True Crime Campfire - Last Supper: The Murder of Joe Cinque

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

In 1997, 20-somethings Anu Singh and Joe Cinque were an up and coming young couple--Joe a successful civil engineer, Anu a law student at Australian National University, both smart and gorgeous. From the outside looking in, they seemed to be on top of the world. But there was a storm brewing behind the scenes. Anu was becoming more and more obsessed with a myriad of health problems that no doctors seemed to be able to find any evidence of. She was becoming more and more controlling and needy, demanding more than any partner could possibly provide. And the more she perceived Joe falling short of her expectations, the angrier she got. And when she got wind that he might be thinking of leaving her, a poisonous rage bubbled up inside her. This is the story of one of Australia's most bizarre murder cases, one that you'll be tempted to think we made up. But unfortunately, we didn't. Join us for a story of love, betrayal, revenge...and the starkest example of the "bystander effect" you may ever see. Sources:VICE: https://www.vice.com/en/article/nneypm/why-a-beautiful-promising-law-student-killed-her-boyfriend-by-forced-heroin-overdoseMurderpedia: https://murderpedia.org/female.S/s/singh-anu.htmNZ Herald: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/joe-cinque-murder-law-students-chilling-warning-before-fatal-canberra-dinner-party/IIMCHOGQTVRCLOZ52BJYHESMOY/TV show "Poisonous Liaisons," Episode "Toxic Affairs"TV show "Crimes that Shook Australia," Episode "Anu Singh"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/true-crime-campfire/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In the Christian Bible, the last supper was the final meal Jesus Christ shared with his disciples before he was crucified. As the story goes, Jesus knew he was in danger. In fact, during the meal he told his apostles that one of them would soon betray him and another would deny knowing him instead of coming to his aid.

It must have been a lonely feeling, sitting down with a group of friends and knowing there were vipers in their midst, that no one was coming to save him from the awful thing he knew was coming. We'd like to think we'd do better, don't we? That if we knew someone was about to be murdered, we'd step up, say something, do something. We'd like to think so. But maybe we can't be so sure. This is Last Supper, the murder of Joe Chinquay.

So, campers, for this one, we're in Canberra, Australia, October 25, 1997. Anu Singh and her boyfriend, Joe Chinquay, were hoping. hosting a dinner party at the townhouse they shared. Anu and Joe were something of a power couple, both gorgeous, both accomplished. He was a talented engineer. She was a law student at Australian National University. They'd met on a night out in Newcastle a couple of years previously, started dating long distance, and the next year Joe moved to Canberra to be with her. At the dinner party, they seemed like the perfect picture of a loving couple.

Everybody ate, drank, chatted, just the normal pleasant things you do at a party. After dinner, they had coffee, and despite the caffeine infusion, Joe soon started to nod off, right in his chair. He obviously couldn't keep his eyes open, always a cue that the evening is coming to an end. Seeing him practically fall out of his seat with exhaustion, everybody decided to head home. So far so ordinary, right? Well, not quite. Because this was not a normal, pleasant dinner party.

It was instead a macabre feast, a kind of bizarre, preemptive wake. The guests, as they ate and drank and talked, fully expected that by the next day, both of their hosts would be dead. And just afternoon, two days later, a call came in to 0-00, the Australian equivalent of 9-1-1. The caller gave confusing information, but the outline soon became clear. Someone had overdosed. They'd been vomiting blood. Their lips were blue.

And when the paramedics arrived, they found Joe Chinkwe, cold and unresponsive. He was dead. So what the hell had happened here? What led to Joe Chinkwe's death and the grotesque dinner party that perceived? it. And who were Joe Chinkwe and Anu Singh? Well, in 1997, Anu Singh was 25 years old, right? Pretty privileged, the daughter of two doctors. As a child, she was intelligent, but not always very studious, the kind of kid who just got good grades without really trying. As a teenager, she discovered the kind of boy-related adolescent rebellion that causes headaches for parents

all over the world. Yeah, I did that too. That was in high school. She seemed to thrive on attention and adoration and the belief that she was the special one among everybody else. Oy, sounds exhausting, right? Pretty sure we all know this girl. But there were also some signs of fragility.

Anu was first accepted to the Australian National University in 1991, pursuing a challenging double degree program in economics and law. Which is pretty brutal. And she was miserable. So miserable that she dropped out during that first year and went home to her parents with her

tail between your legs. I wonder if it was that sort of culture shock that really smart kids tend to get when they start college, you know that disturbing realization that like, hey, you're not a big fish in a small pond anymore. Like, oh shit. I'm not the smartest person in the room now. Ew, I hate it. But Anu eventually rallied. She went back to school the next year and did better this time. She was keeping up with the workload and before long she met a guy, Simon Walsh, and started dating him. Now this was a relationship that ran right up to her time with Joe Chinkwe, possibly with a little bit of crossover, which might have had something to do with why Simon dumped her like a load of stinky trash. Joe Chinkwee grew up in Newcastle, New South Wales, the son of Italian migrants, Maria and Nino,

and he was something of a golden boy, a star both in school and sports. He was known as an extroverted, friendly guy, the kind who'd have a conversation with anybody. He got a degree in civil engineering, becoming the first member of his family to have a university education, which is very cool. I always like to hear that. Right after graduating, he got a job with a local engineering firm. He's a good guy, lots of friends right at the start of a promising life. And when he met Anu, he was boldover. She was just magnetic to him, instant chemistry, physically, intellectually, and for the force of her charismatic personality.

And early on, their relationship seemed to work really. well. It was very passionate. They seemed to just be delighted with each other. At this point, though, the relationship was mostly long distance, with phone calls during the week and Joe traveling down to Canberra on the weekends, which is like 300 miles away. And I'm thinking that might have been part of why they got along so well in the beginning, because more prolonged exposure would probably have revealed that all was not well within the mind of Anu Singh. What's that expression? Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Well, Absence also allows you to hide your warts or pull a little of the old bait and switch.

And Joe's parents, Maria and Nino, they were not enthusiastic about this relationship from the start, mostly because they saw how controlling and demanding Anu seemed to be. Like just one example, Joe would always sit down with his family for dinner after work. You know, big Italian dinners, who wants to miss that, not me. And without fail, as soon as they would sit down and try and eat, Anu would call and, like, demand to speak to Joe. every blessed night, dinner interrupted. So finally, Maria took the phone out of Joe's hand one night and said, look, Anu, we eat at six, okay?

You're welcome to call it seven, but let the boy just eat first. And even that was too much to ask. Anu wasn't having it. So clearly, she didn't even want him spending time with his own family, and that is a massive red flag. Red flag. Anu had always cared a whole lot about how she looked to other people. She always wanted to be the center of attention.

She always needed reassurance that she was smart and desirable and pretty. You know, tell me I'm good, tell me I'm good. And that kind of insecurity tends to find a destructive outlet of some kind. And in an Anu's case, by her late teens, she'd developed an eating disorder. Later on, she'd develop even stranger preoccupations with her body, which for some reason got worse after she and Jo moved in together. She said she felt like her insides were rotting, like things were crawling under her skin. Despite normal doctor's appointments, she was sure she was deathly sick with all kinds of awful diseases.

She was becoming odd. At dinner, where she met some of Joe's friends for the first time, she talked about how intense her relationship with ex-boyfriend Simon Walsh had been. She said, quote, we were so close it was almost incestuous, which is just a really weird thing to say. Not only bringing up a previous boyfriend at all in that circumstance, but describing it like that? What are you doing? It's, I'm sure you've guessed it by now, campers, kinkshaming corner time. Some rules established by Katie's kinkshaming corner trademark 2021. One, don't talk about sex at dinner where you're meeting your significant others friends for the first time.

Seems easy. That seems reasonable. I don't think that's too high of a bar. Two. Just, in fact, let's cut it out entirely. Don't talk about sex in polite company. That's weird. And I think this might be the most important one.

Number three, don't feel like you need to use incestuous an ex-boyfriend in the same sentence under any circumstance. Ever. Gross. Needless to say, this made Joe and his friends a little uncomfortable. Oh, you think? One of his buddies said he thought Anu got off on shocking people, on provoking a reaction and focusing attention on herself. Or possibly her awareness of social boundaries was slipping, and she said whatever came into mind with no filter. Not healthy either way.

And after a bright and shining. beginning, Joe and Anu's relationship started to slide downhill into toxic territory. They started this cycle of Anu freaking out about her looks or her health and Joe struggling to reassure her. And the reassurance part was what she needed. So the freakouts got more and more dramatic and her need for Joe's help got more intense. Interestingly though, in public, it seemed like Anu was the confident one, the dominant partner. She would drive the conversations. She would choose what they did. Joe, friend's thought, had started becoming dimmer around her, less like himself. Yeah, that's an enormous red flag campers. People used to tell me that about my ex. And one time

a friend said it seemed like I turned down my volume around him and just hit me like a semi-truck. Like that is such a hard thing to hear because I knew it was true, you know? And I just got a little advice for you. Don't ever turn down your volume for a partner, y'all. If you have to be less you or take up less space or switch from bright technicolor to black and white to be with somebody, I'm telling you, shut it down. You cannot sustain that. It's going to eat you alive and it's not worth it. So true.

By this time, Joe's parents had started to worry that Anu was too unstable and too demanding for their boy. But Joe begged them not to make him choose between them and Anu. He said, I love you, but she needs me. Oh, Lord. More relationship advice, you don't need anybody. Like if you put yourself in a situation or you're in a situation where somebody literally physically needs you, that's a red flag. Yeah. I can't survive without you.

That person needs help, not a relationship. Exactly. Soon after that, he moved to Canberra, got a new job so he could be with her full time. Joe and Anu had a brief honeymoon phase after they moved in together, but before long, they started to hit the skids again. again. Anu was obsessing more and more about her looks and her weight. She was really thin already, but she'd spend hours at the gym to try and lose more. And it was around this time when she started having health issues, complaining of all kinds of different symptoms. Doctors couldn't pin anything down, though. Anu became convinced she had a neurological disorder, but a whole

succession of tests came up normal. If anyone suggested that her symptoms might be related to depression or anxiety, she'd get angry. Which to me is strange, because anxiety and depression are legit health problems themselves. And, you know, if you're wanting to find out what's causing your symptoms, I mean, those things can cause all kinds of physical symptoms that are really life disruptive. Now, I mean, obviously, I know doctors can be infuriating about this shit sometimes, and a lot of us, especially those of us who have chronic illness, have heard the old, it's all in your head line from healthcare providers who are pretty much just pissed off that they couldn't figure out

what was wrong. Like, I get that. But that wasn't what was happening here. After they, after they've done every test in the book, and there just is not anything wrong neurologically, at that point, it might be time to consider that there's something else going on. You know, and she just wasn't willing to do that. Anu was becoming more and more stressful to be around, which probably wasn't helped by the fact that she also started experimenting around this time with amphetamines and tranquilizers, which just talk about throwing gas on the fire, right? And acquaintances started to get the impression that Joe was getting tired of it all. Tired of the drama, tired of the constant demands, tired of Anu's neediness.

In the summer of 1997, he'd bought himself a new car and he was excited about it, and it seemed to his friends that he was starting to see the shape of a post-Anu life. and if Joe's friends can sense that, Anu almost certainly could. And she was not in a great place. She was reportedly having suicidal thoughts. Her parents knew she wasn't doing great, and they were really worried about her.

They took her to doctors and a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist recommended that she start on antipsychotic medication. But Anu flat out refused because she was afraid the meds would make her gain weight, and that was scarier to her at the time than anything else. I mean, it's clearly, she was clearly struggling with some disordered eating and, you know, stuff like that.

So she didn't want to take the meds. She talked to some of her friends about feeling suicidal, and this, to me, is just pure bananas. According to Anu, anyway, their response was, by and large, yeah, you know, I kind of understand how you feel that way. And if you want to do it, you should. Just, huh? Think about that for a second, campers.

A friend tells you, I'm thinking of killing myself, and your response is basically, well, of course you should. come on I just I can't relate to that at all yeah holy fuck yikes yeah now obviously this is anew's version of events and you know it would be nice to think that she's just making it up because surely nobody could ever be so callous and cavalier about a friend's death right right but here's the thing campers do us a favor and remember back to that super creepy dinner party back at the start of the story which we're going to get back to in a minute As we'll soon see, those friends were sure as hell pretty blasé about the possibility of a friend's death, and once you think about that, it kind of adds a ring of truth to Anu's story. And with a few of these friends, Anu took the conversation a big step further. She wasn't just thinking about killing herself. She was thinking about killing Joe, too.

Huh. Okay, well, why? There are a few possibilities. Anu was deeply dependent on Joe in a really top. toxic, unhealthy way. And considering being without him was painful for her. Leaving him was just unthinkable. And for a narcissistic mind, it's not that big of a leap from I can't live without him to he can't live without me. The old, if I can't have you, no one can. Yeah, how many times have we seen that? More than we'd like to remember. Definitely. But there was a more prosaic motive, too.

According to friends, Anu was really angry with Joe. Apparently, one time they were having a conversation about her weight, as we know, she was obsessed with it, convinced she was fat and desperate to do something about it. And there are varying accounts of how all this went down. So we don't know for sure exactly what Joe said or if he really even said anything at all. But she later told some of her friends that during this conversation about weight loss, Joe had brought up syrup of Ipecac. Now, if y'all aren't familiar with that, it's basically a medication that makes you bark.

And people use it when they accidentally ingest poison or take too much medication or something like that. According to Anu, Joe mentioned it to her as a way to make herself throw up and she decided to try it. Now, based on everything I've read about him, I really can't imagine that this is true, that Joe was like actually bringing this up as a diet tip. That just seems completely contrary to everything I've read about him, you know, based on the kind of guy that everybody says he was. I cannot see him saying, yeah, like, you totally do need to lose weight. You should take this stuff because he was always trying to reassure her that she was beautiful and, you know, just the way she was. Right. And that would be kind of a jerk thing to say.

Like, if he did say it, that would be like, what? Or at least it would suggest that Joe himself had some really toxic ideas about, you know, weight and weight loss. So I suspect he just mentioned it in passing, like either as a joke or as something not to do. Or maybe it just came up in a different conversation about something completely different. and she connected it to the weight issue in her own head. I don't know, but either way, she tried it. And after that, she convinced herself that it was the Ipecac syrup that was causing all her myriad health problems. That's it.

Now, obviously, yeah, that's not the case. I mean, it doesn't make any sense either medically or chronologically. She was already having perceived that she was having health problems. So it doesn't make any sense, but making sense was not exactly a powerful force in Anu's life at this point. you know as far as she was concerned it was the god's truth by now joe had become a lightning rod for annu's unhappiness in general whenever he'd get frustrated with her she would think you're the reason i'm like this this kind of universal blame is something you see a lot in deeply dependent relationships and it does follow its own kind of twisted logic i've made you the person my happiness depends on

but i'm still unhappy therefore you are making me unhappy At one point, Anu convinced herself she'd somehow contracted HIV, again, with no medical evidence whatsoever. It seemed horribly unfair to her that she should have this disease and not Joe. She told a friend she was plotting to put some of her, quote, infected blood on his toothbrush. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's the kind of twisted anger that was brewing in her head. She started talking a lot about revenge. She told one friend she wanted to kill Joe, her ex-boyfriend Simon, and all the doctors who'd failed to diagnose all her medical problems.

She was basically turning into a bubbling cauldron of rage. Lord have mercy. So she's got a whole hit list at this point. And, you know, it's really sad because I don't know if we've made this clear enough yet, but Joe really did love Anu. I mean, he did everything he could to try and reassure her and help her and be there for her. But it was just never enough for her. And granted, she was clearly having some mental health issues, but that does not. exempt you from having to give back in your relationships, at least some of the time.

Anu seems to have just made everything about her. And what she wanted from him, nobody on the planet would have been able to give her. It was just endless, constant, unrelenting demands. And nobody can keep that up. Right. And as we mentioned earlier, Anu may have been catching signals that Joe is getting ready to walk out on her. This, to her, would be a cataclysmic betrayal, an abandonment that would leave her all alone in a dark place. And of course, this just stoked her anger even more. Now, as Anu brought up the possibilities of both suicide and murder to her friends, it's worth questioning how sincere she was.

I mean, we know she loved drama, loved provoking people and getting a reaction out of them, anything that reassured her that she was the main character in the story of the universe. And as the rest of the story will show, between suicide and murder, she seems to have been considering the latter more seriously. Oh, definitely. Anu's closest friend was Madhavi Rao, a fellow law student at A-N-U, and somebody most people considered a calm, spiritual person. Now, we think she's about as spiritual as a toenail clipping,

but you can decide for yourselves. When Anu shared her murder-suicide plans with Madavi, this bitch not only didn't try to dissuade her, she went to the library to help her research how to kill somebody, which really sounds like a plot point in a show called, very Lisa Simpson murder. I want him dead. Dead, you hear?

To the library then. It's like literally when nerds attack. It is. This is not when nerds attack, but it might as fucking well be. It might have been, yeah. Anu and Madavi really did seem to approach this potential murder suicide like an academic project, thorough and methodical.

Anu initially made a few unsuccessful attempts to buy a gun. Yeah, and if this were in a movie, American story, rather than Australian one, things might have shaken down rather differently, although there's a decent chance that these two besties would have still ended up focusing on a different method of ending a human life, poison. After all, would someone as vain as Anu really want to die by a method as bloody and potentially disfiguring as a gunshot? Although I don't think she ever intended to die in the first place, but that was her

story with Madavi at first anyway. And poison offered other advantages, too. It avoided direct confrontation and all the risks that went with it. and it would be secret. Joe would have no idea what was happening. Anu would be in control of the whole process, in control of Joe's life and death, and she liked that idea.

Anu and Madhavi's research eventually led them to choose two drugs for their murder-suicide plot, rohypnal and heroin. Rohypnal, of course, is the infamous date-rache drug, a sedative that impairs your ability to create memories while it's in your system,

which is just terrified. God, that's scary. Ugh. And it reminds me of a story. One of my friends, her mom used to work as a rape crisis counselor. And when we were in college, she told us to never, ever go to this one restaurant and bar on campus. Because the bartender there was notorious for selling rohypnal to guys who wanted to sexually assault their dates. Like he would literally, if you were an asshole predator guy, you would just walk right in and say, hey, I want the rohypnal special and he would hand it to you.

Terrifying. And heroin is lethal in high doses, obviously. especially when you give it to somebody who's what they call opiate naive, meaning they don't use them and they don't have a tolerance. So theoretically, so theoretically there were two ways that they could use these drugs. Option one, Anu sedates Joe so he can't interfere with her suicide by heroin overdose, right? Option two, Anu sedates Joe and then injects both him and herself with lethal doses of heroin killing them both. Now, as far as we know, a third option, sedating Joe and then

injecting only him with a lethal dose of heroin, remained unspoken at this point. Anu's choices were suicide or murder suicide, theoretically. And as a Anu and Madavi continued planning, option one, sedate Joe and let Anu kill only herself, seemed to just kind of fade into the background and get forgotten. It became all about the murder suicide. Joe was going to die. And once she'd chosen her murder method, Star Pupil Anu diligently learned how to execute her plan. With Madavi's help, she met with heroin users, finding out where to buy the stuff,

how much it would cost to buy a big enough dose to kill Joe. And this is insane. them teach her how to shoot somebody up and make her a syringe full of enough heroin to kill an elephant. Like, can you imagine like, so, hello heroin user. Which you might to show me. It's just, it's bananas.

And here's where this already wild case slips down the water slide and splashes into a big pool of, huh? Anu, consummate drama queen and attention addict, decided she wanted an audience for her big farewell performance. She wanted to hold a

pre-suicide meritor dinner party with guests who knew her intentions full well which just what like every part of this every tiny cog in this entire machine is just bonkers like first who gets this idea in the first place like how far up your own narcissist butthole do you have to be to involve so many other people in the potential ending of your life like roll up roll up it's time for the big show you know me settle in the star is amongst you you plebs it's just bananas and second who the hell accepts the invite to this party these are the people i don't understand the most like yeah yeah come on by it's gonna be great nice dinner lovely dessert and my boyfriend and i are going to kill ourselves b yob like what it's not funny it's horrible but like it's all it's so ridiculous that it's

kind of funny yeah it feels like satire yeah exactly because it's like that can't possibly have happen. That's like some dark humor or something, you know, a dark like skit on Saturday Night Live or something, or like something you'd expect to see on it's always sunny in Philadelphia or something like that. And then if you did go to the party, would you eat the food? Like, if the fucking weirdo hosting the death party offers you a crab puff, do you take it? Oh, thanks. Yum. Oh, no, there's no poison in this one. I promise. Don't worry. Like, no, why would you go and why would you eat anything or drink anything? So the answer to the question, who the hell goes to this party, was, for the most part, fellow law students, which is even weirder to me. Good.

But it was not a random selection. Anu and Madhavi picked their guest list very carefully. They drive slowly around the streets of Canberra, close to the university, evaluating every student they passed, to decide if they'd make a suitable guest. Weird. They were very calculating in who they picked. And for the most part, this was students from overseas or from really distant cities. People who were, you know, away from home and didn't have strong connections to the community. People who were lonely, basically, and might not be as savvy about what to do in a situation like this or who to call.

So why these people? The idea may have been to choose guests who were hesitant to assert themselves, even in really strange circumstances. Anu wanted an audience, after all, not co-stars. But Madhavi, the one who actually invited the people to dinner, made no secret of Anu's plans. A crime is going to be committed, she told them, and went on to detail the suicide pact Anu and Joe had supposedly made. A suicide pact that would have been news to Joe, of course, who had no idea what Anu had planned. This poor dude, he was walking right into his execution and he had no idea. And nobody bothered to tell him.

Oh, God. campers all the people they invited showed up not one person went to the police and not one person tried to talk anu and joe out of taking their own lives or went to like a mental health counselor and invited them to the party and try you know what i mean like it doesn't always have to be the cops but like do something well god forbid you turn down a free meal these are college students i guess Jesus true it was all about the free soup and salad you know again again Again, they thought Joe was a willing participant in the whole thing. Well, the guests did. Madhavi knew what was really going on. Now, Anu was well known around campus for her histrionic nature, so it's possible the dinner guests thought this suicide pact was just another shovelful from her big bag of dramatic bullshit.

I guess I can kind of see that. But could you be so sure of that? Like, that you don't even bring it up? You'd go to a dinner party that's allegedly a send-off for a date. double suicide and nobody mentions it. God, it's so weird. I know. That is the part I cannot understand in any way, shape, or form how, like, nothing came up at that entire party that Joe was like, huh? You know, and the whole thing could have just unspooled right then and there. Yeah, there's no, like, you sure you want to do this, man? Like, there's no moment of that.

Right. Nobody said a peep. Yeah. The attendance and inaction of the people at the party who, by all accounts were intelligent, accomplished law students at a prestigious university is the biggest mystery in this case. And it gets weirder, if you can believe it. The dinner party wasn't just a one-time thing. After that first dinner, Anu gave Joe a cup of coffee laced with her hypol. He fell asleep as the guests went home. Anu went and got her creepy little heroin syringe of death and tried to inject him with it. But she couldn't. The heroin had coagulated. so much that the syringe was useless. The next morning, Joe woke up with an awful hangover, a side effect of the rohypnal,

but other than that, he was healthy and well. So Anu had come all the way to the brink of murdering her boyfriend, only to be stopped by a bizarre twist of fate. Now, you'd think that for a lot of people, this would be a wake-up call, a chance to take a step back and think, what the fuck was I about to do? To think about the consequences, right? wrong. But if that kind of self-insight was ever something that Anu Singh was capable of, it was not on the cards in her present state of mind. What she did do was call Madavi Rao and get

her to set up another dinner party, ASAP. Oh my God. Okay, so what was up with Madavi Rao? We need to talk about this. At this point, she was fully engaged with Anu and her plotting and revealingly, she seems to emphasize the murder half of murder suicide. After that first dinner party, Madavi told a friend that Anu had tried and failed to kill Joe that night. And this is just bat shit. The friend threatened to go to the cops and then didn't. Oh my God.

Y'all, do we have to say it? If a friend says a mutual acquaintance attempted murder last night but didn't quite pull it off, please don't just threaten to go to the police. Go to the damn police. Tell the poor sap she tried to kill. Make an anonymous phone call if you don't want to get involved. Do something. And that goes triple if you should happen to hear that the crazy bitch is setting up another wink-wink suicide-packed dinner.

Just a few days later. So they're going to try again. And we have just time and time again seeing people hear someone threaten murder and just do nothing at all. So much that it really seems to me like it's the default human response. Like to either convince yourself that nothing is really going to happen. or to just want to keep your head down and mind your own business. And I'm usually all for minding your own business, but not as somebody's life is at stake. Just for fuck's sakes, you know?

But if you're Madabi Rao, what you do when your friend tells you she's planning to kill herself and her boyfriend is just jump right in, feet first. How can I help? What do you need? Can I hold the syringe for you? Do you need a coffee? What? Like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Yeah. Um, I feel like minding your own business. M-Y-O-B, mind-your-own beeswax, there's levels, right? Like, the family barbecuing in the park that you've never seen before don't need to call

the cops on them. They're fine. Right. The guy reading in his car, just a book in his car, not acting suspiciously, don't need to call the cops on him. Sure. Somebody you don't recognize just kind of taking a walk through your neighborhood, chill out. For God's sakes, people walk in different neighborhoods.

Somebody gets in their car. in your apartment parking lot, don't need to call the cops. Leave them alone. MIOB. Somebody you know tells you, hey, I'm thinking of trying to kill my boyfriend in this really elaborate way. Do you think you can help? Now is the time.

This is now your, it's, you don't, you're not minding your own business. You are minding your own business because it's become your business. It's your problem now. It's your problem now. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Now, after this case, Madavi Rao, bless her heart, appears to have left Australia entirely and changed her name, doing her level best to vanish entirely from the eyes of the world so nobody can ask her what the hell she was thinking.

I don't blame her, I guess, but Anu claims that Madabi just loved her and saw she was in pain and wanted to help. Yeah. You know, it's good to have friends, no doubt. I'm very grateful for mine, but there needs to be an upper limit on wanting to help. Usually somewhere on the scale from moving a futon up some stairs to letting them crash on your couch. for a few days, or even agreeing to be their kid's godmother or donate in a kidney. Murdering a boyfriend and assisting a suicide, not on the list. At least not if you're halfway a normal human being. You want to be a good friend. When someone you care about dumps that on you, you say, don't do that.

You say, let's get you some help. And you don't let up until they get help, right? But Madavi was all in, which I can only assume means she's either the saddest sack in human history so desperate to please her buddy Anu that she was willing to toss her moral compass, just down a well and forget about it or that she's a sociopath and she was getting off on the whole thing. I mean, she helped Anu find the drug. She bought the rohypnal

herself. She arranged both of the dinner parties and think about how she told her friend that Anu had tried to kill Joe. If she'd sounded concerned or guilty when she said that, why would her friend feel like she had to threaten to go to the police? Right. Right? Seems to me like she was finding the whole thing pretty

exciting and getting caught up in the drama, which is just fucked. Like, I so don't get this woman. I mean, who was Joe to Madabi Rao? It seems like she just saw him as an extra in the whole thing, just a minor character in Anu's story, and that he was just barely a person to her, which I think is just awful. But whatever her motivations were, Madavi quickly arranged a second dinner party, and it was literally like four days later, if I recall, like so fast.

Inviting many of the same guests with the same promise, Anu and Joe are going to kill themselves after this. Now, personally, two dinner parties and one week sounds exhausting. to me, like, even if there's no chance of somebody ended up dead, but these freaks showed up again, I guess they were that desperate for free food. Maybe they figured after nobody died at the first party that the whole suicide pack thing was just a gimmick or just another piece of

weirdness from Anu, the odd duck. But again, nobody brought it up. They sat there, they went through the whole dinner, nobody spoke to Joe about the fact that this dinner party was supposed to be a morbid send-off for himself and his girlfriend. And I just don't get it. If you're at a party like that and you don't think it's serious, wouldn't you talk about it or wouldn't you joke about it, it just baffles me. Maybe they thought it was some weird like art exhibit thing. Because like if they really were going to commit suicide, don't you

think they would like invite their real friends and not just like strangers that they cat called on the street? Maybe they didn't have any or maybe she didn't have any. Maybe. I don't know. I just this whole, it's just. They were friends, I think. I don't, they weren't strangers. I mean, they all knew each other. They were all law students. Yeah, I guess. It just makes me sick, man. There was one significant difference between this second party and the first, although the guests didn't know it. This time, Anu had a drug user friend pre-pre-pre-surringes of liquid heroin right beforehand, ready to inject. Anu wanted to make sure there were no slip-ups this time.

Her plan had come so close to success the first time she tried it, so she'd just correct the error and do the whole thing again. She wanted a dinner party followed by death, and she was going to get what she wanted. It's chilling. So Friday night, dinner party number two, second verse, same as the first. They ate, they drank, they talked, and everybody filed out as poor Joe, drugged with rohypnal in his coffee, fell asleep. And then everybody was gone, and the apartment was quiet. It was just Anu and Joe, passed out and cold, totally at her mercy.

Did she talk to him? Did she have any second thoughts about what she was about to do? We have no way of knowing. Anu took out her ready-made syringes and injected Joe with two massive doses of heroin. And we've talked a lot about murder or suicide, but let's be clear. She didn't inject herself, now did she? Either on the first attempt or the second. So we have serious doubts about whether she ever intended this to be anything other than straight-up murder.

An overdose of heroin causes the opioid receptors all over the body to get overloaded. Blood pressure goes down, body temp goes down, and respiration starts to slow down more and more until it finally stops. It can be a slow process, and it was in Joe's case. As his body reacted to the overdose, Joe felt weak and nauseated, had trouble breathing.

He started throwing up blood. By the next day, Joe was still alive, tossing and turning on his bed for hours as Anu sat and watched and did nothing. He was still alive on Sunday morning, too, so Anu injected him with another dose of heroin. And then it seems like she might have started to freak out a little. She called a bunch of friends that morning, saying Joe had overdosed, telling them about his shallow breathing, his bloody vomit, his blue lips. For the most part, her friends reacted like they'd reacted to all of this so far.

Basically, eh, that sucks. Well, got to go, bye. As this bright, happy, 26-year-old man laid dying. Nobody did anything. But finally, finally, one friend stood up telling Anu she had to call an ambulance. When Anu started to fucking argue with her... I know. The friend told her she was a heartless bitch, and if she didn't call an ambulance,

she was going to have a murder charge on her hands. Yeah, and it was that, campers, that finally prompted Anu to dial Triple Zero and call the emergency services just afternoon on the second day after she first injected Joe. A threat against herself is what it took to spur her to action. Nothing to do with Joe's well-being. Ugh, this chick is the worst. The call itself is strange in a couple of ways. For one thing, her tone shifts back and forth all throughout,

from calm to frantic and back to calm, and she seems to have deliberately tried to prevent a quick response, giving the wrong address, given a false name, calling herself Olivia, for some weird-ass reason. And as we heard at the beginning of the episode, the paramedics arrived too late, and Joe was unresponsive. While they worked on him, Anu paced around the room at one point grabbing a paramedic's arm and telling her he had a lot last night. So it looks like she was trying early on to set up a story of accidental overdose, which good luck with that after you spent the past few months blabbing far and wide about your plans for either murder suicide or a suicide pact.

Of course, nobody said shit yet. Maybe she was just confident nobody ever would. I don't know. Detective Sergeant Harry Haynes was the first homicide officer on the scene and he got a briefing on the situation from paramedics and other police. if you're a big city cop for any length of time, you're going to see your share of overdose deaths, and Haynes right away noticed that Joe had a pronounced injection mark in the crook of his elbow. Anu, meanwhile, was downstairs, reportedly in an agitated state.

During his interview with her, she indicated that Joe had taken heroin and that she had injected him. Now, that was enough for Haynes to arrest her for murder. And Anu, she did not take it well. She struggled, kicking at him, and had to be forced to the ground and handcuffed, and then forced again into the back of the police car. Wait.

In an interview at the police station, Anu revealed the suicide pact between herself and Joe, about which investigators were immediately suspicious. The obvious question, of course, was, well, if it was a suicide pact, why are you still here? Anu was unable to answer that. And it's a damn good question. Was Anu ever sincere about the second half of murder suicide?

Maybe at the start, when it was all just dramatic words to her friend, she gave them equal weight. But as her plan started to crystallize and the time of Joe's death came closer and closer, it's really hard to find any indication that she actually planned to take her own life. She dosed Joe with rohypnal twice,

shot him full of heroin, three times, had tried and failed to do so a fourth time. And to herself, zip, bupkiss, nothing. So, I have my doubts. Anu was restless and upset throughout the whole interview, repeatedly asking after Joe, but the lead interviewer did not notice any particularly convincing sorrow from Anu. In fact, he noticed that while she spent a lot of time sobbing,

she never seemed to need a tissue to dry her eyes. Fake crying, y'all, we see it a lot, and it always skeaves me out. I can't imagine I cry if I step on my dog's poor little paw, let alone taking another human's life. It's so fucking creepy that you're just that cold, that you can't summon an emotion up. It just weepy noises and no teeth. years. As you've probably noticed, neither Anu nor her creepy little minion Medavi could be described as particularly discreet. It's really kind of surprising they didn't get, we're planning a murder,

ask us how, t-shirts printed up. That was about the only thing they didn't do. So investigators were able to get the facts of the case pretty straight, including the involvement of Madavi, who was also arrested. In 1999, Anu Singh and Madavi Rao both went on trial separately for murder, and they each chose a trial by judge alone with no jury, which unfortunately was a really smart choice in this case. Yeah. If you're anything like me, campers, and you're inclined to rage strokes, this might be rage stroke time.

So just take a breath with me real quick. You're going to need the serenity. Anu pleaded not guilty by reason of diminished responsibility due to mental illness. and the judge agreed, instead finding her guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter and sentencing her to 10 years in prison with a minimum sentence before parole of four years, which is what she would end up serving. Yeah, four lousy stinking years. That's it, you know. And Joe's poor parents, oh my God, they literally screamed in the courtroom.

It's just heartbreaking. They were completely gutted by Joe's death, and she got her flipping Ph.D. in there. Wrote her thesis on women in prison or so. such a thing, which normally I'd be like, good for you, but I just can't with this lady. Now, clearly, Anu Singh's brain was a pretty weird place to be around the time of Joe's death, but still, this was a meticulously planned and executed killing, one that offered multiple chances for her to back out, including a failed attempt that gave her no pause at all.

Joe, a young man with potentially bright future ahead of him, died slowly and torturously as Anu Singh watched. Diminished responsibility is a very important. necessary component of any legal system. But should Anu Singh's responsibility really have been diminished down to just four years? No, no, not in my opinion anyway. I mean, what do we always say, campers? Your mental health isn't your fault, but it's your responsibility.

And Anu had people around her who were trying to help. Her parents tried to help, Joe tried to help, and she turned down multiple attempts for treatment and decided instead to do this shit. I just don't think we can absolve her for it. We just can't. And I won't, anyway. Absolutely. Diminished responsibility would indicate that she didn't know right from wrong, and I think

it's clear that she did. She took steps, albeit poorly, to cover her tracks. That's not diminished capacity. That's evil. And what about Madavi Rao? This is even more infuriating. Good old Madavi was acquitted on all fucking charges. Yeah, acquitted.

She planned the killing with Anu right from the start. She helped buy the drugs that made him unconscious. and the drugs that killed him. She set up each of those bizarre dinner parties believing each time that Joe would be killed right after. Acquitted. Free as a bird. Didn't do anything wrong. Good job, Kenbara.

Good fucking job. Yeah, I'd like to pop that judge in the mouth. And of course, another group that evaded all responsibility are the frickin' weirdos who attended those dinner parties, believing that deaths would follow each one, yet taking no action whatsoever to try and prevent those deaths. And let's hope they are weirdos. You know, that they're weirdos.

was just something off in the culture of A&U Law School that produced peculiarly cold moral responses to extreme events, because I would prefer to think that most people would do better, be better than that. Where are they now, nearly 25 years after Joe Chinquay's death? Most of them probably went on to be lawyers. Some of them might even be judges today, isn't that a fun thought? So all I'm going to say about that is watch your back, Australia, because you got some frickin' weirdos on the bench and practicing in your courts of law. Yikes.

So that, I think we'll all agree, was a wild one, right campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Taylor, Meredith,

Mazi, I hope I said that right if I didn't tell me. Beth, Steph, Lisa, and Alex. We appreciate you the moon and back. And y'all, if you're not yet a patron, you are missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free at least a day early, sometimes even two, plus an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pen while supplies last at 10, virtual events with Katie and me planning on one this weekend, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us.

Thank you.