Andrew L. Urban.
Parwinder Kaur had poured a small amount of petrol onto herself, hardly enough to fill a teacup. A few minutes later she flicked on a cigarette lighter and ignited the petrol. It was intended not to kill her but to ignite emotions in her husband Kulwinder Singh and their respective families that would lead to a – perhaps hospital bedside – resolution of simmering conflicts over what she was doing with her wages. That’s how the movie Gadar that she had been watching on DVD ended. The disc was still in the DVD player opposite the lounge where she had been sitting.
But now Parwinder was on fire. She was running down the drive of her Rouse Hill home, flames and smoke billowing from her. She let out a scream which attracted her husband, Kulwinder, upstairs at the time and two of their neighbours. She had already called 000 and in the ensuing 89 seconds, calmly spelled out her name and address details. She told the operator: “My husband nearly killed me.” She did not say anything about being on fire. That call set off the wrong alarm for police, leading to her husband being charged with her murder.
It was a hot afternoon in Sydney’s Rouse Hill on December 2, 2013, yet Parwinder had put on a red knitted jumper over her casual top. It was meant to offer some protection from the flames. It killed her. Made of an acrylic fabric, it ignited and continued to burn and melt, giving off a nasty smell and much smoke. If only it had been wool ….
Margaret Cunneen SC
But all this was then unknown to the police. The information they had was that a woman had called 000 and when they got to the address, the woman was dying of severe burns. Her husband was nearby, terribly upset and with burns on his hands. You can’t blame them for setting off with the wrong assumptions. Not then. But as details and evidence began to emerge, it became more and more obvious that the assumptions were leading them on the road to a wrongful conviction … if Karwinder hadn’t had Margaret Cunneen SC as her barrister.
At the start of the trial, Cunneen summarised Karwinder’s case quite simply: “Now, there is simply no physical or forensic evidence that supports the Crown case. It is not that there is no evidence, it is not that there is no forensic evidence – there is plenty of forensic evidence and it all points to the only other possibility besides Mr Singh’s guilt; that, for her own reasons on this day, she set herself on fire. Having alerted the police by phone and, as you have heard, she had done a trial run on a previous occasion when her husband wasn’t even home and knowing that her neighbour, Ms Valle, was at home.”
The jury took less than three hours (including lunch) to return a unanimous verdict of Not Guilty. Read the full story of this tragedy as we reported it on April 2, 2021.