Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon emigrated from Punjab to Hamilton, Ontario in 1981 and sold used cars in Stoney Creek.
His wife, Parvesh Kaur Dhillon, collapsed at home in early 1995 and died in the way strychnine kills: the muscles contracting until the heart stops, the back arched, the teeth clenched. Sources differ on the date, giving January and February 3, 1995. A forensic pathologist recorded death from unknown causes.
He went back to Punjab, took a new young wife and her dowry, and married two more women. One of them died. So did twin infant sons born to another. Police came to suspect strychnine in all three, but the deaths were in India, and no Canadian charge ever followed.
Back in Hamilton he went into business with a friend, Ranjit Singh Khela, who was twenty-five. Khela died in June 1996. Dhillon was the beneficiary of his life insurance, as he had been of his wife's.
That is what undid him. A veteran insurance claims investigator, Cliff Elliot, was assigned to follow up the death claims on both policies, noticed that the same man collected on each, and went to the police. Strychnine was found in Khela's blood, and when Parvesh's stored tissue samples were tested again, it was found there too.
Detective Warren Korol and Detective Kevin Dhinsa took the investigation to Ludhiana and to remote villages in Punjab in April 1997, exhuming bodies. The poison was identified as strychnine, kuchila in Punjabi, of which a minute quantity kills quickly and painfully. Police believe he bought the seeds in a market there and carried them back to Canada.
He was arrested at an east Hamilton car dealership in October 1997. The joint trial for both murders collapsed in a mistrial after witnesses brought from India were exposed as impostors. The charges were then split. He was convicted of murdering his wife in the first trial and of murdering Khela in the second, both first-degree, both in 2001, each carrying life with no parole for twenty-five years.
He died in a Kingston hospital in 2013 at fifty-four, of natural causes, while serving his sentence at Warkworth Institution in Campbellford. A source told the Hamilton Spectator the cause was cancer.
The count here is the two he was convicted of. Murderpedia gives two to five. The three further deaths in India were investigated and suspected but never charged, and are recorded here as that.