By Indira Tarachandra

In 1971 Dianna Singh arrived in Canada from Guyana with her husband and the couple’s baby daughter. Three years later, estranged from her husband, Dianna went missing and her slain body was found on August 25, 1974. For half a century this case has remained cold. Dianna’s daughter was only four years old at the time of her mother’s death. Before she went missing, Dianna was living in a Toronto rooming house and worked at a bar called the Granite Club. On August 14, 1974, she went to visit her boyfriend at a Becker’s convenience store at Jane Street and Woolner Ave.
This was the last time she was seen alive.
Dianna’s body was discovered 11 days later, her pants and underwear found a few feet from her body by a security guard. She had been stabbed to death. Investigators were unable to glean much of anything from the clothes or the scene, other than some trampled foliage. Dianna Singh’s ex-husband and boyfriend at the time were never cleared by York Regional Police investigators.Top of FormBottom of Form Dianna Singh was a 21-year-old from Guyana, with one daughter and was pregnant prior to being discovered murdered near a secluded and wooded King laneway off 15th Sideroad near Keele Street — 100 metres east of Seneca Campus. Over the past decade I have repeatedly thought of Dianna with the hope that her case would finally be solved, and justice served. On a missing persons website, I did connect with a distant relative of Dianna who did not want to be named.

“I met Dianna once when she had visited Guyana, I believed it was in 1973, I was a little girl,” she wrote on the forum. “I remember her to be very pretty with big green eyes.” It was explained to me that the family and Dianna’s daughter refuse to talk about the murder, wanted to be left alone and keep to themselves.

But despite the secrecy that so often runs in Caribbean families, that is not acceptable when a human being has their life taken from them at the hands of another.
Neither Dianna’s ex-husband nor her boyfriend was cleared by police in the initial investigation. Scarce evidence offered to police included a statement from her boyfriend, who said Dianna told him when they last met that she informed him she’d hitchhiked with a man in a ‘big car’ to come to. It’s important to note that in August 1974, the TTC went on strike for 23 days, spanning the time Dianna went missing and subsequently found.
In a 2017 cold case article, York police Det. Bill Courtice and Det. Bob Athwal, two of Canada’s handful of dedicated cold case investigators, spoke to crime reporter Jermey Grimaldi citing there could be a multitude of reasons for this — two of which include, their alibis going unconfirmed or perhaps some inconsistencies with their statements.

Those who commented on her murder online say what they find most disturbing about the site where she was located is close to where another murdered young woman, Yvonne Leroux’s was found nearby – between Jane and Keel streets, in a similar state – clothed from the waist up, naked from the waist down.

As for where the case goes from here, it’s anyone’s guess. Today, true crime and cold cases are heavily featured in the news, documentaries, social media platforms and podcasts. It does not go unnoticed to me that Dianna was a young immigrant woman of colour, and perhaps she did not have the advocates she needed to push for answers. Instead, that’s how the story has been left for 50 years.

Can you help us identify Dianna Singh’s killer?

If so, please contact the York Regional Police Cold Case Unit at 1-866-876-5423 ext. 7865 or call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS.