Toyah Cordingley had been missing for less than 12 hours when her father Troy headed out to a dark pre-dawn beach to search for her.
The 24-year-old organic food store worker drove her Mitsubishi Lancer sedan from Cairns to a far north Queensland beach to take her dog for a walk on October 21, 2018.
More than six years later, Troy Cordingley has told a jury in a murder trial that he couldn't wait for the sun to rise on October 22 to start searching.
"If she was on that beach, I was determined to find her," he said while giving evidence last week.
Mr Cordingley told the the Supreme Court in Cairns he felt tired and went to rest under trees where he saw a mound in the sand.
"I scooped the sand three times. On the third scoop there was a foot," Mr Cordingley said as his voice broke with emotion.
"I reeled back. I was horrified. I yelled out 'help me, help me'. I was shocked, stunned."
A police forensic officer would later carefully remove the sand to reveal Ms Cordingley's body had suffered multiple stab wounds and a slashed throat.
Ms Cordingley's dog Indie was found unharmed and tied to a tree about 30m into the dense bushland scrub that runs the length of the beach.
The jury in the first three days of the trial has been asked to consider if Ms Cordingley was killed by an apparent stranger or someone closer to home.
But Rajwinder Singh, 40, a former hospital nurse from nearby Innisfail, is the only person standing trial for the murder. He has pleaded not guilty.
Ms Cordingley had taken her dog to Wangetti Beach, a long and isolated stretch of sand about a 40-minute drive north of Cairns. A gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, it attracts 1.2 million people annually.
Ms Cordingley's boyfriend Marco Heidenreich called triple zero to report her missing after he found her Lancer in the beach car park and was unable to reach her by phone, the jury heard.
In his opening address on Tuesday, crown prosecutor Nathan Crane told the jury nobody witnessed Ms Cordingley being killed or saw the killer get away.
"Toyah was not known to Rajwinder Singh, or at least there's no evidence in this trial that they were," Mr Crane said.
"Stating the obvious, there is always a motive for a killing but at this trial it's just not known what it is."
Mr Crane said Singh could be linked to locations of Ms Cordingley's phone as it contacted cell towers while being taken from her body and then travelling south from the beach.
"Toyah never left the beach. Toyah's phone left the beach. The phone is able to be traced. The killer took the phone," he said.
Mr Crane said Singh was first linked to the case because a blue Alpha Romeo sedan with a "distinctive" grille, matching his registered vehicle, was seen on traffic cameras in the same areas where Ms Cordingley's phone location was recorded.
Singh was an Indian national who had lived in Australia since 2009, Mr Crane said.
The jurors were told they would later hear a recording of Singh's phone call, made a few hours after Ms Cordingley's body was found, seeking the first available one-way flight to India.
"He calls up and makes a booking at 11.05am (on October 22, 2018) and he said he needed to book a flight very urgently to New Delhi as soon as possible," Mr Crane said.
He said Singh flew out of Australia the next day, quit his job and stopped paying the mortgage on his family's two-storey house.
"He was not seen again until November 25, 2022 when he was found and returned to Australia," Mr Crane said.
Mr Crane said he could not identify the alleged murder weapon to the jury but it was likely sharp and small enough to be concealed.
The jury heard a stick was found partially buried with Ms Cordingley on the beach.
"Mr Singh was 3.7 billion times more likely to contribute the DNA found on that stick," Mr Crane said.
He said male DNA was recovered from Ms Cordingley's fingernails that was 2000 times more likely to belong to Singh than a random man.
Justice James Henry earlier told jurors the prosecution would present a case based on circumstantial evidence because there was no direct witness to the alleged crime.
Lead defence barrister Angus Edwards in his opening address told the jury they could not convict Singh unless they could reject all other reasonable suspects for the killing.
"This whole trial comes down to one issue: could it only have been Rajwinder Singh or is he just one of several possibilities," Mr Edwards said.
He told the jury that police went to great lengths to examine Singh's clothes, movements, associates and car.
"My question to you is did they do the same thing with the other suspects?" Mr Edwards said.
"Did they investigate with the same zeal for those whom there is also a circumstantial case? Or did police put all their eggs in one basket?"
The barrister asked the jury to consider other suspects such as Mr Heidenreich, or a different man who was known to sneak around sand dunes while watching women at the beach.
Mr Heidenreich testified that he had no involvement whatsoever in Ms Cordingley's death.
He denied he had been given favourable treatment by investigators as his step-father was a former Cairns police officer and was friends with a detective on the case.
Mr Heidenreich's friend Joel Cuman on Thursday denied he had altered the time and date stamps on photos of the two men at a waterfall.
Mr Cuman had given the photos to police to account for Mr Heidenreich's movements in the hours before Ms Cordingley went missing.
Under defence cross-examination, Tyson Franklin admitted having lied to police when he said he had not been physically intimate with Ms Cordingley a week before her death.
Mr Franklin told police he got the impression Ms Cordingley wanted to break up with Mr Heidenreich.
"She was not happy. She wanted to live by herself," Mr Franklin said.
The trial at the Cairns Courthouse is due to hear from more than 400 witnesses in the next three weeks.
