Gurpreet Ronald is charged with murder in the death of Jagtar Gill

WANDA SHERRATT writes:

The top news in our city this week is a murder case which seems to draw together a lot of themes that I frequently read about on your blog. This awful murder story in Ottawa is a stew of multiculturalism, infidelity, religion, physical appearance and women’s work outside the home.

A Sikh woman, Jagtar Gill, 43, was murdered in her home on January 29th. It was quite a gruesome murder; she was bludgeoned and then slashed to death. Her two younger children were in school at the time, and her husband and 15-year-old daughter had just gone out to buy cake and flowers, because it was the couple’s wedding anniversary.  (The daughter discovered the body when she and her father returned home.)

Two months later, Gurpreet Ronald, “a striking 34-year-old married mother of two” who lived just around the corner, was charged with her murder.  Yesterday, the victim’s husband, 38-year-old Bhupinderpal Gill, was also charged with murder.  This article provides photos of all three members of this triangle.

You might have noticed one thing that doesn’t match in this narrative: the last name of the accused is decidedly Western.  Gurpreet Ronald came to Canada ten years ago for an arranged marriage with an Indian man.  But she refused to marry the selected man and instead married Jason Ronald, who is white.  The story says that both families go to the same temple, but I’m not sure if that means that Jason Ronald converted to Sikhism to marry Gurpreet, or if just she and her children go.  In any case, she certainly didn’t convert to Christianity.

The story thickens when it turns out that Gurpreet and Bhupinderpal both work for the city bus company, OC Transpo.  So this quite attractive young woman was in daily close contact with a married man, whose wife is five years older than he and looks decidedly matronly in comparison.  She was also working in what is predominantly a male occupation.  Reports state that Gurpreet and Bhupinderpal were having an affair, possibly for as long as four years.

I think it’s interesting that she refused to marry in her own culture and married a white man, but chose to have an affair with another Sikh.  Also, her husband has been training to join OC Transpo too (perhaps to win her back?).  We haven’t learned much about him yet, but I suspect that Gurpreet saw Western culture as something that would provide her with freedom and comfort, but was not something that she really respected.  In intimate matters, she preferred a man from her own unapologetically masculine and macho culture. I wonder whether she saw Bhupinderpal as an alpha male and looked down upon her Western husband.  (My predictions that this would turn out to be a love triangle have been correct so far; my next prediction is that it will turn out that Jason Ronald stayed home to look after the children while his wife worked.)

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