by Helen Garner
Mr T returned in a while with a half-weight. He helped himself to the taste that was his reward. Anu Singh said to him, ‘Today’s the day.’ He told her to relax – not to be silly. He cooked up the balance of the heroin for her and sucked it into a syringe. Off she went, carrying barely concealed in the palm of her hand a fit loaded with almost $250 worth of heroin.
What Singh did next has not been established. But just before noon she made the famous phone call to Bronwyn Cammack that so exercised the psychiatrists during her trial. She told Cammack that Joe’s lips were ‘a tiny bit blue’, and that he was ‘still taking a breath every ten seconds or so’. Cammack, showing the kind of crude common sense that the story conspicuously lacked, refused to be dragged into Singh’s mess, told her she was ‘a selfish bitch’, and bluntly ordered her to call the paramedics at once. And in the end, as we know, Singh did dial 000. But at one-fifty p.m. on Sunday 26 October 1997, Joe Cinque’s life was pronounced extinct.
The transcripts may not have offered me the simple chronology of events that I craved, but as I shifted back and forth between the aborted double trial and Singh’s solo trial, I found the differing versions were rich in extraordinary passages of dialogue that witnesses had recreated under the pressure of counsel’s questioning – scenes of strange drama which gave the flavour of the social, moral and emotional world these people inhabited.
In October 1997, for example, a young woman called Robin Mantoszko had a placement as a student social worker in the Community and Health Services Complaints Commission, in Civic, where Madhavi Rao was doing work experience. According to the evidence this witness gave in the aborted jury trial, Madhavi Rao had said to her on Friday 17 October, ‘I’ve got a friend who’s suicidal. She smothers me.’
Then, on Tuesday 21 October, the day after the first dinner party, a flustered-looking Madhavi Rao had launched a conversation with Mantoszko and her work-mate Russell Baker.
‘Canberra’s such a strange place,’ she began, according to Mantoszko. ‘My friend asked me to get twenty people together for a dinner party by nine-thirty. I just drove around and knocked at people’s doors, that were acquaintances. It was amazing. They said “Oh yeah – I’ve seen you at uni – I’ll come.” The party was really strange. Something really serious happened. It was bizarre. I’ve been looking over my shoulder for the police.’
‘Why?’ asked Mantoszko. ‘What happened? Was it something to do with sex?’
‘Look at me,’ said Rao with a sort of a smile. ‘Do you think I look like a sex goddess?’
‘I don’t know. Was it something to do with drugs?’
‘If it were that, I wouldn’t be worried.’
‘Was it some sort of game, like Dungeons and Dragons?’
‘No,’ said Rao. ‘I’m not into that. It was really strange. It was . . . something really serious.’
‘Was it something to do with the occult?’
‘No. It’s the major crime of the century since 1901. Since the turn of the century.’
‘Was someone raped?’
‘No. It’s the worst thing in the Crimes Act.’
Mantoszko looked at Russell Baker and asked, ‘What’s in the Crimes Act?’ Baker shrugged.
‘It’s the worst thing in the Crimes Act,’ insisted Rao. ‘The worst.’
‘Murder,’ said Mantoszko.
‘Murder,’ said Baker.
‘Do you mean murder?’ asked Mantoszko.
Rao turned away.
‘Were animals involved?’ asked Mantoszko.
‘No,’ said Rao. ‘I wouldn’t let that happen.’
‘Was someone murdered?’
‘No,’ said Rao. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more.’ She threw her hands in the air. ‘I’m not going to talk about it any more.’ She said this several times, quite assertively, then sat down at her desk. A few minutes later she spoke again: ‘It’s got something to do with revenge.’
‘Was someone hurt?’ Mantoszko asked. Rao did not answer. Mantoszko asked again and then again, more forcefully. Rao did not reply. She kept looking down at her desk with her back to Mantoszko. Mantoszko wheeled her chair over to Rao’s left side and tried to look her directly in the eyes. Rao would not meet her eye. Peering round, trying to look into her face, Mantoszko said directly to her, ‘Was someone hurt?’ Rao gave no reply. She turned her chair away from Mantoszko, then stood up and started tidying her desk.
‘Can it be reversed?’ asked Mantoszko.
Rao shook her head and hesitantly said, ‘No.’
Frustrated, Mantoszko said to her, ‘What’s going on? If you can’t tell us what’s going on, is there someone else you can talk to?’
No reply.
‘What about the police?’
‘Oh no,’ said Rao. ‘I’ll be thrown in gaol.’
‘What about a university counsellor?’
‘No. I’d be locked up as well.’
‘If you’re really serious about this,’ said Mantoszko, ‘perhaps you need to see a lawyer.’
There was a pause. Then Rao said there was a university professor who specialised in criminal law whom she could perhaps see and talk to.
‘I strongly encouraged her to do this,’ Mantoszko told the court. ‘I told her to go and see him, to tell someone what was going on. And I told her to cover her own arse.’
Two days later, at lunchtime on Thursday 23 October, Madhavi Rao said to Mantoszko, ‘It looks like it’s going to happen again this weekend.’
‘What’s going to happen again?’ said Mantoszko, who was in a hurry to leave the office. ‘Can you stop it?’
‘No.’
‘Then tell someone who can.’
The July nights in Canberra gasped with blue cold; mornings were stiff with frost. Before dawn each day, right outside my window at the erstwhile government hostel where I was staying, a magpie let loose a bubbling burst of song. I would force myself out along the flat streets to a football oval, and tramp round it three times. The grass crunched under my shoes. The breath of singing birds shot out of their beaks in tiny white puffs.
When I got to my desk at the DPP, I would slide Joe Cinque’s photo out from its hiding place among the papers, prop it against a folder, and contemplate it quietly for a while before I started work. I had an urge to greet him, to say, ‘Here I am, Joe. I haven’t forgotten you.’ His eyes were closed. In death he looked young and tender, pure-faced, even slightly child-like. I felt protective of him, though it was too late. He seemed to me an innocent who had fallen into a nest of very complicated evil.
But I didn’t know what ‘evil’ was. I didn’t know whether such a thing existed, though in an anxious corner of myself I stubbornly believed it did. I kept thinking about a remarkable book by the British writer Tony Parker that I had once read, Life after Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers. I remembered the sense I had got, from even the most laceratingly remorseful of those candid speakers, that ‘evil’ or ‘violence’ or ‘the urge to kill’ is like a storm that rushes in from outside. The killer’s nature is weak, or porous. He lacks resistance. For whatever reason, his defences are down. And this force inhabits him, uses him as its tool, destroys, then rushes on, leaving its host empty, limp as a glove.
Is this primitive? Is it a fantasy of possession? Yet it still has a hold, otherwise there would be no such defence as ‘diminished responsibility’. One lunchtime I went down to Garema Place and emailed a friend who was a Jesuit priest. ‘I think there is good reason,’ he promptly replied, ‘for the long tradition which speaks of evil in the third person, even gives it a name. It seems to treat the human as a kind of host, like a parasite. I do believe there is such a thing as diminished responsibility. But the hardest thing is to get an aggressor to accept what responsibility is appropriate.’
In the transcript of the aborted jury trial I came upon a terrible cross-examination by Mr Pappas of one of Madhavi Rao’s friends, a young woman called Olivia Pipitone. According to this witness, Madhavi Rao had conf
ided in her that Anu Singh, needing practice for suicide, had injected Rao with heroin. ‘Madhavi showed me the mark in her left elbow,’ Pipitone told the court, ‘and said, “This is where Anu injected me.” She said it wasn’t an amazing experience.’
When Rao invited Pipitone to the Monday night dinner, she explained that the reason for the party was so Singh could kill herself. Pipitone had at this stage never met Anu Singh, but she accepted the invitation, and it was very hard for her, in court, to explain why.
‘Now,’ said Pappas, ‘you were left with the impression that Madhavi Rao believed her friend Anu Singh might well commit suicide?’
‘Yes,’ stammered the witness. ‘I – I don’t really agree with that. Like all I had to go on was what Madhavi was saying to me, so therefore whatever she believed I pretty much believed. So – because I didn’t believe, then I don’t think she would have believed either. If she’d have had belief she would have imparted that through the way she would have told me.’
‘There was nothing about the way she spoke to you, was there, in her demeanour or her manner, to suggest that she was treating this simply as a joke?’
‘No, not as a joke.’
‘And she never said to you, did she, “I don’t think she is going to do anything of the sort”?’
‘No.’
‘You believed that Madhavi and Anu had a degree of conviction about these plans but you yourself were sceptical about it?’
‘That was only an impression. I don’t know.’
‘When you got to the party you found that there was a lot of food and only a few guests?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it was Anu Singh who said, “We’ve got to find more guests. We’ve got too much food”?’
‘Yes. It was Joe as well because he was cooking. Like, they were both cooking.’
‘It seemed a bit odd to you, surely, that you’d turn up to a party and there’s only a few people there, to the house of a person you’d never met, and yet then you’re sent off on a door-knock looking for more guests?’
‘Yes, it is strange, yes.’
‘That must have struck you as particularly odd?’
‘Yes, it was quite odd.’
‘And this was the party you’d been told was to celebrate Anu Singh’s intended suicide?’
‘Yes, the whole thing was quite strange.’
‘You didn’t know of any other reason for the party, did you?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘There was some other reason, was there?’
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘What was that?’
‘It was for Anu to kill her boyfriend as well as herself.’
‘Well, that made it perfectly normal, then, did it? It wasn’t just a suicide, it was going to be a murder as well? I mean – you weren’t told that it was someone’s birthday, were you, when you got to the party?’
‘No.’
‘Or that someone was going overseas or just graduated from university?’
‘No.’
‘You were told that this was a party to celebrate a murder/suicide, and when you got there you were told by the hostess you’d never met that there was too much food – “Go and get me some more guests”?’
‘Mm.’
‘And you said to Madhavi Rao, “Why are you doing this?” And she said, “Anu asked me”?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you say, “Why are you playing along with this?’’ ’
‘Yes, but I don’t recall any answer.’
‘And Madhavi Rao was telling you all this in serious, sober, sombre tones, wasn’t she?’
‘I really wouldn’t use those words to describe it –’
‘What words would you use?’
‘It’s just so hard to say. It’s just not – just nothing – all I can say, it was just nothing. No overly impressive tones. Like, no – nothing overly – sort of light and fun and not overly serious and sombre. Just – but not – not carefree either.’
‘There wasn’t a word spoken by Madhavi Rao on the evening of that party which led you to the view that it had all been some bad joke?’
‘No.’
‘Because the very next day you went round to ask her what happened?’
‘Yes.’
‘You had some morbid curiosity about whether there’d been a suicide or a murder, did you?’
‘I suppose I would’ve, yes.’
‘You certainly posed that question, didn’t you – “What happened last night?” ’
‘I did, yes.’
‘What did you mean by that? – “Was someone killed?” ’
‘Yes, that would have been what I meant.’
‘She had conveyed the whole story to you with sufficient conviction to cause you to ask the question the next day?’
‘But I still didn’t really think that anything would happen.’
‘Well, why did you ask the question?’
‘It’s sort of like, you know – I’d, you know, “Did anything happen”, sort of, as if it would have, sort of.’
‘That was a little joke, was it?’
‘No, I don’t think it was a joke.’
‘And once you’d confronted Madhavi Rao and asked what happened, the talk about this suicide dropped off a little bit?’
‘It just sort of dropped off, yes. It was the end of uni and I didn’t – I didn’t – yes.’
‘And the next conversation you had on the subject, you were told by your friend Madhavi Rao that there was going to be another party?’
‘On some occasion, yes.’
‘And she was again telling you that Anu Singh was suicidal?’
‘That was the implication, I suppose, yes.’
‘And she told you that Anu did not have in mind, at that point, the killing of Joe Cinque?’
‘I remember Madhavi saying that Anu isn’t going to kill her boyfriend, like she’s decided not to and there’s going to be a party, there’s not going to be another party – that’s just sort of hazy.’
‘Did all this seem perfectly normal to you, did it?’
‘Well, no, but – it was something that had been coming up in conversation for a couple of months, and –’
‘Had your friend Madhavi Rao been talking about it so much that you’d become a little desensitised to the whole subject?’
‘Yeah, perhaps. But it’s not that I was highly sensitised from the start.’
Olivia Pipitone’s memory of this cross-examination, so unbecoming to her, may have been rendered slightly more bearable by the benevolent treatment she received next, for his own purposes, from Mr Adams, counsel for Madhavi Rao. Deftly he let her off the whole row of nasty ethical hooks from which Mr Pappas’s questions had suspended her. He reminded her of previous evidence she had given to the effect that Madhavi Rao, when inviting her to the Monday night murder/suicide dinner, had ‘rolled her eyes’ in a manner he called ‘symptomatic of disbelief’. Eagerly Pipitone agreed that this ‘rolling of the eyes type of response’, which conveyed what Mr Adams called ‘a sense of exasperation about Anu Singh going on and on and on’, had characterised all of the discussions between her and Madhavi on the subject of Anu Singh’s suicide. And though she didn’t actually recall having said in conversation, ‘People who are going to do this sort of thing don’t just talk about it – they go ahead and do it,’ she now agreed that ‘this does sound like a sentiment I would have had and would have expressed at some point.’
If Pipitone had really taken the talk seriously, Mr Adams went on, ‘you wouldn’t have put yourself in a position to go along to a party to witness a murder and a suicide, would you? You didn’t understand Madhavi to be telling you that that was going to happen on a particular night – because you simply wouldn’t have gone along to it, would you? You certainly wouldn’t have gone out to get additional guests, to get a bigger audience to witness this murder and suicide, if that’s what you knew or thought was going on?’
‘No. No. No,’ said
Pipitone.
‘And the dinner party was perfectly normal, if not boring? You saw Joe Cinque and Anu Singh there behaving like an ordinary couple who were obviously affectionate to one another?’
‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’
‘You didn’t expect anything to happen? It doesn’t seem logical, then, does it, that you would be asking the question “What happened”?’
‘No. No.’
‘Can I suggest to you that when you saw Madhavi Rao the following day, you said “How did it go?” It’s a more logical thing to have asked her, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
And as for when Madhavi Rao had shown Olivia Pipitone the needle mark on her arm – ‘I think you’d agree with the proposition,’ said Mr Adams, ‘that the fact that it was practice for suicide is more likely to be a conclusion drawn by you than something that Madhavi told you?’
‘Yes,’ said Pipitone.
‘And when you asked Madhavi, “How could you let Anu do that to you?” she said “Anu pleaded with me and was terribly insistent and eventually I let her do it”?’
‘Yes,’ said Pipitone. The girl’s relief lit up the page. ‘That’s it. Yes.’
One of the props of the adversarial system, I began to see, is a curious charade that memory is a clear, coherent narrative, a stable and unchanging source of information, so that any deviation from a witness’s original version of an event can be manhandled to look like unreliability, or the intent to deceive. Thus, I saw how a Crown witness of what seemed to me transparent sincerity and desire to do right – the only person who had made any real attempt to break through the ghastly, paralysing spell that hung around Anu Singh and her plan to kill Joe Cinque – could go to water under the sustained onslaught of a defence cross-examination.
