The tabloids dubbed her the ‘honeytrap’ girl when she was tried for the murder of Gagandip Singh in 2012, alongside two others. Was the truth more complicated?
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.
