone at work, which she said she listened to “multiple times”, and transcribed, because it was “quite a disjointed verbal message”.
In the message, which Ms Harris read out in full to the court, Mr Singh said he had no phone, was experiencing “stressful things”, and would not be returning to work, his family, or Innisfail.
He asked Ms Harris if she could let the pay office know to organise his severance pay.
“I am calling from overseas. The thing is I have two very personal circumstances – the issue is family and things like that,” the message read.
“I am really stressed out and … so well, what I think at this stage, I will be resigning. If there is anything I need to do for that – written or that, please let me know. Sorry all this but umm. Still recovering from all the stressful things, so there is no way I am coming back to my family or Innisfail or work in the near future so this is the only way I can get off these things.”
Mr Singh’s sister, Palwinder Kaur, said her brother stayed at her home on the evening of October 22, 2018, and she could not recall if they spoke about the reason for his trip to India.
Mr Singh’s father and mother also gave evidence on Wednesday, with both saying their son had not said goodbye to them when he left Australia.
Mr Singh’s father Amar Singh said on Sunday, October 21, Rajwinder took him to the Sikh temple outside of Innisfail, where he stayed until the evening.
He said he went to India to look for his son.
“He was nowhere,” Amar told the court.
Defence counsel Ms Bilic asked Rajwinder’s mother Balwinder Kaur if divorce was discouraged in Indian culture and Ms Kaur said “yes”.
Ms Kaur said she discouraged Rajwinder from getting a divorce.
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Originally published as Toyah Cordingley trial: Family and friends of Rajwinder Singh, 40, describe his last contact
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