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Tsaw. man sentenced 51 months for fraud
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BY
JESSICA KERR
jkerr@delta-optimist.com
CHUNG CHOW
Crown contends cover up Trial begins for man charged with killing wife and dumping her body on Deltaport Way BY
TOM ZYTARUK
Optimist contributor
A former Surrey teacher on trial for the 2006 murder of his pregnant wife staged a missing persons complaint with police in an attempt to conceal the crime, the Crown alleges. Mukhtiar Singh Panghali, 38, is being tried for second-degree murder and interfering with a dead body in the strangulation of his wife, Manjit Panghali, 30, in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster.
Prosecutor Dennis Murray outlined the Crown’s case at the beginning of the trial Monday morning. The Crown alleges Panghali killed his wife after she’d returned home from a prenatal yoga class, staged the discovery of her car in Whalley, burned her body on a South Delta beach and then delayed for as long as he could to lodge a missing persons complaint with the Surrey RCMP. His wife’s charred remains were discovered along Deltaport Way several days later.
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She was four months pregnant with couple’s second child. Panghali originally elected to be tried by judge and jury but last month decided to be tried by a judge alone. With head shaved and wearing a white dress shirt, Panghali listened intently from the prisoner’s dock as Murray told Justice Heather Holmes the couple had been “in the throes of some difficulty in their relationship” at the time. The court heard Panghali reported his wife missing to
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police “about 26 hours” after her disappearance. When he’d been encouraged by others to call police sooner, Murray alleged, Panghali gave various reasons why he didn’t want to do that. The prosecutor accused Panghali of making a “concentrated effort to cover up the fact” he saw his wife after her yoga class, and tried to create an “impression” of concern. “The accused was not telling the truth,” Murray alleged. The trial continues.
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A nanny and her charge rest on a log at Centennial Beach while Mt. Baker dominates the landscape.
A Tsawwassen man was sentenced Friday in a Seattle courtroom to more than four years in jail for mail fraud. Barrie Turner, 66, was sentenced to 51 months in prison, three years of supervised release and ordered to pay more than $300,000 in restitution. Earlier this year, Turner was arrested and charged with mail fraud in connection with the operation of a series of fake “executive dating” websites. He was arrested in March trying to cross the border into Point Roberts as part of a U.S. Postal Inspection Service investigation into Executive Dating LLC, which ran Executive Catholic Dating and Executive Gay Dating among other matchmaking websites. In total, he operated more than 200 “executive dating” websites. Turner pleaded guilty to the charges earlier this year. At his sentencing in a U.S. District Court, Judge Ricardo S. Martinez told Turner: “You stole the victims’ money, you stole their hope and dignity for the most base of reasons — money.” The investigation determined more than 1,000 people signed up for dating services from one of the 240 bogus websites. Some paid as much as $1,500 for the services. Turner sent out fake matches to customers, sometimes using the same photo while the identity information was changed to match each client’s geographic location. The payments were sent to UPS stores in different states and then forwarded to a mailbox in Point Roberts.