The Coffee Killer

Wayan Mirna Salihin and Jessica Kumala Wongso became friends as students at a design college in Sydney, Australia. By early 2016 both women were back in Indonesia, and Mirna had recently married. On January 6, 2016, they arranged to meet another friend at Olivier, a café inside the Grand Indonesia shopping mall in Central Jakarta.

Jessica arrived well over an hour early. About an hour before the others were due, she ordered and paid for the drinks, then set large gift bags on the table in front of them. Moments after Mirna sipped her Vietnamese iced coffee, she said it tasted awful, and within a minute she had collapsed. She died shortly afterward, at 27. Tests found cyanide in the coffee and in Mirna’s body. Prosecutors relied on café security footage and argued that Jessica had slipped the poison into the glass while the bags blocked the view, although no witness saw it happen.

Jessica denied any part in Mirna’s death. On October 27, 2016, the Central Jakarta District Court convicted her of premeditated murder and sentenced her to 20 years. Her appeals and a first judicial review failed. After sentence reductions, she was released on parole on August 18, 2024, with supervision set to last until 2032. The 2023 Netflix documentary Ice Cold renewed public debate over the evidence, and in August 2025 Indonesia’s Supreme Court turned down her second request for a case review.