Netflix has a new tell-all true crime documentary in the form of “Ice Cold: Murder, Coffee, and Jessica Wongso,” which aims once again to tell the story of one of Indonesia’s most notorious and controversial murder cases.
To those new to the case, we need to go back to January 6, 2016, when 27-year-old Indonesian socialite Wayan Mirna Salihin began convulsing after drinking a Vietnamese iced coffee at the Olivier Cafe, an upscale cafe in the opulent Grand Indonesia shopping mall in Jakarta.
Salihin was rushed to a nearby hospital and died a few hours later.
On January 30, Salihin’s friend, 27-year-old Jessica Kumala Wongso, who had arrived early at the cafe and ordered the infamous drink, was arrested and charged with her murder.
The police alleged that Wongso had poured the powerful poison cyanide into Salihin’s drink, shielding the act from the myriad CCTV cameras in the cafe with carefully placed shopping bags, as revenge after Salihin had suggested that Wongso break up with her Australian boyfriend.
The case of two affluent, attractive young women caught up in a bizarre murder plot, triggered the public imagination and became known as the “Trial of the Century” in Indonesia, eliciting rather inappropriate comparisons to the O.J. Simpson trial in the United States.
At the end of an exhausting trial that lasted for almost five months, Wongso was found guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The fact that, some seven years on, we are still talking about the case, demonstrates its significance as potentially one of the largest mistrials of justice that Indonesia has ever faced.
While the story polarized Indonesia, with supporters forming teams in favor of either Wongso or Salihin, the time that has ensued since the conviction has allowed for a calmer and cooler review of the events that transpired, something that the new Netflix documentary aims to achieve.
One of the main sticking points of the case, given ample air time by Netflix, is whether Salihin was poisoned by cyanide at all – an astonishing question to continue to ask after a woman has been incarcerated for almost a decade for that very crime.
Yet we are reminded that after a partial autopsy taken some 70 minutes after Salihin died, no trace of cyanide was found in her body. Another partial autopsy taken on January 20, after Salihin’s body had been embalmed and prepared for burial, found only slight traces of the poison in her system.
No full autopsy was conducted due to the wishes of Salihin’s family, although the lack of one means that another cause of death was always impossible to rule out. Could Salhihin have suffered a stroke, or a sudden heart attack, or any number of other possible medical disasters that could have killed her immediately?
We will never know.
The Netflix documentary also patiently takes us through the colorful cast of characters involved in the case – some of whom do a better job of making a convincing case for Wongso’s guilt or innocence than others.
Salihin’s father, Edi Darmawan Salihin, is a particularly prominent interviewee, who at several points in the documentary has to be reminded not to brandish the gun he is carrying at the Netflix interviewers, including when they inexplicably visit a shooting range together.
Salihin’s father is a vocal advocate of Wongso’s guilt, as is her twin sister, although neither can clearly articulate exactly why other than the fact that Wongso was jealous of Salihin, who had recently married, and didn’t seem appropriately grief stricken at her sudden death.
Otto Hasibuan, one of Indonesia’s most famous lawyers, and Wongso’s legal counsel, perhaps comes across as one of the more sympathetic interviewees. He appears genuinely upset about the outcome of the case and convinced of Wongso’s innocence, and hints openly that the trial was rigged from the start, while admitting that he lacks the evidence to substantiate this claim.
With no direct evidence linking Wongso to the murder, her trial became, as they so often do, a face-off between various expert witnesses, some of whom tried to reason with the judges and demonstrate that the cause of death could not have been cyanide poisoning.
The prosecution meanwhile brought in their own witnesses to speak to Wongso’s perceived odd behavior following the murder and purported mental health issues, which do not a murderer make but which appeared to have held sway in both the court of public opinion and the actual court during the trial.
Like so many women before her, Wongso was portrayed as jealous, crazed, and obsessive, and eclipsed by her more beautiful and successful friend – all of which apparently prompted her to somehow procure a vial of cyanide and murder Salihin in a public place in broad daylight.
In the Netflix documentary, the prosecution team comes across as stoic, defensive, and proud of their efforts to secure Wongso’s conviction, although they do not mention that the prosecutor’s office asked, on four occasions, for more evidence to be submitted before it pressed ahead with the premeditated murder charges.
They also appear pleased with their tactics to weaken the defense’s case, including having one of the expert witnesses deported back to Australia for an immigration violation when he gave evidence in court.
The Netflix documentary is also noticeably absent of Wongso’s voice, as the interviewers tried on a number of occasions and ultimately failed to interview her in prison – a right afforded to many other high-profile detainees, including convicted terrorists, and the refusal of which no one is able to explain.
Despite everyone’s best efforts, and at the end of the almost 90-minute documentary, many issues around the case continue to hang in the air, and it is impossible to get past the lack of a full autopsy and therefore the questionable cause of Salihin’s death.
Seven years after Wongso’s conviction, and even with the renewed interest in her case, the question that no one seems able to answer still remains.
Was a murder even committed?