'Iced coffee killer' smiled as best pal drank cyanide and died in brutal death
Jessica Kumala Wongso was dubbed the 'smiling iced coffee killer' after she handed her pal Wayan Mirna Salihin a drink in a cafe before watching her take one sip and die within an hour. Chilling CCTV footage had shown the pair laughing and joking before they sat down in the glitzy eaterie, with Wongso buying the drinks.
The jealous friend secretly added cyanide to her friend's iced Vietnamese coffee, causing her to cry out: 'It tastes bad' before she started convulsing in front of fellow patrons of the busy cafe. Just 27-year-old, the socialite was rushed to a nearby hospital where she was pronounced dead less than an hour later.
Indonesian investigators went onto claim Wongso had been jealous of her pal for getting married. And while she pleaded innocent at her trial in 2016, she was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
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Back in January 2016, footage showed Wongso, 27, arriving at the Olivier cafe an hour before her victim, also 27, and a third friend. The murderer ordered an iced coffee for Wayan before carefully placing three shopping bags around her drink and shuffling them around, in order to block cameras from seeing her next move.
Wayan, who had become friends with Wongso at a design college in Sydney, Australia, went onto arrive and taste her drink, before collapsing into convulsions and foaming at the mouth. She died within an hour, before she had reached hospital.
The coffee was later found to have been tainted with a massive dose of deadly cyanide. "This deed was vile and sadistic, committed against her own friend," said the chief judge at the murder trial, which heard of Wongso's jealousy after her friend got married.
Wongso was released from prison last year, after serving eight years of her 20-year sentence. She continues to protest her innocence, recently explaining away placing three shopping bags on the table to an Australian journalist.
"Oh, it's just me being me," she told Liam Bartlett from 7NEWS Spotlight. "I just put it there and it's like shuffle and play with it. It's just me being bored, it really doesn't mean anything at all."
The murderer went onto claim she was never close to Wayan. "We came from the same country," she said. "We weren't best friends or anything. After graduation she went back to Indonesia for good and I stayed in Australia."
Chilling, Wongso spoke of seeing her friend die when she took a sip from her deadly drink. "She was saying something like: 'It tastes really weird and stuff' and after that she got really sick," she said. "That's pretty much all I can remember."
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