The Leader

To their friends, they were “Manj” and “M.P.” They met at UBC while they were both studying to become teachers.

He was smart, articulate and good with children, and that was appealing to a young woman who had long dreamed of being a mother.

They were both goal-oriented people, a bit driven, but not in a bad way, friends say.

Shortly after they married, for example, they drew up a list of all the countries they wanted to visit. They methodically checked off every one in just a few years.

Manjit was the more outgoing, emotionally expressive member of the partnership, a warmly maternal Martha Stewart type who baked cakes and made elaborate homemade Christmas and birthday cards. She taught at North Ridge Elementary School in Newton.

Mukhtiar was a quiet, hard-working man who worked full-time as a physics teacher at Princess Margaret Secondary School, also in Newton, and ran a small construction business on the side, building and selling new homes, one at a time.

He was not an especially observant Sikh as a youth, but had begun wearing a turban before he met Manjit.

Her name was tattooed on his arm as a sign of his devotion.

The Panghalis were both outdoorsy people who enjoyed camping and fishing and other wilderness adventures. Both had backpacked through India, determined to avoid the conventional tourist trip.

They were, it seemed, the very model of a successful modern couple.

But there were signs of trouble before her murder and his arrest.

When her daughter was two, Manjit suddenly left the family home and spent a week with a relative. She maintained she was just taking a break.

In public, they had become very polite with each other, almost excessively so, but in private there was tension, some of it revolving around Mukhtiar’s younger brother Sukhvinder.

“Sukhi” had come to stay with them while he looked for a job in the airline industry. After about two years underfoot, Manjit confronted her brother-in-law demanding to know when he would get his own place.

When he replied it was her duty as wife to care for her husband’s family, an angry Manj went to Mukhtiar. She told friends her husband took her side and ordered Suhki to get out.

Manjit was preparing to leave her teaching job to become a full-time mom with the birth of her second child.

She wanted Mukhtiar to scale back his construction business and spend more time at home, something that caused him to worry about the drop in income.

Though frustrated, Manjit had not given up on her marriage.

A friend says Manjit was trying to fix it by taking courses on relationships at night including one about developing “emotional intelligence,” attending churches outside the Sikh faith and reading self-improvement books.