Mundill Mahil was a straight-A student with a bright future. Then she was charged with murder
Mundill Mahil knows it sounds cheesy, but as a girl she wanted to save the world. She was a model student. At Rochester grammar school, she got 10 A*sat GCSE, three As at A-level, mentored an autistic child and worked in a hospice, before winning a place at Brighton and Sussex Medical School; she hoped to do aid work for Médecins Sans Frontières when she qualified. Then everything went wrong; at 19, she was charged with murder.
There are no winners in this story. One young man died; one was convicted of murder, another of manslaughter. On 25 February 2011, 21-year-old Gagandip Singh was brutally beaten by two men in Mahil’s Brighton bedroom, before being burned to death in the boot of a Mercedes. A year later, an Old Bailey jury acquitted Mahil of murder, but found her guilty of GBH with intent, for having lured Singh to his death. She was given a six-year sentence. Her motive, prosecutors argued, was revenge; she had told friends Singh had assaulted her six months earlier.
It was a shocking crime. In a television documentary broadcast last year, Singh’s mother, Tejinder, talked about how she has struggled since her son was killed: “I have no life left. Two or three times a day, I think I want to die.” Last week, Singh’s sister, Amandip, told the Guardian that the family still grieve every day. “We will never be a normal family again. There’s not a moment we do not think of Gagandip.”
Mahil, now 29, has never talked about what happened before: she never felt she had the right. “It is so horrific, what happened to Gagan. It felt, if I told my story, it would seem as if I didn’t care: ‘Look at me, I’m the victim.’” We are talking over Zoom, and she is clearly nervous.
In media coverage of the case, Mahil has been portrayed as a vengeful student at the heart of a honeytrap plot to kill Singh, once her close friend. And she admits she was her own worst enemy in the days that followed: it was true she had invited him to her house under false pretences; and that when his body was found, she failed to tell police the full story. She even acknowledges that Singh would not have died had he not come to see her. Looking back, Mahil says she is not surprised the jury convicted her. But she says she was oblivious to any plan to hurt Singh, let alone kill him. There was no thought of revenge that night: she had hoped to put an ugly episode with her former friend behind them. So how did a teenager with so much to look forward to end up here?
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Mundill Mahil grew up the youngest child in a conservative, upwardly mobile Sikh family. Her parents ran a B&B; her sister was a doctor; one brother went to medical school before going into IT, while the other became a police officer. Mahil thrived at her girls’ school, making friends and becoming a star pupil. But she also felt an outsider: while her classmates had boyfriends, traditional Sikh girls were not expected to socialise with boys. A marriage would be arranged when the time was right. Occasionally, Mahil found herself lying to her mother if she
