Without Noel’s body, prosecutors face challenges to prove mom killed Everman boy
There comes a time in nearly every capital murder trial when the state calls a forensic pathologist to the witness stand.
The physician will describe training and credentials, explain generally how an autopsy is conducted and narrate as a prosecutor displays to the jury photos that a technician took during the exam in the case at hand. For gunshot wounds, inevitably the discussion turns to the path that a projectile took through tissue and organs.
The pathologist typically ends by sharing his or her determination on the cause and manner of death.
Through the testimony of a doctor who performed or reviewed an autopsy, the state’s primary goal is not to show the defendant caused a death, but rather that the person whom the defendant is accused of killing is, in fact, dead.
In the capital murder prosecution of Cindy Rodriguez-Singh in the killing of her 6-year-old son, Noel Rodriguez-Alvarez, the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office is proceeding without a critical piece of evidence: the little boy’s body.
Law enforcement officers presume that the child, who lived in Everman, is dead. But unless Noel’s body is found before his mother’s trial, no pathologist will testify. In its prosecution of Rodriguez-Singh, the district attorney’s office will attempt a rare feat.
Prosecutors have evidence of Noel’s absence — that no one has seen him — but not his body. They will confront the prospect that a juror could think the boy may be alive.
District Attorney Phil Sorrells will have to decide whether to seek or waive the death penalty.
Noel’s speech was limited, and he had poor vision and limped, symptoms of his developmental disabilities. Everman police have described Rodriguez-Singh as an abusive parent who would deprive Noel of food and water because she did not like changing his diaper. At least once she struck him with a set of keys because he drank water, police said.
Rodriguez-Singh called Noel evil and a demon, police have said.
The prosecution will attempt to demonstrate investigators’ diligence in the search for the boy in order to persuade a jury that there is no reasonable explanation other than that Noel is dead. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, for example, concluded that his mother’s report that Noel was in Mexico with his biological father is false.
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Noel has not been seen since the fall of 2022. He was reported missing in March 2023.
Until a Texas Penal Code revision in 1974, the victim’s body was a required element of evidence to prove a homicide case.
Prosecutors will need convincing evidence to prove case
Successfully prosecuting the case will be extremely challenging, according to Cynthia Alkon, a professor of law at Texas A&M University School of Law in Fort Worth. Prosecutors are likely to rely on significant circumstantial evidence as they attempt to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Noel is dead and that his mother intentionally or knowingly caused his death.
“They have to get over huge hurdles to that,” Alkon said in an interview.
Without a body, evidence of massive blood loss could suggest death, but it is not clear whether blood was found in the Rodriguez-Singh case.
“You would need some sort of forensic evidence,” said Alkon, the director of the university’s Criminal Law, Justice, & Policy Program.
It is not known whether law enforcement officers attempted an in-custody interview of Rodriguez-Singh after her arrest in New Delhi this week. With her husband and six of her other children, she flew from Dallas-Fort Worth to India after police tried to check on Noel. The arrest of Rodriguez-Singh came about a month after she was added to the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list.
A cadaver dog alerted on topsoil near the structure — a converted shed behind a house — in which the boy and his family lived, but as authorities dug deeper, the dog no longer alerted, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation.
A piece of an outdoor rug was sent to an FBI lab for analysis, according to the source.
Everman police have said that a cadaver dog alerted to the carpet, which Noel’s stepfather, Arshdeep Singh, disposed of the night before he and his wife fled the country. Singh took the rug to a dumpster outside a convenience store where he worked, according to a search warrant affidavit. The carpet was used as the floor for a second shed that stood where a patio was later built by a contractor hired by Rodriguez-Singh, according to police. Authorities dug up the patio, and a dog alerted to the topsoil in that area, police have said.
Tarrant County has prosecuted other homicides without a body
Prosecuting the case are Rose Anna Salinas, the chief of the criminal division at the district attorney’s office, and Assistant Criminal District Attorney Ashlea Deener. That pairing of prosecutors represented the state in the case of Matthew Purdy, who in 2023 shot to death a TCU student in Fort Worth. Purdy pleaded guilty to murder.
Defense attorneys Bob Gill and Eric Nickols were appointed to represent Rodriguez-Singh, who is 40.
Gill has prosecuted a case without a body. In 2008, a jury convicted Rodney Owens of murder and assessed his punishment at life in prison in the death of Glenda Gail Furch, a 51-year-old Fort Worth woman last seen leaving work at the General Motors plant in Arlington.
The Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office also successfully prosecuted, without a body, four Aryan Brotherhood gang members who killed Bryan Childers in Fort Worth in 2014. Childers was beaten, strangled, bound with an extension cord and stabbed. His body was dismembered with a reciprocating saw and the parts were placed inside cement-filled buckets and tossed into the Trinity River.
This story was originally published August 22, 2025 at 2:59 PM.
