'Greed' motivated young international students in murder of elderly couple in rural Abbotsford home: Crown
Three international students bought baseball bat, rope, cleaning supplies before allegedly robbing, killing Arnold and Joanne De Jong on Mother’s Day 2022
March 7, 2026
Arnold and Joanne De Jong hosted their children and grandchildren on Mother’s Day at their home on a rural east Abbotsford cul-de-sac just metres from Highway 11 on Saturday, May 8, 2022.
Members of the family were at the house on Arcadian Way until approximately 10 p.m. after which Arnold and Joanne carried on with their regular bed-time routines.
The next day, Heather De Jong-Hoogland called her parents but neither answered. She planned to go check on them, but first tried her husband Raymond Hoogland who she figured could be nearby at work. He was just down the road, so Raymond went to check in on his septuagenarian in-laws.
When Raymond arrived at approximately 10:15 a.m. on Sunday, no one answered the front door. He picked up the Vancouver Sun that had been delivered in the early hours, and he entered through the unlocked garage door.
Raymond called out to Arnold and Joanne. Nothing. There was no damage in the house. Nothing looked out of place. The couple slept in separate bedrooms because of a health condition of Arnold's. Raymond went looking and saw Joanne’s door ajar. He went in and saw the shape of a body covered up on the bed. He removed the blanket and saw Joanne's bloody face, duct tape over her mouth. He pulled the duct tape off to see a sheet pushed into her mouth.
Both Arnold and Joanne were tied up, partially undressed, brutally murdered.
Who would do such a thing?
BC Supreme Court room 404 was filled on Friday (March 6, 2026) with family members, supporters, and members of the media for the start of closing statements in the first-degree murder trial of three international students from India.
Greed was motive, not debt
Abhijeet Singh lived in Surrey and worked for a Fraser Valley landscaping and property services company. He had cleaned the De Jong’s gutters, windows, and doors for $400 a year prior, in July 2021. They appreciated the work and he was brought back again in April 2022 with co-workers.
Some time after that date, Crown alleges a horrific plot was hatched to take a lot more than house cleaning payment from the De Jongs.
Abhijeet Singh, Gurkaran Singh, both aged 22 at the time, along with 20-year-old Kushveer Singh Toor, are accused of the first-degree murder of the De Jongs before buying flights to Ontario.
The motive was greed, according to Crown counsel William Dorsey in closing arguments in BC Supreme Court in Abbotsford Friday (March 6, 2026).
The three international students (who apparently never attended school) are charged with conspiring, planning, and committing the murder after which they quickly tried with to empty their bank accounts and use the De Jongs’ credit cards.
Singh, Singh, and Toor were each charged with two counts of first-degree murder seven months later in December 2022.
The three men had been living together in a house in Surrey, and all three were piling up debt, the court heard. With money owed to ICBC, mobile phone companies, and others, Abhijeet Singh was trying to get customers for his house cleaning company.
“The Crown respectfully submits, despite whatever financial pressures [they] may have been under, the main motivation behind the robbery for all three accused and the resulting deaths at the De Jongs was not to pay off debts,” Dorsey said. “It was greed.”
Strong circumstantial case
Dorsey said Singh, Singh, and Toor visited Home Depot and Canadian Tire before the killing late May 8 or early May 9 and bought a hammer, screwdriver, ropes, a softball bat, disposable gloves, and heavy-duty cleaning materials.
They knew the two would need to be confined. They knew it would be violent. They knew there would be blood to clean up.
To make it clear that no one of them acted independently, Dorsey said an inference could be made that because of its size, all three men knew one of them had the bat, and that the bat was not intended to break a window at the residence. Doing so would have eliminated the element of surprise. The bat was intended to be used in a violent manner.
Bringing rope showed the men knew they would have to restrain the De Jongs, and one can infer the cleaning products were purchased because they knew blood would be shed.
Google searches made by the men before and after offer more circumstantial evidence into motives and guilt. One of them searched asking the search engine how much money banks hold in cash at one time.
“The Crown respectfully submits a reasonable inference to be drawn is that all accused were anticipating that the robbery could be lucrative,” Dorsey said.
After the killings, one of the men Googled what the sentences are for the different levels of murder in Canada.
Dorsey suggested that a reasonable person could infer this was planned, agreed upon, and deemed successful given how much they stayed in contact and how quickly they tried to steal as much money as they could from the De Jongs. They cashed forged cheques for more than $5,600 and $5,100 each. One of the men’s mobile phone bill was paid with Arnold’s credit card less than 12 hours after he was killed. Some of their digital thefts and fraudulent transactions card transfers failed.
Dorsey provided what he could in circumstantial evidence to show the planning before the killing and post-offence behaviour was enough to prove first-degree murder rather than second-degree or manslaughter. He also provided several precedents to this end, as well as ones to show that murder during a kidnapping or confinement is considered to be particularly egregious.
One example from the Supreme Court of Canada “held that a murder committed by someone already abusing his power by illegally dominating, ought to be treated as an exceptionally serious crime.”
The case continues on Monday (March 9) at 10 a.m. in BC Supreme Court in Abbotsford.
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April 8, 2022, but the full price quoted $551
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