BREAKING NEWS: Hung jury means new trial to take place in Toyah Cordingley murder case

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The jury could not decide on a verdict in the Toyah Cordingley murder trial.

A Supreme Court of Queensland jury in the trial of Rajwinder Singh for the murder of former volunteer Toyah Cordingley on a Wangetti Beach in 2018 was today discharged after it could not come to a unanimous decision.

The case will now go to a retrial, with presiding judge Justice James Henry setting a date of next Wednesday for a directions hearing to decide when that will go ahead.

Former Paws and Claws worker Ms Cordingley went missing on the afternoon of Sunday, October 21, 2018, while walking her dog Indie on a remote stretch of Far North Queensland beach.

Parents Troy Cordingley and Vanessa Gardiner found her body buried in a shallow grave in sand dunes, with the dog tied to a tree nearby.

Mr Singh pleaded not guilty to murder, telling an undercover police officer posing as a prisoner in the Cairns watch-house in March, 2023, he fled the country after seeing a masked person kill her that day.

But forensic scientists told the court during the three-week trial that Mr Singh’s DNA was 3.7 billion times more likely than another person to be on a stick found partially protruding from Ms Cordingley’s burial site, and 310 times more likely than any other person to have been found under Ms Cordingley’s fingernails.

Crown prosecutor Nathan Crane had pointed out the “unison” between the movements of Mr Singh in his distinct blue Alpha Romeo and Ms Cordingley’s phone from Wangetti to Cairns on the afternoon of the murder. 

However, Defence Counsel Angus Edwards KC’s told the court, unless the prosecution had disproven beyond a reasonable doubt any other possibilities, Mr Singh must be found not guilty.

The prosecution’s evidence fell “woefully short of reasonable doubt”, he said, and there was a chance somebody else may have committed the murder.

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