THE CRIMSON TIDE OF WANGETTI BEACH: JUSTICE, DECEPTION, AND THE FIVE-YEAR HUNT FOR A KILLER

The golden hour at Wangetti Beach is usually a sanctuary of silence, where the Coral Sea laps against the pristine sands of North Queensland and the ancient rainforest of the Macalister Range whispers in the breeze. But on October 21, 2018, that silence was shattered by a violence so visceral it would leave a permanent scar on the Australian psyche. Toya Jade Cordingley, a 24-year-old pharmacy worker and a tireless advocate for animal welfare, parked her Mitsubishi Lancer near the beach entrance, her boyfriend’s dog, India, barking with excitement in the backseat. It was supposed to be a routine evening walk, a moment of zen before the start of a new week. She never walked back to her car.

The first sign of the nightmare was India. The following morning, searchers found the dog tied to a tree near the car. The knot was deliberate—not the frantic tangle of a dog that had broken free, but a secure hitch that suggested the attacker had paused to “park” the animal before or after the slaughter. Inside Toya’s car, her life sat in stasis: her wallet, her house keys, her pharmacy ID. Only her phone was missing. The search that followed wasn’t just a police operation; it was a communal outpouring of grief. Dozens of locals, familiar with the treacherous terrain, combed the dunes. It was Toya’s father, Troy Cordingley, who eventually made the discovery that no parent should ever endure. In a stretch of scrubland where the sand was unnaturally disturbed, he cleared away the surface to find his daughter. She had been overpowered, partially buried, and left in a state that spoke of a struggle against a predator who viewed her life as a mere obstacle to his impulses.

The investigation was a masterclass in modern forensics meeting old-fashioned grit. There were no drag marks, meaning the crime happened exactly where Toya fell. The “Wangetti Beach Killer” hadn’t just attacked her; he had waited for her. Investigators began a digital dragnet, sucking up every bit of cell tower data from the remote area. Amidst the thousands of pings, one number stood out—a device that had no business being at Wangetti at sunset. It belonged to Rajwinder Singh, a 38-year-old nurse from Innisfail. But by the time his DNA was matched to biological evidence found under Toya’s fingernails—proof that she had fought like a lioness in her final moments—Singh was already 10,000 miles away.

Singh’s flight from Australia was a clinical exercise in panic. Within 24 hours of the murder, he had abandoned his wife and children, ignored his shifts at the hospital, and boarded a one-way flight to Delhi. He traveled light, leaving behind his own family’s passports and his medical registration. For the next four years, he became a phantom. He posed as a wandering pilgrim, hiding in the sprawling temple complexes of Punjab and the chaotic backstreets of Delhi. He stayed in “langars” (community kitchens), eating for free and sleeping on stone floors, moving every few days to stay ahead of the Interpol Red Notice. The Australian government, frustrated by the slow gears of international diplomacy, took an unprecedented step in 2021: they offered a $1 million reward for information leading to his capture. In the slums and villages of India, that kind of money is enough to make even the most loyal relative talk.

In November 2022, the hunt ended. Indian authorities, acting on a tip that Singh had resurfaced in the Janakpuri area of Delhi to seek medical attention for a lingering hand injury—the same injury he’d sought treatment for in Australia just days after Toya’s death—moved in. He was unkempt, his face weathered by years of life on the run, but his eyes still held the defiant spark of a man who thought he had won. His extradition was a legal marathon. Singh initially confessed to the killing during an interrogation in Delhi, only to retract it days later, claiming he was a mere witness to a “gang-related hit” involving two other men. He spun a bizarre narrative of a secret drug war on the beaches of Queensland, a theory that Australian detectives dismissed as the desperate ramblings of a cornered animal.

While Singh sat in a Delhi cell, the investigation back in Cairns took a dark, domestic turn. As digital forensic experts cracked the encryption on Toya’s recovered laptop and cloud accounts, a hidden layer of her life emerged. Toya hadn’t just been walking the dog; she had been walking a tightrope. She had been in secret communication with a man named Tyson, a specialist she had met through her work. The messages, recovered from the “deleted” archive of a secure messaging app, revealed a woman in crisis. “He lost it again,” she wrote to Tyson just weeks before her death, referring to her partner, Marco. “I don’t feel safe. I think I need to disappear for a while.”

Marco Hines, a fixture in the Cairns nightlife scene, had always been a person of interest, but his alibi had initially seemed solid. He claimed to be in the city center at the time of the murder. However, with the discovery of Toya’s secret messages, the police re-examined the CCTV from the Captain Cook Highway. A vehicle matching Marco’s was seen heading north toward Wangetti at 5:14 PM—precisely the window when Toya would have been on the beach. When confronted, Marco’s composure slipped. He admitted to following her because he suspected she was seeing someone else, but he insisted that when he saw her Mitsubishi in the lot, he “lost his nerve” and turned around. The coincidence was staggering: two men, both connected to Toya through either biology or obsession, were allegedly in the vicinity of that lonely beach at the exact same hour.

The trial, which began in mid-2024, has turned into a Shakespearean tragedy played out in a Queensland courtroom. Rajwinder Singh stands in the dock, his defense team arguing that the DNA evidence is “circumstantial” and that his flight to India was a cultural reaction to being a “wrongly accused outsider” in a high-tension community. They have leaned heavily on the “Marco factor,” suggesting that the police suffered from tunnel vision, ignoring a volatile domestic situation in favor of an easy foreign scapegoat. The prosecution, however, has produced a chilling piece of evidence: Singh’s nursing logbook, where he had scribbled a series of anatomical notes about the carotid artery and the pressure required for “instant incapacitation”—notes written just forty-eight hours before Toya was strangled.

As the hearings continue, the town of Cairns remains on edge. The quiet pharmaceutical worker who loved puppies and advocated for the voiceless has become the center of a storm that involves international bounty hunters, secret affairs, and the terrifying reality of “stranger danger.” Toya’s mother, Vanessa, sits in the front row every day, a silent sentinel of grief. For her, the “how” and the “who” are secondary to the “why.” Why did a walk on a beautiful beach have to end in a shallow grave? Why did the system take five years to bring a suspect back to the soil where the blood was spilled?

The legacy of Toya Jade Cordingley has fundamentally changed Wangetti Beach. There are now emergency beacons installed along the highway, and the once-deserted stretch of sand is regularly patrolled. But for the women of North Queensland, the innocence is gone. The story of the “Nurse Who Fled” and the “Partner Who Watched” serves as a grim reminder that the most beautiful places can hide the ugliest intentions. Whether Rajwinder Singh is a cold-blooded predator or a man caught in a web of impossible coincidences will be for the jury to decide. But as the sun sets over Wangetti today, the shadow cast by the rainforest seems just a little bit longer, and the sound of the tide sounds uncomfortably like a secret that may never be fully told.

The evidence remains a jagged puzzle. There are the footprints in the sand that match Singh’s gait, but there is also the unexplained gap in Marco’s phone records during the exact hour of the attack. There is Tyson, the “secret man,” who has since left the country, refusing to testify. And there is India, the dog who saw it all but cannot speak, the only living being who knows exactly what happened in those final minutes before Toya Jade Cordingley’s light was extinguished forever. Justice in the tropics is a slow, humid process, but the ghost of Toya Jade still walks that shoreline, waiting for the truth to be unearthed as clearly as her body was on that terrible October morning.