In 1997, a young woman named Anu Singh murdered her boyfriend Joe. Her friends and acquaintances knew she was planning the murder and helped her procure the drugs she used to subdue and poison her victim. The murder took several attempts. Singh would drug Joe with Rohypnol and try to inject him with a lethal dose of heroin. It took days for him to die as she sat and watched him and brought friends to observe Joe's agony. No motive was ever uncovered for the murder aside from Anu Singh's desire to feel important and flatter her narcissism by controlling another human being in the most inescapable way.
Singh and her friends were law school students from well-to-do families. They were fanatical believers in freedom and choice, which is why none of them did anything to thwart Singh's choice to murder her boyfriend.
Singh was arrested, tried, and served 4 years in jail for the murder. It was a strange jail where male and female inmates were allowed to socialize, so Singh - known to be very promiscuous - found several boyfriends during the pre-trial stage. When she was released, she went to continue her complex personal life at her parents' lavish house.
Her female accomplice in the murder who procured the lethal drugs and stuck around to observe Joe's agony didn't serve a day in jail.
Helen Garner writes about this terrible story in a way that turns a true crime story into something much bigger. She sees similarities between Singh's sexual, emotional and verbal incontinence and her drug-addled carelessness and Garner's own lifestyle 20 years earlier. The horror unleashed by Singh and the utter indifference of the legal system and the people around her grips you even 30 years later. Garner doesn't want to cause additional pain to Joe's parents with whom she developed a profound relationship while working on the book but the young man's dysfunction that leads him into a relationship with the abusive, immoral Singh is clear to anybody willing to notice it.
I'll be reading more by Helen Garner in the new year for sure because this is a talented writer with a strong point of view and a brilliant writing style.
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