HONOURING MY CHILDREN
Two decades ago, horror struck Shirley Singh’s family. Three beloved children murdered. Later, they lost another daughter. Today, in a new book, she reveals how she found the strength to live without her beautiful children
In a room at the John Tonge Centre, Shirley Singh stood by a curtain while trolleys carrying her dead children were wheeled before her. It had been several days since she and her husband Vijay had flown back from a wedding in Fiji, when their plane had been met by detectives who spoke in gentle and kind voices but could tell her little. She knew her children were dead. But that first night at her brother’s, with her home a crime scene, he’d told her only: “Shirley, something has happened. You’ll come to know about it later.”
They brought out her son Kunal first. Her lovely boy who never spent his pocket money, who could pick a car from the sound of its engine, was lying lifeless on a trolley in a forensic laboratory. She looked at his face and asked: “Why is he bleeding?”
Next was Neelma. Her face had been disfigured too. “No,” Shirley said. “That’s not Neelm.” And last was Sidhi. Her youngest. Her cuddly girl, her arms perpetually wrapped around Shirley’s legs. Just 12 years old and beaten with the tines of a garden fork before being dumped with her siblings into the family’s spa bath.
“I’d be cooking and she’d come from the back and hold me,” Shirley recalls. “I said once, ‘Sidhi, could you leave me alone for a while?’. “And she’s left me for good.
“So when I hear anybody saying that to their child, ‘Leave me alone, go away’, I say, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t say that.’”
On the 20th anniversary of one of Queensland’s most horrific crimes, Shirley will release Shirley’s Story, written by close friend and former journalist Emily Eklund Power.
The pair met through Emily’s mother-in-law Angie, one of Shirley’s closest friends and her support for the past two decades.
Emily conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with both Singh parents, as well as detectives who worked tirelessly to catch the killer. The story is one of resilience and survival, detailing Shirley’s upbringing in Fiji where she lost her mother as a baby, endured racism and lived through a military takeover.
The trial of her children’s killer heard she is a survivor of domestic violence and marital infidelity at the hands of her husband Vijay, and she is a survivor of the loss of all of her children – her eldest daughter Archana dying of a brain aneurysm in 2020.
The murders of her three children saw Shirley battle alcoholism, substance abuse and survive multiple suicide attempts.
Today, she and husband Vijay live as “housemates” in the home where their children were murdered. But, Shirley explains, it is also the home that holds her happy memories of them, where she speaks to them still, where they come to her in her dreams.
Neelma, 24, Kunal, 18 and Sidhi, 12, were murdered by Neelma’s ex-boyfriend Massimo “Max” Sica on Easter Sunday, 2003.
Neelma and Sica first met when the Singhs lived next door to the Sicas in Stafford, on Brisbane’s northside, before Shirley and Vijay built their dream home in nearby Bridgeman Downs. They’d become close after Neelma had been robbed at knifepoint at a city hotel. Sica had consoled her, encouraged her to sue for compensation. Sica always had an eye on a prize.
Both Shirley and Emily agree that looking at the relationship through today’s lens, Neelma was the victim of sustained coercive control.
In early 2002, Neelma, who had a love for travel, flew to Dubai to begin training as an Emirates air hostess. Her father thought international communication would be easiest with a laptop, which Sica set up for her.
They would later discover he’d installed monitoring software on it – and then began emailing Neelma, posing as another man, to make sure she was faithful.
Neelma ignored the mystery man’s advances and when she was attacked by a female roommate, decided to return home.
Back in Brisbane, Sica had been to see Vijay. He wanted Vijay’s blessing to marry Neelma.
“He chased him,” Shirley says. “He said, ‘Get out of here.’”
Vijay did not consider Sica a good match for his daughter and was aggressively vocal about it. Sica was still legally married for a start. He was older, at 33, did not have a job and had spent time in jail.
Sica was furious at the rejection.
“He said, ‘I’ll get you one day’,” Shirley says. Vijay grabbed his car keys and drove away to confront Sica’s father.
For Sica, it was the beginning of a vindictive revenge campaign to cause tension in the family – particularly for Vijay. The trial heard he would later encourage Shirley to make complaints to the police about Vijay.
Neelma came home from Dubai on May 3, 2002, and went directly – and secretly – to Sica’s home on Bribie Island.
But it didn’t last – and six weeks later she was back home with her family. That night, Neelma told her mother she’d seen more of Sica’s shady side than she could accept. She’d seen him hack a friend’s computer. And he’d told her about a bizarre plot that he had to kidnap an Asian businessman for ransom.
He could wear a balaclava, he told her ominously, and stand in her yard at night and neither she, her parents or siblings would know he was there.
When she broke it off, Sica was less than accepting. He anonymously emailed naked photographs of Neelma to a large group of her friends and family.
She was so embarrassed and ashamed that she’d barely left the house after.
Then Sica told her he was dying, that he had an inoperable brain tumour and only weeks to live. He told her he didn’t want his parents to know, that he would spend time with his children before driving off the road at Mt Nebo. She could collect his life insurance. Neelma believed him. Her family did not. On April 22, 2003, Sica made a call to Triple-0 from the Singhs’ Bridgeman Downs home and attempted to portray the relevant emotion of someone who had just discovered three bodies.
“What do I do?” he sobbed.
It would take a relentless team of detectives five and a half years to gather the evidence they needed to take Sica to trial.
Shirley never doubted they’d do it.
“My boys,” she says of the police who gave her justice. She had not minded a bit when they’d had to eliminate her and Vijay as suspects. Whatever they needed to do.
Sica, a lengthy trial would hear, arrived at the Singh house on the night of the murders to visit Neelma.
With her parents away and wanting to be a comfort after his terminal illness diagnosis, Neelma had agreed to spend time with him.
“Something happened in Neelma’s bedroom between the two of you,” Justice John Byrne said, as he sentenced Sica to a minimum of 35 years behind bars.
“Enraged by jealousy most likely, you strangled Neelma with both hands, using sustained pressure for about a minute,
When I hear anybody saying to their child, ‘Leave me alone, go away,’ I say, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t say that.’
intending to kill her. To ensure that Kunal and Sidhi would not tell that you had murdered Neelma, you murdered them too.
“You put your victims into the spa bath in the master bedroom ensuite.
“Your savage attack on Kunal had rendered him unconscious. He drowned after you filled the bath with water and covered the three bodies with bedding.
“These are brutal, horrific crimes – in the worst categories of murder.”
Shirley had jumped to her feet that day and tried to spit on the man who’d taken her children from her.
From the third row, she was never going to make it.
“The poor thing, it landed on a lady,” she laughs now.
Every night, Shirley tucks photographs of her
children into their beds.
“At the moment, it’s pretty hot, so I don’t cover them (with blankets),” she says.
In the mornings she wakes them, just like she did when they were alive. With Kunal, she is sure to knock first.
“One day I opened his door (and) he said, ‘Mum, you know I’m a teenager. You’re not supposed to walk into my room just like that. You have to knock and ask me if you can come in,’” she recalls.
“So I still do that. (I say) ‘Kunal, time to wake up.’”
On their birthdays she cooks them their favourite meals and buys them presents. A beer for Kunal. A Vodka Cruiser for Sidhi, “because she’s old enough now”. “And then I cut the cake, and I give them the cakes.”
In her bag, she carries mementos of them. A lock of Archana’s hair. Kunal’s baby bonnet. And she carries something else.
From the mother who raised her, who taught her to survive, she carries a photograph of waves breaking against a rocky cliff.
“She says, ‘Be a rock in the middle of the ocean and don’t let any waves budge you,’” Shirley says.
Our beautiful Nim, Kunal, and Sidhi were with Lord Shiva. Vijay and I knew we were suspects
Shirley’s Story by Emily Eklund Power, will be released today