by Helen Garner
Dressed in T-shirts, necklaces, baggy cargo pants and coloured runners, the young male witnesses slouched in and out of the court with their hands thrust deep in their pockets. They shared an odd demeanour – resentful, wry, even defiant, though Justice Crispin was always gently courteous to them, giving them eye-contact and smiling down at them when he spoke to them. They were like sulky children. It was as if no formal demeanour were available to them. One would hardly have been surprised to hear them address the judge by his first name.
‘You’re free to go,’ said Justice Crispin to the one who had answered the Condamine Street phone.
‘Cheers,’ he replied, and shambled off.
Next morning as I came round the corner of the Magistrates’ Court, heading for the Supreme, I saw Mr and Mrs Cinque talking under a shady tree with a man dressed in combat gear. I approached to greet them and realised the man was D-C Harry Hains. We teased him about his macho get-up. He told us cheerfully that he was working with the Water Police while he waited for a transfer to Christmas Island; meanwhile, he had to undertake weapons training.
‘Oooh!’ I said. ‘Which weapons?’
He affected a scowl and recited deadpan, ‘Remington 870P pump action shotgun.’
Mrs Cinque, mother of sons, rocked back on her heels with laughter. ‘You look younger than you are,’ she said to him affectionately.
But once Maria Cinque returned to her post in the courtroom, her face lost its softness and went grim. Things for Madhavi Rao, too, despite the glowing character studies that Mr Lasry had drawn from her friends, now seemed to darken.
Detective Sergeant Gregory Ranse, balding, tanned, in gold-framed glasses, told how he and D-C Hains had taken out a search warrant on Monday 27 October, the day after Joe Cinque’s death; at about eleven o’clock that night they had gone, with six other police officers and a tape recorder, to the house in Condamine Street. They had searched Madhavi Rao’s bedroom, where they found, along with Anu Singh’s torn-up diary, a Rohypnol packet still bearing its prescription label, some apparently used syringe packs, some alcohol swabs, a quantity of printed material, pamphlets about drugs, drug dependency, veins and arteries, and seven foolscap pages, hand-written in pencil, on the subject of Rohypnol.
D-S Ranse came under heavy fire from Lasry’s junior, the clear-voiced Mr Brady, about whether he had properly cautioned Rao and observed all her legal rights during the search of her house that night. Telstra records showed that no one had phoned out from the Condamine Street house after nine p.m., but the detective maintained that he had heard Rao speaking on the phone, and had assumed that she was ‘accessing a legal practitioner’.
At this, Madhavi Rao drew a quick breath of indignation, and swung her head towards the gallery. Her eyebrows went up and her mouth fell open in the expression of someone about to say, ‘Did you hear that?’ The eyes that her glance met were mine. For a second or two we stared each other right in the face. Then she turned back to the action.
‘Are you saying,’ said Mr Brady sarcastically, ‘that a solicitor just happened to ring Ms Rao?’
‘Funny you should say that,’ said the detective. ‘I don’t know. But that does happen – I’ve known it to happen – at the police station. It was a flowing conversation between her and me. Maybe the questions were back to front, but she was the one who kept talking.’
Madhavi Rao pulled an ironic grimace, almost a smile, full of bitterness. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, and her face settled back into its smooth reserve.
A year earlier, when Rao and Singh were being jointly tried before a jury, their friend Len Mancini was called as a witness. What he said had caught both Crown and defence off guard: indeed he had casually thrown a rather large spanner into the works. His evidence suggested that Anu Singh, rather than being driven to kill by her psychiatric condition, had had ‘a rational motive’ for killing Joe Cinque: that late on the Saturday night Joe had told Anu he was going to leave her. This piece of information had been passed to Len Mancini by Rao, who told him she had heard it from Singh herself. At that point Justice Crispin, for complex legal reasons, had decided to dismiss the jury and abort that trial.
Len Mancini, then, was a crucial witness – a close friend of both Rao and Singh, and the repository of a great deal of relevant information. He was also, of course, the man whom the unfortunate, honourable Tanya Z— had thought of as ‘a steady sort of person’, and to whom she had addressed her fruitless plea, on the Saturday morning before Joe Cinque died, for assurance that Joe was not in danger.
In my experience, few men have the emotional stamina to sustain a friendship – as distinct from an affair – with a high-maintenance histrionic like Anu Singh: I was curious to see Mancini. Now, in Rao’s trial, he was to be called again. But first, the Crown called his parents.
Tony Mancini, from Griffith, New South Wales, was a big, broad, slow-talking man with an Australian accent and a farmer’s profound, almost blackish tan. On Sunday 26 October 1997, he said, he and his wife were on their way from Griffith to Sydney, where Mrs Mancini was to have an operation. They travelled via Canberra to stay a night with their son. They got to Len’s place, he said, at about three on the Sunday afternoon, and found him waiting for them, with Madhavi Rao. The young people, ‘very nervous, very upset’, told Len’s parents that the paramedics were at Anu’s house – that ‘Anu had tried to kill Joe.’
Mr Mancini, having met Anu Singh several times in the past, responded to this news with predictable scepticism. He thought it was ‘more of Anu’s melodrama – unbelievable’. But he urged them to phone the Canberra hospitals and check whether anyone by the name of Cinque had been admitted. Madhavi made the calls, and reported that nobody had. She seemed, said Mr Mancini, under pressure, disturbed, agitated.
Mrs Kathy Mancini, an imposing dark-haired woman in a navy blue blazer, jewellery and gold shoes, said that she and her husband had encouraged Madhavi to make a further call, to Joe and Anu’s house. Madhavi dialled the number, listened for a moment without speaking, then hung up abruptly, saying, ‘That was Joe, and he was very angry.’ Mrs Mancini had taken this to mean that Joe was all right.
But a horrible feeling crept through me. Some time after three she made this call? And Joe spoke to her? But hadn’t he been declared dead just before two o’clock? I glanced at Madhavi Rao. Her face was still, and closed.
Mrs Mancini completed her account of their late Sunday lunch. At the table, Madhavi told Len’s parents that Anu had accused her, the night before, of having put drugs in both her drink and Joe’s. She said she’d had a ‘massive fight’ with Anu; Madhavi had really stood up to her, and told her she never wanted to be her friend again. ‘I’m going to see Joe first thing tomorrow morning,’ she declared, to the approval of the assembled Mancinis, ‘and tell him to leave Anu.’
Now Leonardo Mancini himself stepped into the witness stand. What a curly-lipped, heavy-browed, chubby-cheeked, olive-skinned, soft-mannered young man! Madhavi Rao kept her eyes down as he began to speak.
He had met Rao in 1992 and Singh a year later. They were all law students together and he knew the women ‘fairly well’. He had had many conversations with Anu, often in the presence of Madhavi, about her illnesses and grievances. There had been talk of suicide, and of techniques and methods she was contemplating: guns, heroin. Late in September 1997, on his way to a lecture, he ran into the two women ‘wandering around the Law School carpark’. Standing side by side they said to him, ‘Len, we’ve taken heroin.’
Mancini was a guest at the second dinner party, the Friday one. Anu had phoned from Sydney to invite him. No, she hadn’t told him the purpose of the party. He went to Antill Street at eight-thirty on the Friday evening and found there Joe Cinque, whom he already knew, Anu, Madhavi, Tanya Z—, and five or so other people. During the evening he found himself briefly in the kitchen with Anu. He remarked that she seemed ‘bubbly’ and she told him she had taken some Rohypnol. Len left the party with Tanya Z—, dropped
her off at Madhavi’s house, and was home in his own bed by twelve-thirty.
At nine-thirty the next morning, Saturday, he was woken by Anu and Madhavi banging on his door. They came hurrying in all anxious, saying, ‘Len, you’ve got to speak to Tanya.’ Madhavi dialled Tanya’s number and handed him the receiver. As he listened to Tanya’s report, he turned aside from the phone and asked Anu, ‘Did you give Joe sleeping tablets last night?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I did. I gave him three.’
‘Why did you?’
‘She goes, “I wanted Joe to be asleep while I killed myself.” She took the receiver off me several times. She said to Tanya, “My life’s in your hands. Please don’t tell Joe. My relationship will be over. Please, please, please, you can’t tell. You’ll ruin our relationship. I love him.” ’
In the front row of the gallery Nino Cinque lowered his head. Maria Cinque sat bolt upright but her face was wet with tears.
‘I said to Anu, “What are you going to do now?” ’ continued Mancini. ‘She said, “I’m going home to tell Joe.” ’ Mancini took this to mean that she would confess to Joe what she had done, and the whole matter would be resolved.
All this happened on the Saturday morning. At ten-thirty on Saturday night, Anu Singh phoned Mancini. Part of the call was accidentally recorded on his answering machine and the tape had been admitted into evidence at the earlier trials. Having read its contents in the transcripts, I understood why Justice Crispin, in the presence of Mr and Mrs Cinque, did not order it to be played again: Singh tells Mancini she is worried about the sleeping pills she has given Joe the night before; they have kept him asleep till early Saturday evening and are still affecting him. There is some talk about taking him to hospital to get the drug ‘removed from his system’; but then Joe’s voice can be heard on the tape, blurrily murmuring, ‘My mind’s a hundred per cent functional – my body just wants to sleep like crazy! Anu’s worried for nothing!’
An hour or so later, around midnight on the Saturday, Singh called Mancini again. Telstra records show that they spoke for nine minutes. Oddly, Mancini couldn’t remember what they spoke about. Sorry, he couldn’t recall any details – no, not even the thrust of the conversation. But at around noon on the Sunday – at either elevenish or twelvish; he was uncertain because of the switch to daylight saving – Mancini called Rao and said, ‘What’s going on? I got this strange call from Anu last night. Have you heard any developments?’
‘Len,’ said Madhavi, ‘something’s happened. I might come over. I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.’
It was a five-minute walk from Condamine Street to Len’s place, but Madhavi didn’t arrive till thirty or forty minutes later. She came in looking upset and anxious, and told him that the paramedics were at Antill Street. ‘Anu tried to kill Joe last night,’ said Rao. ‘With heroin. She injected him with heroin.’
‘I was in shock,’ Mancini told the court. ‘I was rambling – I was saying “I can’t believe Anu’s actually done this.” ’
Mancini and Rao got it into their heads that they ought to call Anu’s mother and tell her that her daughter had ‘done something very bad’. They were concerned that Anu would get away with it – that she would tell the paramedics Joe had done it to himself. Madhavi picked up the phone, but for some reason, instead of calling Anu’s mother in Sydney, she dialled the Antill Street number.
Anu answered. Madhavi asked, ‘Are the paramedics looking after Joe?’Mancini could not discern actual words, but Anu’s voice came blaring out of the phone. Her screaming intensified when Madhavi told her they were about to call her mother. Madhavi hastily hung up and said to Mancini, ‘Anu’s hysterical. We shouldn’t tell her mother. She told me not to tell anyone.’
‘Was she mad?’ asked Mancini.
‘She sounded really, really angry,’ said Rao.
What if she came over? The last thing the two friends wanted was to have to face a furious Anu Singh. They got into Mancini’s car and went for a drive to South Canberra. As they motored along they marvelled to each other that Anu had had the nerve to try to kill someone. This time, they agreed, she had really gone off the deep end.
Mancini couldn’t understand it. ‘Why did this happen?’ he kept asking Rao. Anu had sounded so remorseful on the phone last night – why had she done this?
Madhavi knew why, and at last she told him. Anu did it, she said, because during the night Joe told her he was going to break up with her. Madhavi knew this because when she got home from the ball at dawn, Anu had called her ‘heaps and heaps and heaps’ of times; and during one of these calls she had also told Madhavi that she had given Joe heroin.
The court was breathlessly still.
‘Eventually,’ Mancini went on, ‘Madhavi told me, hesitantly, that Anu had come and got her from her place at about eight that morning, and taken her back to Antill Street. Madhavi saw Joe. He was lying on his bed. Madhavi said he seemed pale, or blue, but stable. He was breathing.’
Madhavi Rao sat expressionless on her chair. Her face had turned grey.
‘I asked her why she didn’t call an ambulance,’ said Mancini. ‘And she said, “Anu wouldn’t let me.” ’
After lunch at Len’s with the Mancinis, Madhavi went home; but she and Len were on the phone to each other ‘pretty well all afternoon, going “I can’t believe Anu’s done this, I wonder where she is, God, I wonder what Joe’s doing, I wonder if they’ve broken up.” ’ Mancini slept that night on the couch. On Monday morning his parents resumed their drive to Sydney and he went to his classes. On the Monday evening his friend Rachel came over. They saw on the TV news that Anu had killed Joe – that Joe had actually died. A few moments later Madhavi Rao walked in.
‘We were all in shock,’ said Mancini. ‘And Madhavi said, “I think I’m in trouble. If this ever gets to court I’m going to plead duress.” She kept saying, “He seemed stable. He was breathing. He seemed pale – or blue – but he seemed okay.” ’
‘When was the last time you spoke to Madhavi Rao since then?’ asked Mr Golding.
Mancini dropped his eyes. ‘I don’t think I have, actually.’
Outside at the morning tea break, the young women journalists were quieter, much less scornful. Madhavi Rao puzzled them. ‘She comes across as a complete victim,’ said one of them. ‘Anu Singh you can almost understand, but this one’s so passive.’
Len Mancini, citified in his loose, fashionable suit and professional’s haircut, stood about the lobby in the protective circle of his family: his confident-looking parents had been joined by two more large, brown-faced farmers in their thirties, perhaps Len’s brothers, who planted their feet wide and kept their powerful arms folded across their chests.
When Mr Lasry rose to cross-examine him, Len Mancini’s demeanour underwent a certain change. He turned spongy. His voice dropped so low that he had to be asked again and again to speak up. He agreed with Lasry that he had not had a romantic involvement with either Rao or Singh, and that he felt his contact with Singh to be ‘one of life’s liabilities’. He described her as ‘psycho’, and ‘fixated on her own problems’. But soon he began to exhibit a fading of memory that was quite striking. His evidence today, it seemed, differed from the account of events he had given a year ago during the aborted jury trial; but when Lasry pointed out these differences to him, Mancini would turn his mouth down at the corners and shrug, or say in an uninterested voice, ‘Probably.’
What could Mr Lasry do with such a passive, forgetful witness? He tried to refresh Mancini’s memory of his own evidence by reading aloud to him from the transcript of the jury trial, but in vain: the times and contents of certain phone conversations he had had with Madhavi Rao on that deathly Sunday had flown clean out of Mancini’s head. Most vexing to Mr Lasry was that Mancini couldn’t recall Madhavi’s telling him on the phone that, during her eight a.m. visit to Antill Street, she had told Anu Singh to call an ambulance, and that Anu had gone downstairs to do so. No, Mancini couldn’t reme
mber saying that. Nor did he remember Madhavi’s telling him on the phone that Joe’s breathing had been regular; that she had looked at Joe, checked his breathing and put him on to his side before she left the house. Mancini kept shaking his head.
Lasry took him again to the transcript of the first trial: ‘You asked Madhavi why she didn’t ring an ambulance. She said she was going to, that she wanted to, but that Anu said she would ring an ambulance.’
Mancini sat there on the witness stand, vague, slow, stumped. He let a long silence fall. He turned his mouth upside down. ‘Madhavi said,’ he repeated, with a sort of dreamy stubbornness, ‘ “Anu wouldn’t let me.” ’
Lasry pressed and pressed Mancini to confirm that Madhavi Rao had left his house that Sunday afternoon declaring that as soon as she had ‘gathered up the courage’ she would call Joe Cinque and get him away from Antill Street. Once again Mancini’s memory lost precision. He couldn’t seem to make a clear statement on that point.