COLD CASE: Pregnant and murdered — Dianna Singh found in King

It was late one night when a bored Indira Tarachandra began searching York Regional Police's website, serendipitously landing on the service's cold case files page.

Clicking through, the 40-year-old woman of Guyanese heritage landed on a case that took her breath away and promptly penetrated her dreams.

Dianna Singh was a 21-year-old from Guyana, she had 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

“I feel a affinity to her … and I've always been fascinated by cold cases,” she said. “It's like a puzzle that can always be completed if you can find the right pieces. It's a moving target, but when people are persistent and keep asking questions all roads lead to an intersection, the crime being solved.”

Reaching that juncture has remained elusive for detectives at York Regional Police since the slaying was discovered on Aug. 25, 1974.

It was in 1971 when Dianna arrived in Canada with her husband and the couple's daughter, aged four at the time of Dianna's death.

Three short years later, estranged from her husband, Dianna — living in a Toronto rooming house and working as a waitress at a bar called the Granite Club — went to visit her boyfriend at a Toronto Becker's convenience store he was managing at Jane Street and Woolner Avenue, on Aug. 14, 1974.

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.

That's how the story has been left for decades.

Despite having no ties to Dianna, other than nationality, Tarachandra has doggedly attempted to contact Dianna's family. She's had little luck, except with a woman by the name of Janice, who says she's a cousin of Dianna's.

Taranchandra discovered her on an unsolved mystery forum about Dianna's murder. Janice explained the family and Dianna's daughter refuse to talk about the incident, want to left alone and, in general, “keep to themselves.”

She did report that Dianna's mother flew to Canada after her daughter's murder to attend her funeral, staying in the country for two weeks.

"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."

However she refused to say much when contacted by yorkregion.com.

“I was very young (when the murder occurred) ... I was only nine years old and I wasn't living in Canada,” she wrote yorkregion.com. “Her daughter wants to be left alone and so does the rest of Dianna's family.”

Neither Dianna's ex-husband nor her boyfriend were cleared by police in the initial investigation.

According to York police Det. Bill Courtice and Det. Bob Atwall, two of Canada's handful of dedicated cold case investigators, there could be a multitude of reasons for this — two of which include, their alibis going unconfirmed or perhaps some inconsistencies with their statements.

Some of the scant evidence offered to police includes one tidbit from her boyfriend,  who said Dianna told him when they last met she informed him she'd hitchhiked to see him with a man in a “big car.”

Perhaps the biggest draw to the case for Tarachandra, a former reporter who worked for Rogers TV York and now works in public relations, is an intimate knowledge of the pair's shared cultural roots.

Part of a large Guyanese-Canadian family herself, Tarachandra said she's learned plenty about how she feels the community tends to guard personal information tightly.

“I have always gotten in trouble for asking too many questions,” she said. “We (Guyanese) can be secretive and we don't like our business being out in the street. In my experience, you don't talk about things that might have happened ... you don't ask questions. You leave things, especially as a woman.”

As for where the case goes from here, it's anyone's guess.

The individuals who commented on her murder online say what they find most disturbing about the site where she was located is that another body was found nearby and a third person went missing in very close proximity.

Those include Yvonne Leroux who was found two years earlier between Jane and Keele streets, in a similar state — clothed from the waist up, naked from the waist down. Cheryl Hanson, 7, meanwhile disappeared while walking on Bloomington Sideroad while walking three months before Dianna was found on May 31, 1974.