by Helen Garner
Because this witness’s family belonged to a historically traumatised ethnic group and would have turned her out of home if they knew she had had dealings, no matter how innocent, with the police, her name was suppressed by the court; I shall call her Tanya Z—. According to her evidence-in-chief at the jury trial, she had met and had social contact with Madhavi Rao early in 1996 when they were both residents of a university college. Her acquaintance with the morbid concerns of Singh and Rao began around July 1997, when she ran into them at the university library. It was the first time she had met Anu Singh. Rao asked Tanya Z— to lend her some money so she could photocopy an article for a law assignment. Tanya was surprised to notice that the material was about suicide.
Early in the week familiar to us as the one leading up to Joe Cinque’s death, Madhavi Rao phoned Tanya Z— and invited her to a dinner party that ‘a friend’ was having on the following Friday, 24 October. Tanya Z— was pleased to accept.
On the Friday evening, Rao and Singh picked up Tanya Z— from a bus stop. When Singh hopped out of the car in Braddon to buy something in a shop, Rao turned to Tanya Z— and said, ‘I’ve got a big story, bigger than you’ve heard before. It’s a secret. I’ll tell you about it later.’
They dropped Singh off at 79 Antill Street, then drove on to Turner, to pick up another guest. During the twenty minutes when they were alone in the car, Rao told Tanya Z— that the dinner party was to be a send-off for Anu. She was going to kill herself afterwards, because she was suffering from a muscle-wasting disease caused by ‘a syrup called ipecac that makes you vomit if you’ve eaten too much’; Rao said Singh had heard about the ipecac from her boyfriend Joe. Singh and Rao had researched the means of suicide. They would inject several hundred dollars’ worth of heroin, and it would take two seconds.
Tanya Z— panicked. She told Madhavi Rao that it was morally and legally wrong to participate in such a thing.
‘I’ve taken care of that,’ said Rao. ‘I’ll be downstairs when it’s happening.’
‘Anu can’t be serious if she’s using that method,’ said Tanya Z—. ‘If she was serious she’d try other methods like, for example, a gun.’
‘She’s tried that,’ said Madhavi Rao, ‘but she couldn’t get one.’
Having picked up the other guest, they headed back to Antill Street for the party. On the way, Madhavi told Tanya Z— she might as well stay the night at her place after the dinner, instead of making the long trip home to the township where she and her family lived.
Another guest, a friend of Singh and Rao called Len Mancini whom Tanya didn’t yet know, would give her a lift back to Rao’s share house later. Tanya should be ready to leave with him when told to.
Tanya Z— was not asked to give the court an account of her state of mind during the party, which was already in progress when they reached the house. She said merely that she met Joe Cinque and others, that people ate and drank, that there was conversation round the table, and that she recalled nothing unusual about the dinner. She stayed at the party till sometime between midnight and twelve-thirty, at which point Len Mancini drove her back to Madhavi Rao’s house in Condamine Street and left her to spend the night in Madhavi’s room.
At about six on Saturday morning Tanya was woken by the noisy arrival home of her hostess. Rao, she said, was ruffling angrily through her things, jerking them this way and that, apparently getting ready for bed.
‘Hi,’ said Tanya Z—. ‘You seem upset.’
‘Yes,’ said Madhavi Rao. ‘Just go to sleep. I’ll tell you about it later.’
‘You seem really upset,’ said Tanya Z—. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘It didn’t work,’ said Rao.
‘What – you tried it?’
‘Yes.’
‘How could it not work? She’s an idiot. If she really wanted to kill herself she’d do it. How hard is it to do? She’s not a good friend to you. Just stay away from her.’
‘Well, it’s okay with her,’ said Madhavi Rao, ‘but Joe’s the problem. She wants to take Joe with her.’
‘What?’ said Tanya Z—. ‘I didn’t think they were that close.’
‘No – it’s because she blames him for her condition.’
‘What kind of idiotic rationalising is that? She’s the one that took the ipecac!’
‘Yes,’ said Rao, ‘but he used to roll round in his sleep saying, “You’re such a slut, Anu.” ’
Madhavi lit a cigarette for Tanya Z— and another for herself.
Tanya asked her whether she’d ever had heroin. Madhavi said she had tried it with Anu, to practise injecting, at the house of a student friend. This man had given them stern advice about dosages: he said, ‘You don’t fuck around with things like murder and suicide. If you do it, you do it properly.’
‘We had a party on Monday night as well,’ Madhavi went on, ‘but the heroin had been left in the syringe too long. It congealed in the syringe.’
‘So was the party for Joe?’ asked Tanya.
‘Yeah. It was to get him drunk.’
‘That’s just too elaborate,’ said Tanya. ‘Anu can’t be serious. How hard is it to get your own boyfriend drunk?’
Madhavi began to talk about spiritual things. She said, ‘It’s amazing – it wasn’t his time to go. Even though he’d had that many Rohypnol, he was still moving. Anu couldn’t get the injection into him. She wanted to put it into his arm muscle. I told her it wouldn’t work – it wouldn’t kill him.’
‘Did Joe take the Rohypnol deliberately?’
‘No – would you take ten Rohypnol deliberately?’
‘How did you get him to take it?’
‘Anu put it in his coffee.’
‘Did you know that Joe was supposed to go as well?’
‘Yes,’ said Madhavi. ‘That’s why I couldn’t look him in the eye when he was talking about the conspiracy book I’d lent him.’
‘So are you still going to try and kill Joe,’ asked Tanya, ‘or is this all over with?’
‘I’m not going to have anything more to do with it. Anu doesn’t want me to. She said, “No offence, Madhavi, but I’m going to have to do this alone – it’s just not working.” ’
It was by now seven-thirty on the Saturday morning. Tanya Z— was due to start work at noon. After their disturbing conversation, Madhavi Rao made Tanya a cup of tea and drove her to Civic so she could catch her bus home.
I had read a compressed account of all this in Justice Crispin’s judgement; but in the transcript of the jury trial, Tanya Z—’s dismay and fear seemed to leak out between the words. Even without having seen her or heard her voice, one could feel her sense of the crazy unreality of what she had been told. I tried to imagine her in the bus as it trundled along, that warm Saturday morning, heading out of the city. She had slept badly in a strange house, in the bed of someone she hardly knew, and had woken to find herself in the middle of a tale so lurid, so absurd, that she might have thought she was still dreaming, or the butt of a practical joke.
As soon as she got home, she picked up the phone and dialled Madhavi Rao’s number.
‘Madhavi,’ she said, ‘I’m not comfortable with the situation. I think Len Mancini will know how to handle this. I just can’t. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m going to either tell Len about it, or I’m going to tell the police. I want you to give me Len’s phone number.’
‘You can’t tell the police!’ said Madhavi. ‘What are you doing? It’s none of your business. Joe’s going to be okay. Don’t tell the police. There’s no evidence, anyway.’
‘If I tell the police and there is something going on,’ said Tanya, ‘they’ll be able to do something about it – and you’ll probably be okay.’
‘If they talk to Anu,’ said Madhavi, ‘they’ll talk to Anu’s parents. They’ll ask Anu’s parents who her friends are, then they’ll come round to my house asking questions. I don’t need the police asking me questions.’
At this point in the conversation, a
ccording to Tanya’s evidence, the phone was abruptly taken from Madhavi and another voice said, ‘It’s Anu here. What are you doing?’
‘Madhavi’s told me about Joe and the heroin and the suicide,’ said Tanya. ‘I don’t know how to deal with it. I want to tell Len about it. He knows you better. He’ll know whether you’re serious. If you don’t give me Len’s phone number I’m going to call the police or the Mental Health Crisis Centre.’
‘You don’t know anything,’ said Anu. ‘What are you going to tell the police?’
‘That you have heroin, that you tried to kill Joe, that you gave him Rohypnol and you tried to inject him –’
‘You don’t have any evidence,’ said Anu, and started to cry.
Tanya Z— kept talking right over her tears. ‘– And that you blame him for your medical condition.’
Anu Singh’s crying intensified. ‘I love him, but there’s that. What can I do?’
‘If there’s something wrong in the relationship,’ said Tanya, ‘you just leave. You don’t murder people to punish them for what’s going wrong.’
‘Leave this alone!’ said Anu. ‘Nothing’s going to happen. I won’t do anything to him. If anything happens it could ruin my career!’
‘Look,’ said Tanya. ‘Just let me tell Joe about it, then I’ll leave it. I won’t tell anyone else. You needn’t worry about your career.’
‘No!’ screamed Anu. ‘You’d ruin him, you’d ruin us! We’re engaged. We’re in love. I couldn’t do anything to him! After I tried it, I sat there looking at him for two hours when he was asleep – I realised that he’d been the one who stuck by me, and that I loved him. Please don’t tell anyone! All this is over with Joe, but I can’t go on, knowing that some time in the future he’ll find out about it, and our relationship may be ruined and possibly my career. I can’t live comfortably day to day with this hanging over me.’
‘Right,’ said Tanya. ‘Give me Len’s phone number and I’ll tell him about it. He’ll know what to do and I’ll stay out of it. I’m going to tell him that you blame Joe for your medical condition, that you wanted to kill yourself, that you had heroin, that you gave him Rohypnol and that you tried to kill him too. If it’s out of character for you, if it’s a result of stress and you’re unlikely to go through with any of it, Len will know. He knows you better than I do. I’m really uncomfortable in this situation. I don’t know you and I can’t judge what’s going on, but I feel somehow implicated. I have to do something.’
Singh and Rao must have taken Tanya Z—’s threats seriously, for within the hour, that Saturday morning, they had arrived at Len Mancini’s house, where the phone apparently had an extension and a complex conversation was possible. Rao dialled Tanya’s number and handed the receiver to Mancini.
When Mancini greeted her, Tanya Z— announced to him, ‘Anu tried to kill herself and Joe last night. She was using heroin and Rohypnol.’
But Mancini’s reaction was not what Tanya had expected. ‘Yep. Yep,’ he said. ‘Okay, yep.’
‘There,’ said Anu, butting in on the line. ‘Are you satisfied?’
‘No, I’m not,’ said Tanya. ‘He obviously doesn’t believe me.’ She tried once more, and got the same off-hand response from Mancini.
Anu cut in again. ‘Are you happy now?’ she said. ‘You’ve told him twice. Are you going to leave this alone?’
Tanya Z— stuck to her guns. ‘No. I’m not satisfied.’
‘How about I tell him,’ said Anu, ‘and you hear me tell him, so he understands everything – will that do?’ Tanya agreed. Anu said, ‘Okay, Len. I’ve been really depressed for the last couple of months – but aren’t I always?’
‘Yes,’ said Len Mancini.
‘I thought about killing myself and I thought about taking other people with me, but –’
‘What’s new?’ said Mancini.
‘I got some heroin and I considered it but I didn’t do it – I never do.’
‘No,’ said Mancini. ‘You don’t.’
‘There,’ said Anu to Tanya, according to the transcript of the jury trial. ‘Len heard everything. Is that it? Are you going to leave it alone?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tanya. ‘I’m still not satisfied.’
‘What else can I do?’ said Anu. ‘I can’t have this hanging over my whole life.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tanya. ‘I don’t know what to do about it.’
‘This is none of your business anyway,’ said Anu. ‘Just stay out of it. Nothing’s going to happen to Joe. Len loves Joe and I love Joe. We wouldn’t let anyone hurt him. Look – how about I call you tomorrow morning? You think about it and then you let me know.’
Tanya Z— agreed to this, and they hung up. But later that same morning, before she left for work, Tanya phoned Anu Singh once more and said, ‘Okay. I’m going to leave this alone – but just know that if anything does happen to Joe, your friends are now implicated.’
And so this unfortunate young woman Tanya Z—, her resolve ‘to be moral’, as she put it, worn down by frustration – and perhaps by a suspicion that she was making a fool of herself, being uncool – released her terrier grip, hung up the phone and went to work.
But the story had not quite finished with her.
When Tanya got home from work at six-thirty that same day, only a few hours before the events of the fatal Saturday night would begin, Madhavi Rao pulled up outside the Z— family house in Anu’s car and came to the front door, keen to talk.
‘I just wanted to thank you for what you did this morning,’ said Madhavi. ‘Anu has told Joe how depressed she was, and everything is going to get better. I wanted to give you a hug and thank you for it.’
But Tanya was expecting friends over; and anyway she had plainly had a gutful. ‘How can I trust you,’ she said, ‘after all the lies you’ve told me? I’ll give you back your books. I don’t want you to have an excuse for us to have contact again. It’s better that we don’t have anything more to do with each other.’
‘Okay,’ said Madhavi, as she was being hustled out the door, ‘but this doesn’t need to be dinner conversation for you and your friends.’
Who else in this story was bold enough to try to alter its course, to hold up her hand and say, ‘Stop! What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ Tanya Z— came so close to blasting a hole in the force-field around Anu Singh that one can hardly bear to think of the moment when the news reached her that Joe Cinque was dead.
It was awful, too, to read the transcripts of the days of mauling cross-examination she had to face, in both the trials: to see the erosion of her certainty about herself and her memory. Again she was outmanoeuvred by heads cooler and wills tougher than hers. Tanya Z— was an earnest witness, eager to co-operate and to get things exactly right; but she was easily rattled, and defence counsel showed no mercy. Lex Lasry, Madhavi Rao’s QC, yanked her story this way and that, repeatedly asking her whether she was – that word so insulting in a legal context – ‘emotional’. He launched long, convoluted questions and then, when she lost her way, became irritated. He made much of the gaps in time – as long as seven months – that stretched between her bouts of memory of the incidents: she had kept notes for herself, thrown them away, spoken several times to people at the DPP, remembered further details after having given evidence at the committal, and added things to her original statement. Lasry hinted that her shocked, confused and angrily ironic responses to Rao’s early morning reports of the failed suicide attempt were signs of a hard heart and a lack of care. He suggested that she hesitated to go to the police that Saturday morning because, as he put it, she had had ‘three or four drinks the night before, probably looked like some kind of drunk’ and was ‘not dressed up’.
Tanya Z— struggled to clarify this. ‘I hadn’t really slept,’ she said. ‘My eyes were red and I was in a state of shock. I was ruffled up, and I was upset. I wasn’t dressed in a suit or anything, and I thought the way I appeared would contribute to the police not taking
me seriously. They would have asked me whether I’d been drinking. I would have had to say yes. I was all roughed up and I was in a panic.’
But shade had already been cast on her character; she was being made to look trivial and callous.
Anu Singh’s counsel, Mr Pappas, put Tanya Z— through an equally pounding ordeal. He battered away at her about what exactly she had said to Len Mancini during the frustrating four-way Saturday morning phone call, and what precisely she thought Mancini had understood her to be telling him. At one point in Singh’s solo trial, while the distressed and exhausted witness was given a short break, the judge remonstrated mildly with Pappas: ‘I do not propose to stop the cross-examination, Mr Pappas, but I must say, being the jury in this case, I can tell you that I do not see it turning on fine distinctions about the extent of this lady’s anticipation of the depth to which this comment had percolated into Mr Mancini’s brain.’
‘Your Honour,’ replied the chastened Mr Pappas, ‘I will cease bashing my forehead.’
But the forehead being bashed, of course, was Tanya Z—’s.
When a serious charge is laid against a person, a preliminary inquiry called a committal proceeding is held before a magistrate, who decides whether the accused should face trial. Only one side of the case is heard: the evidence that the Crown will rely on. Individual witnesses give their evidence and may be cross-examined, but no findings of guilt or innocence are made. Its purpose is only to test the sufficiency of the evidence against the accused. To read the record of it, specially after one has ploughed through the transcript of the trial proper, is to be flung back into the same story when it was in a much more sprawling, undignified state, before the Crown and defence teams had taken hold of it to smooth away its rough edges and trim off damaging or uncontrollable bits that did not fit their respective ‘case concepts’.