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Indo-Canadian man gets 25 years for poisoning wife

Ajit Jain in Toronto

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.

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