By GARY DIMMOCK, OTTAWA CITIZEN
She was the last to see her mother alive, and the first to find her dead.
The girl had stayed home from school that day — Jan. 29, 2014 — to look after her mom as she recovered from surgery. The girl didn’t want to run errands with her father but he convinced her, and they went to the grocery store and bought roses and cake for her mom. It was their wedding anniversary.
When they returned from the grocery store, it was the girl, roses in her hand, who found her mom dead on the floor. Jagtar Gill was slashed and bludgeoned to death in the family room of her Barrhaven home.
The horrifying discovery was recounted by Gill’s daughter for police in a 2014 interview. A video of the interview was shown in court at her father’s first-degree murder trial. Bhupinderpal Gill and his mistress, Gurpreet Ronald, are on trial for killing his 43-year-old wife. The accused killers — both OC Transpo drivers — watched in silence as the girl recounted that awful afternoon.
She walked in the door (unlocked), kicked off her shoes and later “froze” at the sight of her dead mom.
“There was blood everywhere. I started yelling for my dad,” the girl told police in the 2014 interview.
She started crying, started breathing heavy, she said. She was too scared to check for a pulse, but it was clear from her severe wounds — including a slit throat — that she was dead.
“My dad’s panicking,” she recalled. “He was just yelling in a worried tone about nothing … I kept hearing about suicide but she would never do that. She was happy,” the girl told police in the videotaped interview.
Her mother had in fact been killed, and worse, police said it was her father who conspired with his mistress to do it.
She said her father wondered aloud if it was a robbery.
The girl said she kept thinking: “Who would want to do this on my parents’ anniversary?”
The detective told the girl the police were going to do their best to find out.
Earlier that day, her mother was joking around that they’d be lost without her. If she died, she joked, nobody would know how to cut the pizza.
Her dad said they’d figure it out, the daughter said.
The jury has heard about key DNA evidence against the mistress, Gurpreet Ronald. Her DNA was all over the murder weapons and the bloody gloves. The police say when Gill came home with his daughter on the day of the killing, he went to the kitchen and started washing the bloody knives used to kill his wife.
The jury has heard that Gill also dumped one of the murder weapons outside, and that Ronald dumped the bloody gloves in a park, according to police.
Gill is expected to testify in his own defence at the trial before Ontario Superior Court Justice Julianne Parfett. The trial continues Thursday.
