Sukhwinder Singh DHILLON
AKA "Hamilton serial killer"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Serial poisoner - To collect insurance money
Number of victims: 2 - 5
Date of murders: February 3, 1995 - June 23, 1996
Date of arrest: October 1997
Date of birth: 1959
Victims profile: Parvesh Kaur Dhillon, 36 (his wife) / Ranjit Singh Khela, 25 (his friend and business associate) / Kushwinderpreet Kaur Toor (his third wife) / His 12-day-old twin boys (by the second wife, Sarabjit Kaur Brar)
Method of murder: Poisoning (strychnine)
Location: Canada / India
Status: Sentenced to 25 years to life in prison in 2001. Died in prison on November 16, 2013
Convicted murderer dies in prison
November 21, 2013
A Hamilton man, convicted of the first degree murders of his wife and a business partner, has died while serving a life sentence.
Corrections Canada says 54-year old Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon, died in a Kingston hospital last Saturday. There is no word on the cause of death. Dhillon was an inmate at the Warkworth Institution. He was found guilty in the strychnine poisonings of his wife and business partner. He was also suspected in at least three other strychnine deaths in India; those of his third wife, and twin boys from a second wife.
Hamilton serial killer Sukhwinder Dhillon dies in prison
By Jon Wells - TheSpect.com
November 22, 2013
Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon, a crooked Stoney Creek used car salesman and serial poisoner at the centre of an investigation that took Hamilton detectives — and journalists — to India, has died a natural death.
Dhillon had been serving a life sentence at the Warkworth Institution in Campbellford, east of Peterborough. He turned 54 last May.
The Peterborough Examiner reported that Dhillon died in a Kingston hospital, and police and the coroner are investigating. A source told The Spectator the cause of death was cancer.
Dhillon murdered his wife, Parvesh Kaur Dhillon, in Hamilton in January 1995, and his friend and business associate Ranjit Singh Khela in June 1996. The motive in each homicide was insurance money.
The Dhillon and Khela families lived in the Riverdale neighbourhood, where Hamilton meets Stoney Creek.
In the 17 months between those two crimes, Dhillon returned to his native Punjab to marry three women and collect dowry payments. Police believe he murdered the second of those wives, Kushwinderpreet Kaur Toor, also with poison, and his two newborn sons by the first of those wives, Sarabjit Kaur Brar.
Dhillon appeared to be getting away with all of these crimes until a veteran insurance claims investigator named Cliff Elliot was assigned to follow up on death claims for both Parvesh Dhillon and Ranjit Khela. Dhillon was the beneficiary of both policies.
Elliot contacted police with his suspicions, setting in motion an investigation that took lead Hamilton detective Warren Korol, and detective Kevin Dhinsa, a native of central India, to Dhillon's hometown of Ludhiana in the Punjab and several remote villages in April 1997.
Forensic investigation proved Dhillon's murder weapon had been strychnine or "kuchila," a minuscule amount of which can cause rapid and tortured death.
Police believe Dhillon bought the seeds used to make the poison in a Punjabi market and brought them back to Canada.
Dhillon was arrested at an east Hamilton used car dealership in October 1997. A mistrial was declared in 2000 when witnesses from India proved to be impostors. He was convicted of his wife's murder in July 2001, and Ranjit Khela's five months after that.
The blockbuster case was documented in a 31-part, 176,000-word series in The Spectator called Poison. The series, researched in part in the Punjab, won a National Newspaper Award, and spawned a Bollywood movie and a book of the same name being rereleased by HarperCollins Canada next spring.
Court rejects Dhillon appeal
BySusan Clairmont - Hamilton Spectator
October 20, 2010
TORONTO The poisoning case unfolded with more than enough drama to stretch from Hamilton to India.
A young mother and an even younger businessman dead and rigid with classic strychnine symptoms in Hamilton.
Another woman and newborn twins suspected of dying by the same means and same hand in India.
An international police investigation. An intrepid insurance investigator. Legal machinations that took years and one mistrial. All this to finally end up with what Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon deserved all along: a conviction for first-degree murder and a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.
Twice.
The drama and intrigue captivated Hamilton, won The Spectator a National Newspaper Award, spawned a Bollywood movie, and became a case study for countless homicide detectives.
Yet the final chapter in the saga ended swiftly and dryly Tuesday in an empty courtroom at the Ontario Court of Appeal.
After deliberating just 20 minutes, the three justices hearing Dhillon’s latest appeal attempt dismissed it, saying Superior Court Justice Stephen Glithero had earlier ruled upon “a fair balance of evidence the parties could and could not call” during the case that convicted the former used car salesman of fatally poisoning his business partner.
Toronto lawyer Brian Snell, representing Dhillon for the second time at the appeal court, argued that a pretrial ruling by Glithero had unfairly prevented the defence from setting up Ranjit Singh Khela’s wife as an alternative suspect.
Snell told the court the defence should have been allowed to tell the jury that Lakhwinder Kaur Sekhon made and distributed homeopathic medicines from her Hamilton home, that they contained small amounts of strychnine and that the medicines had been destroyed after the murder.
But if the defence had been allowed to do that, countered Crown counsel Brian McNeely, the prosecution would have had to be given the opportunity to tell the jury Dhillon had already been convicted in an earlier trial of poisoning his wife with strychnine.
The jury in Ranjit’s trial was not allowed to know of the earlier murder conviction.
While the appeal court’s decision Tuesday may seem abrupt, consider what happened the last time Dhillon appealed, back in January — the justices dismissed it without even bothering to hear the Crown’s case.
That first appeal was regarding the first of Dhillon’s convictions. He was found guilty of the poisoning death of his wife, 36-year-old Parvesh Kaur Dhillon. In 1995, she was rushed to Hamilton General Hospital with mysterious symptoms that doctors couldn’t diagnose. Her body was so rigid her back was arched backward like a bow. She died an agonizing death.
In June 1996, Dhillon’s business partner, 25-year-old Ranjit, died in a similar manner. Ranjit told his wife he had taken a pill, given to him by Dhillon, which was supposed to be a cure for his impotence.
Insurance investigator Clifton Elliot realized Dhillon was the beneficiary to the life insurance policies in both bizarre deaths. He alerted Hamilton police.
The ensuing investigation, led by Detective Warren Korol, tracked Dhillon’s murderous ways to India.
He is a suspect in the death of his third wife there. Her body was cremated without an autopsy, but relatives have said her body was so stiff as she was dying that they laid her across their laps in a car en route to the hospital. Her legs were sticking out a window.
And Dhillon remains a suspect in the death of the 12-day-old twin boys he fathered with his second wife. The babies died just after Dhillon visited them. Much later, their bodies were exhumed in India by Hamilton police and brought to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. Their tiny corpses were loaded with medications their mother says she never gave them.
Dhillon was married to both his wives in India simultaneously and Punjabi police launched an investigation into his bigamy and dowry fraud.
At best, Dhillon is a double murderer who killed two people in Hamilton who loved and trusted him.
At worst, he is a serial poisoner who has been held accountable for fewer than half the lives he took.
Indo-Canadian man gets 25 years for poisoning wife
By Ajit Jain in Toronto
August 1, 2001
An Indo-Canadian who allegedly poisoned his wife with strychnine has been sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon, 42, also faces a second charge of first-degree murder in the death of his business partner Ranjit Singh Khela, published reports say.
Dhillon was found guilty on Tuesday of first-degree murder in the death of his wife Parvesh Kaur Dhillon, 36.
The verdict came after lengthy deliberations by the jury and a closing address by Brent Bentham, the crown prosecutor, that, according to a report in The National Post, brought tears to the eyes of a juror in Kitchener court, near Toronto.
Parvesh Dhillon's death in January 1995 was a mystery. She first fell violently ill at home and subsequently slipped into a coma and died four days later in hospital.
According to court documents, a medical examination failed to find a reason for her sudden illness and death.
Her death was considered a mystery, but medical examiners later found the cause of her death to be strychnine poisoning.
Strychnine is a powerful poison that originates in the seeds of a plant found mainly in India. Once used as rat poison, it is now rarely found in Canada.
Reports say Dhillon laced his wife's headache pills with strychnine.
After her death, he reportedly collected $215,000 in insurance payments as well as $65,000 to pay off a mortgage and an $18,000 line of credit protected against the death of a spouse.
The case might never have come to light had it not been for a quick-witted insurance investigator who, while probing Khela's unexplained death before paying out a $100,000 insurance policy to Dhillon, was struck by a sense of déjà vu -- that he had been through this process with the same beneficiary 18 months earlier.
After checking, the investigator noticed that he had sat down in the same house to discuss with Dhillon the unexplained death of his wife.
That discovery in 1996 prompted a police investigation that eventually led to murder charges against Dhillon, who came to Canada in 1981 from Ludhiana.
Dhillon now faces a second murder charge in the death of Khela, then 26.
Khela died about a month after Parvesh Dhillon, but the jury in Kitchener was not told of the second charge because Justice Stephen Glithero of the Ontario superior court ruled that it would be prejudicial to the case.
"It was a long, hard road and I give a lot of credit to the jury. It seemed some of the odds were stacked against this case coming together, but it did," Detective Sergeant Warren Korol of Hamilton Police is quoted as saying.
The published report reveals that the case lasted 10 weeks and cost the taxpayers an estimated $1 million that made it one of the most expensive prosecutions in the Hamilton area. They had to fly in witnesses from India also.
NRI killed wife, partner for insurance claim
By Faisal Kutty - IndianExpress.com
September 19, 2000
Toronto: On September 11, at a court in Hamilton, the trial of a bizarre murder case began. The story is of multiple murders and serial marriages in two countries, hundreds of miles apart. The accused is an Indian emigrant from Punjab, Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon.
The Crown's attorney, Brent Bentham, alleges that Dhillon poisoned his wife and a business associate to collect insurance proceeds. The court also heard that Dhillon poisoned to death another wife in Punjab, but he is not on trial for this alleged murder.
Dhillon came to Canada in 1981 from Ludhiana and married Parvesh Kaur in 1983 back in Punjab and they lived together until her death in 1995. Parvesh fell ill on January 30, 1995, went into a coma and died four days later in hospital.
The coroner was unable to establish the cause of death. Bentham told the jury: "The death of Parvesh Dhillon was considered a mystery. That mystery, the Crown contends, has since been solved by science."
Nothing much was thought at the time and Dhillon filed an insurance claim the next business day. The 46-year-old collected more than $ 215,000 in insurance proceeds and also got $83,000 in loans paid off.
The court was told that the newly single and wealthy, Dhillon traveled to India and married 21-year-old Sarabjit Kaur Brar within nine weeks of his wife's death. Dhillon allegedly travelled to another village and married yet again. The new bride Kushwinderpreet Kaur, 23, had no knowledge of his earlier marriages. Bentham alleges that both women remained in India expecting to be sponsored, while the groom returned to Canada. The father of the two brides began immigration proceedings.
Dhillon returned to India in late 1995 and visited Brar in hospital where she had just given birth to their twin boys. The Crown attorney told the attentive seven-men, five-women jury that Dhillon killed Brar by poisoning her with strychnine, derived from a plant found in India.
Dhillon allegedly gave her the poison claiming that it was medication to help her with her immigration medical examination. Brar took the medication against the wishes of her parents. "He did that, members of the jury, in order to be free to sponsor his soon-to-be fourth wife to come to Canada," said Bentham.
The jury also heard that within 16 days of Brar's funeral, Dhillon married his fourth wife, 26-year-old Sukhwinder Kaur Grewal of Ludhiana. Soon, he returned to Canada in March 1996 and sponsored Grewal in lieu of the deceased Brar. By then the parents of Brar and the other wife, Kushwinderpreet Kaur, got wind of the situation and notified Canadian authorities. His application for Grewal was rejected.
None of this would have come out had it not been for the death of Ranjit Singh Khela. Khela, 25, came to Canada in 1993 and became a business partner in Dhillon's used-car business. The young man reportedly trusted and respected Dhillon and referred to him as "uncle." In May 1996, Bentham alleges, Khela and Dhillon tookout insurance policies with each other as beneficiaries for$100,000. The policy contained a clause that would double the amount in the event of accidental death.
Bentham told the court that sometime in June Khela's body went stiffand he died in hospital. He had reportedly said that he had taken a pill given to him by Dhillon who told him that it was "good forbackache and good for sex."
After Khela's death the same insurance investigator went to meet Dhillon and found it unusual that in both cases there was no explanation for the death. A reexamination of Parvesh Dhillon's tissue discovered evidence of strychnine poisoning.
A global police investigation followed resulting in two charges of murder being laid in Canada in October 1997. Dhillon has been in custody since then.
