Toyah's Murder: What we know so far

Speaker 1 What do Rasputin, Tupac, and Pharaoh Ramses III have in common? No, it's not the weirdest boy band ever. They all met their end at the hand of an assassin.

Speaker 1 From seizing power to silencing dissidents, assassins unpack the moments in which someone decides that murder is the move.

Speaker 1 Search for assassins with Aslan Pahadi on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

Speaker 1 The body of Toya Cordingley was found in the sand seven years ago after she'd gone for a walk along an idyllic tropical beach with her dog. Today, the trial of her accused murderer begins.

Speaker 1 I'm Stephen Stockwell. Welcome to the the case of Toya's murder.
The body of Toya Cordingly was found at Morngetty Beach north of Cairns. Her face adorns billboards and stickers across the region.

Speaker 2 Searching for clues in the murder of the 24-year-old pharmacy worker alongside the idyllic and isolated beaches.

Speaker 1 This should not happen to a young woman out there walking her dog on a Sunday.

Speaker 1 In October 2018, just as Cairns was warming up for one of its hot and sticky tropical summers, the body of 24-year-old Toya Cornery was found on a long but very secluded North Queensland beach.

Speaker 1 Now, plenty of time has passed since then. It's been over seven years, but now the man accused of her murder is facing his trial.

Speaker 1 That man is Razwinder Singh, and this is all taking place in the Cairns Supreme Court, and it starts today.

Speaker 1 We will be bringing you updates throughout that trial, and when I say we, I have enlisted the help of Chris Tester, a reporter with the ABC in Cairns. Chris, welcome to the case of.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 It's our pleasure, although I would prefer it was under much different circumstances, Chris. But, you know, this is a story that has been a huge deal in North Queensland.

Speaker 1 It's something that you've been following for quite a while as well, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I actually first found out about this case before I even moved to Cairns.

Speaker 2 I moved to Cairns in 2022 and prior to that, I'd actually come here on a personal holiday and couldn't help notice the name Toya on a lot of stickers and signs all over town.

Speaker 2 And of course, Curious Me got googling as to what this was about.

Speaker 2 And yeah, I read a bit about the, you know, what happened on that day at Wongetty Beach, north of Cairns, and then began working here as a journalist.

Speaker 2 And at that time, no one had been charged with her murder. So really, in terms of the legal proceedings, I've been there since the start.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I mean, a lot has happened in this story since 2018, since you first saw the name Toya on a bunch of stickers, you know, cruising around Cairns, and as you've been following these legal proceedings as well.

Speaker 1 So in this episode, we're going to give you the background on what that is. You know, this trial is starting today.

Speaker 1 This is a very sensitive time, so we need to be very careful we don't give away any information that could jeopardise the trial at this point.

Speaker 1 Obviously, through the trial, we get more detail as that is presented to the jury. But Chris, to give us this background, tell me about Toy Accordingly.

Speaker 1 Who was she?

Speaker 2 Well, she grew up in Cairns and was a Far North Queensland local, 24 years old at the time in 2018, and I guess in many ways was a young woman that you could say very typical of Far North Queensland but well known to many people.

Speaker 2 She was working at a health food store.

Speaker 2 She was a part-time volunteer at an animal shelter which is how she met her then partner and knew so many people through the community and I guess was known as a bright and bubbly young woman who had many friends.

Speaker 2 A lot of those friendships extended throughout Far North Queensland.

Speaker 2 It's a big region with a big population, but in many ways it's that typical country community where people form these connections and so many people know one another.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I guess that's an interesting part about North Queensland, right? You know, we're thinking of Cairns for this, but there's, you know, there's communities that are quite close to this.

Speaker 1 I mean, Port Douglas is one, and we're probably going to end up talking quite a bit about some of them through the trial. I mean, kind of how's this region kind of shaped and look?

Speaker 1 Can you give me a bit of a picture of it?

Speaker 2 Well, certainly so many people in Australia would know of Port Douglas, particularly if you're from Melbourne or Sydney because it's such a popular holiday destination.

Speaker 2 It's an hour north of Cairns, and there's that beautiful coastal highway which takes you there to Port Douglas from Cairns after you arrive.

Speaker 2 That beautiful blue sea on one side and mountainous rainforest on the other and along that little coastline is a beach called Wongetty Beach and that's really where all this took place.

Speaker 2 Toya went there that day on the 21st of October 2018 for a walk with her dog and the alarm was raised several hours later because she wasn't found.

Speaker 2 So a lot of locations will come up in this trial that people may be familiar with, even if you haven't lived in far north Queensland.

Speaker 1 And this is the interesting thing about Wongetty Beach as well, right?

Speaker 1 Like is it kind of stuck between Cairns and Port Douglas, so it's kind of, you know, kind of isolated, kind of secluded, but there is the highway that runs right next to it.

Speaker 1 So it's a reasonably accessible beach, right?

Speaker 2 It is, yeah.

Speaker 2 It's easy to get to, and so it's in many ways a bit of a paradox that it's both remote and secluded at the same time.

Speaker 2 It's not, you know, your typical typical beach that's, you know, you're going to say, I'm going to pop down to the beach for five minutes and go for a walk. You do need to plan to head there.

Speaker 2 But at the same time, it's such a well-travelled road. It's between these two major holiday destinations.
So many cars would go on that highway each and every day.

Speaker 2 And, yeah, parts of it you can see from the road.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And that's Toy accordingly.
That's where she was walking and that's where her body was found. What about Rajwinder Singh, the man accused of her murder? What do we know about him?

Speaker 2 It's important to note, firstly, that Rajwinder Singh denies having murdered Toy accordingly. He's pleaded not guilty, and that's what this trial is about.
He's maintained his innocence throughout.

Speaker 2 He's a 41-year-old man, was working as a nurse at the time in a town called Innisfail, which is about an hour south of Cairns, in the opposite direction from Wangetty Beach.

Speaker 2 He was born in India, but had been in Australia for quite a number of years by the time this occurred in 2018, and he is an Australian citizen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right. And yeah, he will obviously have defence lawyers, defence barristers representing him.
What do we know about the barristers who are

Speaker 1 defending Rajwin Der Singh in this trial?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so Raj Winter Singh will be represented by a barrister, Greg Maguire, at this trial.

Speaker 2 He's someone you may be familiar with if you follow Queensland court proceedings at all or, you know, you've tabbed into some high-profile cases over the years because he's one of the most experienced members of the Queensland Bar.

Speaker 2 He's been appearing in cases, trials for almost 40 years.

Speaker 2 Been in a few high-profile ones lately, some that you may have seen. He represented the former cricketer Michael Slater on assault and domestic violence charges.

Speaker 2 Other cases, he represented Queensland mum Heidi Sturback, who was convicted of killing her four-year-old son, Tyrell, back in 2017.

Speaker 2 And more recently, he's been acting for a Mongols. bikey figure, Ian Ronald Crowden, who's one of nine men accused of the alleged serious organised crime murder of former Mongol Shane Bowden.

Speaker 2 And that matter hasn't yet gone to trial, but he has appeared for Mr. Crowden at a committal hearing.

Speaker 1 So that's the defence team, Chris. Obviously, you'll be hearing a lot from them as they're cross-examining witnesses

Speaker 1 and defending Rajwinder Singh on these charges. Of course, there are the prosecution as well, the people that have brought the charges against Rajwinder Singh.

Speaker 1 Who's sitting on the other side of the bar table?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so leading the prosecution case will be the Crown Prosecutor, Nathan Crane. Again, very familiar to people if you've been following legal proceedings in Queensland, but particularly in Cairns.

Speaker 2 He was prosecuting in Cairns for many years, has since moved to Brisbane, but has prosecuted many high-profile cases here in far north Queensland in recent years.

Speaker 2 For example, the attempted murder case of Isabella Cicarovar, who stabbed her mother with a knife at the Cairns Esplanade in 2022 in front of onlookers. She was found guilty.

Speaker 2 Another high-profile case was the childcare educator Dion Batrice Grills, who was found not guilty of manslaughter, having been accused of leaving a little boy on a bus.

Speaker 2 He died in heat back a few years ago. That was another high-profile Cairns case that Nathan Crane was representing the Crown.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, thank you, Chris.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, interesting to get the names and the introductions of both Nathan Crane and Greg Maguire, the barristers who we'll be talking a lot about as this trial unfolds.

Speaker 1 And I mean, another name that we'll be talking a lot about will be that of the judge presiding over this case. You know, the judge, it's their courtroom.

Speaker 1 They're basically in charge of how this trial unfolds and, you know, keeping order and making sure everything's progressing in the right way and done according to the law.

Speaker 1 And, you know, in this trial, we have Justice Lincoln Crowley.

Speaker 1 What's he like?

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's actually not too familiar to us here in Far North Queensland because ordinarily he's not sitting at the Supreme Court in Cairns.

Speaker 2 He's sitting at the Supreme Court in Brisbane, but that doesn't mean that he's unfamiliar with North Queensland. In fact, much the opposite.

Speaker 2 Very familiar with North Queensland, having been born and raised at Charters Towers, which is a bit to the south of Cairns, but still very much the heartland of North Queensland.

Speaker 2 And his career has been one of a legal trailblazer.

Speaker 2 But he has an interesting background because he made some remarks after he was admitted to the bench back in 2022 that when he was going to school at Charters Towers State High, legal studies wasn't even an option for him to have studied.

Speaker 2 So in many ways, he's broken the mold a little bit.

Speaker 2 And he had a keen sense of justice from the start, saying that he knew it wasn't fair when teachers suggested that he wouldn't amount to anything.

Speaker 2 They couldn't have been more wrong because he went on to study at JCU in Townsville, then got a job as a solicitor with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service, also in Townsville.

Speaker 2 And his career has taken him one,

Speaker 2 you know, to many firsts because when he was sworn in as a judge just over three years ago, it actually made him the first Indigenous judge appointed to any Superior Court in Australia.

Speaker 2 So he's a judge who's already gone down in history and still very early in his time on the bench, having been appointed just back in 2022.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and he's previously been a barrister as well. And am I right in thinking that he was actually the first Indigenous person appointed as a Queen's Councillor, QC, in Queensland as well.

Speaker 2 That's correct, yeah, and he also represented the state of Queensland as well. So, yeah, many firsts to his name.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, it's yeah, it'd be interesting to have his guidance and his leadership throughout this trial.

Speaker 1 You know, the judges are kind of, well, they are in charge of that courtroom, so they're going to be managing, he's going to be managing how this trial unfolds.

Speaker 1 Interesting having another kind of locum judge dropping in as well. Chris, you've just covered the trial of Matt Wright up in Darwin, and yeah, Acting Justice Alan Blow Blow presided over that one.

Speaker 1 He'd pumped up from Tasmania to Darwin. I feel like the transition from Brisbane to Cairns is a little less stark than the transition from Tasmania to Darwin, though.

Speaker 1 So it'd be interesting to see how Justice Crowley copes with the heat and the humidity throughout this point. So, yeah, it's certainly a very sweaty time of year in Cairns at the moment.

Speaker 1 Chris, you mentioned the stickers with Toya's name on earlier when you were talking about how you kind of first came across or heard about this case.

Speaker 1 How high profile is this? How big a deal is this in Cairns?

Speaker 2 It's certainly a case, Stocky, that's been followed by people who didn't know Toya. You know, it's just had such a wide reach in the community.

Speaker 2 Her family and friends have really campaigned for justice from the time that she died,

Speaker 2 not initially knowing what

Speaker 2 may have transpired.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the bumper stickers are probably the most visible sign.

Speaker 2 If you've been to Cairns or come to Cairns at any time in in those past six or seven years, you may have seen the name Toya on the back of cars. It is almost ubiquitous, you know, calls for justice.

Speaker 2 There is a memorial at Wongetty Beach that, again, bears her name and is well cared for by the family. And of course, it's just been so high profile in the news over the years that many people,

Speaker 2 I guess, feel a sense of investment in what happens and the outcome of this case.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I remember Toya's murder in 2018. I was working for Hack on Triple J.
At the time, I reported on it. I also reported on the murder of Eurydice Dixon, which happened about the same time.

Speaker 1 You know, it was only a month or two before, I think. She'd been walking through a park not too far from the city in Melbourne alone one night, and she was killed while doing that.

Speaker 1 And I mean, I remember those deaths. I remember the reclaim the night marches that happened in response to them.
This was a real... you know, kind of national movement as well.

Speaker 1 There were the deaths of other women around the same time, unfortunately, as there often is.

Speaker 1 But, you know, with this case, this was a really high-profile case at the time, so I can only imagine kind of how the Cairns community feels about it now.

Speaker 1 And I guess it's that community who'll be making up the jury. We'll be making that decision at the end of this trial.

Speaker 1 I mean, are there challenges trying to select a jury, given how high-profile and how well-known this case is there?

Speaker 2 There are, and I guess it remains to be seen how the courts will handle that, but sometimes they do do things such as, you know, enlarged jury pools, so they're selecting from a larger number of people.

Speaker 2 You know, there are typical things things that courts do in all trials to ensure that the jury is the right one to be sitting on it. For example, they'll be shown a list of witnesses,

Speaker 2 names, people who could appear in the case, and they'll be asked, you know, that's typical of a court, that you'll be asked, well, do you know any of these people?

Speaker 2 So the courts have a very strong process, which is, you know, a time-honoured process that's done.

Speaker 2 to make sure that jurors are fair and are going into a case knowing that they can be impartial and won't be swayed by any outside influence.

Speaker 2 But certainly the prominence of the case will have to be a factor in addressing that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, absolutely. I know for the trial of Aaron Patterson that we covered earlier this year, they had a huge jury pool to start with.

Speaker 1 You know, in Cairns, this trial is starting today, so I imagine the jurors or potential jurors

Speaker 1 for this trial will be gathering soon around the courthouse, the Cairns Supreme Court. We will be there.
We'll have all of the details for you, the challenges, et cetera, in our episode tomorrow.

Speaker 1 Chris, what are you expecting today?

Speaker 2 Yeah, we have the impanelment. That can take some time.
It can take most of the first day of the trial on some occasions.

Speaker 2 But then from there, the judge will address the jury, and then we hear the opening statements from the Crown prosecutor and the defence barrister.

Speaker 2 And that will really set out, I guess, what the Crown alleges has taken place here.

Speaker 2 But the Defence will also have an opportunity to point the jury to some areas that they want them to focus on as they try and unpick different parts of the Crown case and you know

Speaker 2 the areas that they really want questioned.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think the opening statements I find so helpful to understand what picture the you know the various legal teams are trying to paint for the jury to understand the case that the prosecution outlines, that'll be the case against Rojwinder Singh and then the defence is opening

Speaker 1 where they will look to defend Rajwinder Singh to show that he's not guilty of these crimes. And obviously obviously he's pled not guilty in this trial as well.

Speaker 1 So we'll look to see how everything unfolds. Chris, how long do we think this trial is going to run for?

Speaker 2 Look, we're expecting it to run for three to four weeks at this stage.

Speaker 2 Of course, you know, different things can happen in trials and sometimes things move at a pace slower or faster than what the courts can expect.

Speaker 2 But that's roughly around the time that I would expect after three and a bit weeks, we should start to get towards the closing of the case and jury deliberations. All right.
right, great.

Speaker 1 Well, look, thank you, Chris, for taking us through all of those details. We'll be talking a lot over the next few weeks as this trial unfolds.

Speaker 1 I'll be back in your feed tomorrow with our first episode from the impanelment, from the openings, as everything starts to happen on the first day of this trial.

Speaker 1 Chris and I will be in the room in the Cairns Supreme Court, keenly observing to bring you all of the details. So make sure you grab yourself the ABC Listen app.

Speaker 1 We're going to be publishing episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays as this trial continues. And so that'll be the best place to catch them.

Speaker 1 They appear there slightly before they appear on any other podcast platform.

Speaker 1 If you are using a different podcast platform though, all I would ask is that you give us a rating or a review on that platform if you're enjoying us obviously but hopefully you are if you've gotten this far.

Speaker 1 Leaving a rating or review makes it easier for other people to find us through those platforms. It's what their algorithm looks for when it's promoting things.

Speaker 1 So if you can do that, it means that more people will be able to hear the you know the story, the coverage of the trial of Rajwinder Singh as we take you through the case of toya's murder be back in your feed tomorrow

Speaker 1 the case of toya's murder is produced by abc audio studios and abc news it's reported by abc reporter chris tester and me stephen stockwell our executive producer is claire rawlinson and this episode was produced on the land of the urugenjee and murundri people