It takes a certain “breed of person” to care for the rescue dogs of tropical Queensland, Gabrielle Gleeson says.
They must be committed, says the dog foster care charity co-founder, as the animals they take on will have suffered neglect, mistreatment and abuse. But the rewards can be profound.
And there are few greater joys for these animal lovers than seeing their dogs run and play on the mountain and rainforest-lined beaches that make far north Queensland one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
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“The days when you can take your dog to the beach – and there’s no stingers and no crocodiles about – it’s just a lovely pastime to have,” Gleeson says.
Which is why the murder of 24-year-old Toyah Cordingley while walking her German shepherd cross mastiff, Indi, at Wangetti beach north of Cairns on 21 October 2018 so profoundly shocked people like Gleeson.
It was another glorious Sunday. Cordingley had been to the “Cairns institution” of Rusty’s markets, and was taking Indi for a run on the sand off the highway between Cairns – where she lived and worked in a health food and pharmacy store – and Port Douglas, where she volunteered at an animal refuge.
The market and beach combination, Gleeson says, is “standard operating procedures for anyone in Cairns”.
“Just the fact of what an ordinary, joyful sort of day she was having,” Gleeson says.
“It hit me and so many – I mean not just women – but a lot of women in Cairns so deeply. The loss of that beautiful, innocent young woman, it just sort of shatters that sense of everyday safety.
“She could have been any of our volunteers. Any one of the girls on our board.”
It is also why the life sentence handed down to her murderer, Rajwinder Singh, this week left people like Gleeson with an “odd feeling” of “bittersweet relief”.
Singh was set a non-parole period of 25 years, seven years after his killing of Cordingley that the sentencing justice described as “shocking, sickening and depraved”, three years after Queensland police posted a $1m reward for information, more than two years after he was charged with murder and extradited from India to Australia and eight months after the first trial against him ended with a hung jury.
After such a drawn-out and disturbing saga, as Cordingley’s father, Troy, told press outside court on Monday, the guilty verdict that day was “a form of justice”, but not one that would bring back Toyah.
It was Troy who found his daughter’s half-buried body on Wangetti.
He has spoken publicly about the “unbearable” pain and ongoing trauma of losing his only child in such horrific circumstances.
But it is not just those who knew Cordingley in life who have been rocked by her death.
Steven Parsonage was chasing marlin on a friend’s game boat off the Great Barrier Reef on that weekend of October in 2018. He never met Cordingley but, like everyone around him, Parsonage was shocked by the news when he came ashore after a week at sea.
“Cairns is not that big of a town,” he says. “People were mortified that this could happen to a poor young girl who was just walking a dog on a beach in our town.”
Parsonage runs a “humble print shop”. He makes signs and posters for nearby “pubs, clubs and government departments”. In the weeks after Cordingley’s murder, a woman who worked in a nearby office came to see Parsonage with an ad from the local paper.
It was written by a family friend of Cordingley, Wayne “Prong” Trimble, and it called for a bumper sticker campaign to help seek justice for Toyah Cordingley.
“I thought: yeah I could do that,” Parsonage says. “So I printed a few bumper stickers.”
The stickers were simple. “Toyah” written in big black font surrounded by sunflowers (her favourite), the phrase “The Community Will Never Give Up” and an appeal for anonymous information.
Parsonage estimates he printed more than 100,000 but is quick to add other print shops joined the campaign.
“I think, in the end, there would have been about a quarter of a million printed up and down the country,” he says. “Pretty much everyone in town had one. They were just everywhere.”
It wasn’t just the stickers. Businesses flew banners and put up billboards. A memorial sprung up at Wangetti.
“How much, I don’t know, but it must have added some weight of pressure,” Parsonage says of the years-long, grassroots campaign. “Just because of the public outcry, the visibility of it. But, like I say, I’m no expert. I don’t know. I’m just a guy who prints some stickers.”
Trimble and Parsonage were among the people Cordingley’s mother, Vanessa Gardiner, thanked outside court when Singh was found guilty on Monday after all the long and agonising years.
Gleeson, too, named the bumper sticker campaign as part of the reason she felt such a connection to the fellow dog lover she never met.
“You see her photos and see her name every day for seven years, she becomes a part of your daily life almost,” Gleeson says.
“Those ‘justice for Toyah’ stickers are on every car, every business … she has just become a part of the everyday fabric. She’s in Cairns’ psyche now, that girl, she will never leave it.
“No one is gonna forget that girl in this town.”
