Cliff Elliot was a veteran insurance claims investigator, and the two death claims he was assigned had the same name on them. In early 1995 Parvesh Kaur Dhillon, thirty-six, had died in Hamilton, Ontario, of what a forensic pathologist could only record as unknown causes. Seventeen months later, on June 23, 1996, Ranjit Singh Khela, twenty-five or twenty-six by different reports, died in the same city. The man collecting on both policies was Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon, a used car dealer in Stoney Creek who had come to Canada from Ludhiana in 1981 who had been Parvesh's husband and Khela's business partner. Elliot had handled the first claim himself. He took his suspicions to the Hamilton police.
Accounts of the money differ. Hamilton reporting put each policy at about $200,000; a 2013 Press Trust of India report, citing the Sun News Network, said Dhillon had collected $300,000 after his wife's death and was claiming $200,000 on Khela's policy when he was arrested.
Parvesh Dhillon had been married to him for twelve years and had two children, and the prosecutor who later spoke for her in court described a hard-working, quiet woman devoted to them. She collapsed at home in agony, her back arched and her teeth clenched as her muscles contracted, slipped into a coma and died in hospital four days later. The medical examination found no reason for it. Most reports place her death in January 1995; others, including the 2013 reports of Dhillon's own death, give February 3.
Within months Dhillon went back to Punjab. He married Sarabjit Kaur Brar, a young bride who came with a dowry, and then another woman, while none of the earlier marriages had ended. Sarabjit gave birth to twin boys, and both babies died suddenly, reportedly at twelve days old. A later wife, named in different accounts as Kushwinder Kaur, Kushpreet Kaur and Kushwinderpreet Kaur Toor, also died. Canadian detectives came to suspect strychnine in all three deaths.
Back in Hamilton he went into business with Khela, a friend. On the last night of Khela's life at least six other people were with them, among them Khela's wife, Lakhwinder, who made dinner. According to the Crown, Khela had said he had taken a pill Dhillon gave him, described as good for backache and good for sex. His body went rigid and he died in hospital. Strychnine was found in his blood, and when Parvesh's stored tissue samples were tested again, it was found in hers as well.
Even so, the case was thin. Dhillon denied killing Khela, and on December 15, 1996, after some fourteen hours with detectives, he failed a polygraph examination and went home a free man. There was no confession, and police had not been able to search his house. He had a motive in the policy on Khela's life, but Khela's widow was the beneficiary of another one, and Dhillon had been one of several people at the table that night. What Detective Warren Korol, who led the investigation, still lacked was proof that Parvesh's death belonged to the same pattern.
In April 1997 Korol and Detective Kevin Dhinsa went to Ludhiana, Dhillon's home district, and to villages across Punjab, where bodies were exhumed. The poison was identified as strychnine, known there as kuchila and sold in shops as a poison for rats and other vermin. A minute quantity brings a fast and agonizing death, and it does not show up in routine tests, which was why nothing had been found in Parvesh. Police believe Dhillon bought the seeds in a Punjabi market and carried them back to Canada.
He was arrested at a used car dealership in east Hamilton in October 1997 and charged with two counts of first-degree murder. After a three-day hearing Justice Paul Philp refused him bail, remarking that the Crown had a very strong case to put to a jury; the assistant Crown attorney, Brent Bentham, had laid out Dhillon's lies, his bigamy, his beatings of Parvesh and the two poisonings. The deaths in India were left off the charges because they had happened outside Canada, but witnesses to them were brought over to testify. The joint trial opened in September 2000 at the John Sopinka Courthouse in Hamilton, with Russell Silverstein, Dhillon's third lawyer, for the defense. It collapsed in a mistrial when witnesses brought from India were exposed as impostors.
The two murders were then severed. The retrial for Parvesh's death was held in Kitchener before Justice C. Stephen Glithero, with Bentham and Tony Leitch prosecuting. Key witnesses changed their stories on the stand, but the toxicologist Fredric Rieders testified for the Crown and Sarabjit, the second wife, gave evidence against her husband. Silverstein put Dhillon on the stand, and the Crown cross-examined him for more than two days. In closing, Bentham told the jury that Parvesh had given the accused twelve years of her life and been murdered to satisfy his greed. The jury of seven women and five men retired on July 30, 2001, deliberated for eight hours, spent the night sequestered in a Kitchener hotel, and convicted him of first-degree murder.
About five months later a second jury, which was not told of the first conviction, found him guilty of first-degree murder in Khela's death. Each verdict carried life imprisonment with no chance of parole for twenty-five years.
He appealed both. The Court of Appeal for Ontario dismissed the appeal from the first conviction without needing to hear from the Crown. In October 2010 his lawyer, Brian Snell, argued the second, saying a pretrial ruling by Justice Glithero, who had also presided over the Khela trial, had unfairly kept the defense from presenting Khela's widow as an alternative suspect. The three judges took twenty minutes to reject it, finding that Glithero had struck a fair balance between the evidence each side could and could not call.
No court in either country ever ruled on the three deaths in Punjab. The Hamilton Spectator's serial on the case by Jon Wells won a National Newspaper Award and became a book, and the story was adapted for a Bollywood film. Dhillon was an inmate of Warkworth Institution when he died in a Kingston hospital in November 2013, at fifty-four, Correctional Service Canada said; the cause was not released. Parvesh Dhillon's ashes were scattered over a sacred river in India.