Cinque's coffee was laced with rohypnol, a sedative, at a dinner party, after which he was injected with a lethal dose of heroin by his girlfriend Anu Singh, who was a law student at the Australian National University at the time.
During the 1998 trial, one of Singh's friends testified that she had been highly obsessed with her self-image, particularly her body, since 1991 and had briefly taken ipecac after Cinque mentioned it, something she was later angry with him for.
[4] Singh's close friend Madhavi Rao invited acquaintances to two dinner parties in October 1997 and told them that a crime would be committed.
[5] Witness Sanjeeva Tennekoon reported that the first dinner party on 24 October was normal and that Singh and Cinque appeared loving.
[7] The day after the first dinner party, Singh and Rao went to a friend, Len Mancini, and told him they had given Cinque drugs the previous evening.
—Singh, speaking in 2016[20] In her 1999 trial, Singh's defence presented evidence that she was mentally ill and had diminished responsibility, proposing an insanity defense.
[21] The court was told that Singh believed she was dying from a muscle wasting disease, complained of "not being able to feel her head on her body" and was bulimic.
[22] On 23 April Justice Crispin found Singh guilty of manslaughter[23] and the following day sentenced her to ten years' imprisonment with a minimum four-year non-parole period.
[20] She was returned to jail in April 2004 after breaching her parole conditions by smoking marijuana[28] and re-released on 5 August 2004 after challenging her re-imprisonment on a technicality.
[1] She graduated high school in 1990 and moved to Canberra the following year to begin studying a double degree in Economics/Law at the Australian National University.
Singh missed her life in Sydney, engaged in recreational drug use while living in Canberra, and frequently called home to her parents.
[3] Singh's early life was relatively unremarkable, and her father remarked on her as a "happy-go-lucky child" albeit one with some attachment issues,[3] who gradually descended into mental illness in her twenties.
After Singh's break-up with an ex-boyfriend, Simon Walsh, as a result of her brief affair with Cinque, she began to use recreational drugs daily, developed insomnia and would pace the house at night.
[3] Singh completed a master's degree in criminology at Sydney University, having attended classes on day release from Emu Plains Correctional Centre.
It outlines "five major pathways that led [female prisoners] to crime: unstable upbringings, sexual and physical abuse, drug use, economic marginality and, mental illness".
[41] The film, also called Joe Cinque's Consolation, was given a cinematic release on 13 October 2016 to generally positive critical attention.