Surinder Kaur Varyapraj was a thirty-six-year-old Sikh woman, a devoted mother of three. Divorced and living alone in a modest home on Church Hill Road in Handsworth, Birmingham, England, she doted her children—a fourteen-year-old son and two daughters, aged fifteen and twelve—who stayed with their father following the separation. Known locally as a fit and active figure, Surinder was a familiar face in Handsworth’s shops and businesses, often chatting with neighbors and shopkeepers. Yet, beneath her outward strength lay personal struggles; she had a history of mental health issues and was sometimes heard talking to herself.
Her last confirmed sighting came on January 4th, 1996, when she signed on at the local job center. Eyewitness accounts place her outside her home on February 4th, sweeping snow from the alleyway behind the property. For weeks afterward, she vanished from view, her absence noted only gradually by those around her.
It was March 5th, 1996, when the nightmare unfolded. A concerned shopkeeper, alarmed by Surinder’s prolonged disappearance—four to five weeks by some accounts—alerted authorities. Police entered her home and found her badly decomposed body in an upstairs bedroom. The cause of death was clear and chilling: strangulation by ligature.
Neighbors later recalled eerie disturbances in the preceding weeks. Around early January, a chair had been spotted propped against her bathroom window, accompanied by shattered glass in the bathroom and kitchen doors: possible signs of an intruder. By February 7th, fresh footprints marred the snow in her backyard, trailing from the gate to that same window. Most hauntingly, on the night of February 5th, just before midnight, residents heard loud banging from the row of houses, followed by a brief, piercing high-pitched scream echoing from Surinder’s address. These fragments of sound, pieced together too late, paint a picture of a woman fighting for her life in the dead of night.
West Midlands Police launched an immediate and exhaustive probe, conducting house-to-house inquiries and amassing 147 witness statements. Forensic teams scoured the scene for clues, but the passage of time, coupled with the body’s decomposition, complicated efforts. No forced entry was definitively proven, suggesting the killer may have been known to Surinder or exploited a moment of vulnerability. Robbery seemed an unlikely motive; nothing of significant value was reported missing.
One tantalizing lead emerged: a man believed to have rented a room in nearby Vicarage Road. Witnesses described him driving a distinctive Jaguar XJS with a partial registration ending in “RAJ.” He was a fixture in the area, yet his full identity eluded detectives. Police have long appealed for information on this individual, emphasizing that he could clear his name with a simple DNA test if uninvolved. Despite these efforts, no arrests were made, and the case slipped into the cold files, a victim of investigative dead ends and the era’s forensic limitations.
Hope flickered anew in December 2018, when a cold case review unearthed fresh DNA evidence from the original scene. This breakthrough eliminated several persons of interest but failed to match anyone on national databases. Detectives hailed it as a “significant development,” renewing public appeals and underscoring the evolving power of genetic profiling. By 2020, however, the trail had cooled again; the killer remained at large, leaving Surinder’s family in a limbo of grief without closure.
In July 2023, Sikh activists and representatives from Sikh Women’s Aid—a charity combating domestic abuse and cultural violence against women—staged a poignant vigil in Handsworth. The event honored Sikh women killed or missing in the West Midlands, with Surinder’s name invoked as a symbol of enduring injustice.
Surinder Kaur Varyapraj’s murder is still unsolved as of December 2025.
Crime Immemorial 