Chronology of a Murder Part 1: From Cairns to Wangetti
Toyah Cordingley Case
What follows is a chronology of the murder of Toyah Cordingley based on statements made to the Cairns Supreme Court in February and March, 2025.
In late March a hung jury could not decide if accused murderer Rajwinder Singh killed former Paws and Claws volunteer Toyah Cordingley at Wangetti Beach, and a retrial was ordered for Monday, November 10.
This is a three-part chronological retelling of what the court heard during the first three-week trial:
Toyah Cordingley, 24, wakes up on Sunday, October 21, 2018, at her Cairns home and visits Rustys Market in the CBD before heading north to take her dog Indie for a walk at Wangetti Beach.
The same morning, nurse Rajwinder Singh wakes up in the Innisfail home he shares with wife Sukhdeep Kaur, their three children, and his parents, and gives his father a lift to his place of worship.
He then heads to Cairns Central shopping centre, arriving at about 11.50am in his distinctive Blue Alfa Romeo - one of only three of its kind registered in North Queensland.
Mr Singh’s whereabouts on the day were shown to the Cairns Supreme Court after being painfully pieced together by police investigators using CCTV footage, dashcam and phone records.
The CCTV captures a man driving an Alfa from Innisfail, north past Gordonvale, and through Cairns, to the shopping centre.
Mr Singh is seen at Cairns Central wearing a striped polo shirt, grey shorts and sandals in the mall and food court - with a striped polo shirt, grey shorts and sandals also later being seized by police from the family home.
The vehicle is filmed again leaving Cairns Central at 12.40pm, before travelling north along Captain Cook Highway at about the same time Ms Cordingley is tracked departing Rustys bound for Wangetti Beach with dog Indie.
The Alfa is tracked passing through Smithfield and past Clifton Road, Clifton Beach, but not as far north as the BP petrol station at Craiglie.
Mr Singh’s wife Mrs Kaur later tells the court she met her husband in India in 2009 - he is originally from the Punjab village of Buttar Kalan - and they moved to Australia the year they married.
But the marriage was tested early in 2018 - Mrs Kaur said Mr Singh had moved out of home, but had returned after she had become upset and asked him to come back.
Meanwhile, Toyah’s new friend and podiatrist Tyson Bryan Anthony Franklin is out of town, but she is intending to pick him up from Cairns Airport when he arrives home later that evening.
When she does not arrive, he calls her multiple times, then takes an Uber home.
CCTV footage that evening captures Mr Franklin catching the Uber from the airport.
Mr Franklin said he met Ms Cordingley in early October when she came to his podiatry clinic for an appointment.
They did a Harry Potter quiz together and exchanged numbers, saving one another in their contacts as “Gryffindor” and “Slytherin”.
There were then several weeks of texting between them, which Mr Franklin told the court was sometimes sexual and intimate.
In his first interviews with police, Mr Franklin said there had been no physical contact and that he and Ms Cordingley had decided “nothing should happen” between them.
But, under cross examination, Mr Franklin said he had not initially been candid with the police, saying they had, a few weeks earlier, spent a day hiking and swimming at Crystal Cascades near Cairns, then shared dinner and a night together.
He said they did not have a sexual relationship, but “we lay together and I ran my hands over her body, we cuddled”.
Then they exchanged frequent texts daily after that meeting, he said.
Mr Franklin also told the court he had accessed porn via a file-sharing website around the time he and Ms Cordingley were texting.
He said he thought she was unhappy in her relationship with long-term partner Marco Heidenreich and he believed she wanted to live alone.
But Mr Heidenreich told the court the couple had not been having any relationship issues and they had not spoken about splitting up or seeing other people.
Following Mr Singh being filmed at 12.40pm that day, the blue Alfa is captured on CCTV footage, at 1.17pm, driving past the Clifton Beach turnoff.
Data records of Mr Singh’s mobile phone usage show a gap between 1.16pm and 8.15pm, meaning his phone was likely either turned off or had a flat battery during that time.
Mr Singh next used his phone that evening to call Innisfail Hospital where he worked.
According to data analysis tabled in court, Ms Cordingley’s phone is tracked moving from Cairns to Wangetti Beach before a data gap from 2.07pm to 3.49pm.
What happened during that about an hour and a half when her phone was out of contact is forever seared into the psyche of so many Douglas Shire locals.
Continued tomorrow - Chronology of a Murder Part 2: The Port Douglas connection
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