Three people died in three Ontario cities on three consecutive days in the first week of October 2024, and for most of that week three separate police services were working what looked like three unrelated homicides. The link came from Hamilton. Detectives there saw that the description of the woman they wanted matched the suspect in a killing in Niagara Falls the day before, and the two investigations were then tied to one already open in Toronto. Sabrina Kauldhar, thirty, of Toronto, was arrested at a hotel in Burlington and charged with all three deaths. She has not been tried, and none of the charges has been tested in court. What follows is what police, prosecutors and the courts have said publicly.
The first victim was Trinh Thi Vu, sixty-six. Toronto police called to a house near Keele and Dundas Streets in the city's west end just after two in the afternoon on October 1 found her dead with visible signs of trauma. Police said she and Kauldhar knew each other and would not say how; CHCH News later reported that Vu was Kauldhar's roommate. One early wire report gave her age as sixty.
On the afternoon of October 2, Niagara Regional Police went to John Allan Park in Niagara Falls on a report of a disturbance and found Lance Cunningham, forty-seven, critically injured. Paramedics and firefighters worked on him, and he was pronounced dead at the scene. His wife, Kim, told the CBC that they had a thirteen-year-old daughter, that he had not deserved this, and that she wanted her husband back.
On October 3 Hamilton police found a man unresponsive and injured in a parking lot. Mario Bilich, seventy-seven, a retired teacher, had been stabbed, and he died in hospital. Police said he had been followed. In the coverage that followed, Cunningham and Bilich were both remembered as loving fathers.
Canadian Press reports put the arrest in Burlington later on October 3; the police announcement of the charges came on October 4, and several outlets date the arrest to that day. Police asked the public for help piecing together the three days, and tried to identify a woman seen on security video at a Burlington store on October 1 buying clothing that Kauldhar had with her when she was taken into custody. Court records reported by the CBC showed that she had been convicted in 2018 of break and enter, assault with a weapon and assaulting a police officer. Her Toronto landlord described her as a quiet, model tenant.
Only one of the three was known to her. Chief Bill Fordy of the Niagara Regional Police said that Cunningham and Bilich were both going about their business and that investigators believed the attacks were random. Asked at the news conference whether the term applied, he said that by definition she was a serial killer: two or more offenses, so he thought it a fair comment. It was a police characterization of a charged case, made the day after the last death.
The first court fight was over her mind. When she appeared in Toronto on October 17, 2024, her own lawyers had applied for an assessment of her fitness to stand trial and then withdrawn the application, saying she had instructed them to oppose it. The prosecution applied instead, and Ontario Court Justice Edward Kelly granted it, finding reasonable grounds to doubt her fitness at that time. In March 2025 a judge ruled her unfit and ordered sixty days of psychiatric treatment before reassessment. After it, her lawyers argued that the Crown had not proved it more likely than not that she had the psychological wherewithal to meet the test. On June 11, 2025, Justice Russell Silverstein ruled her fit, relying on experts from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health who had observed her. If most of the symptoms of her illness had resolved with treatment, he said, it stood to reason that her unfitness, an earlier symptom of the same illness, had resolved too.
She faces one count of first-degree murder and two of second-degree murder. Early reports divided them differently, with second-degree in Toronto and first-degree from Niagara and Hamilton; the consistent later reporting is one first-degree count and two second-degree. Police have not said how Vu or Cunningham died. No verdict has been reached on any of the three.