At the beginning of 1995, Joe Cinque joined his mates for a night out at a club in Newcastle called The Brewery. There he met 22-year-old Anu Singh. She had just completed a Bachelor of Economics at the Australian National University in Canberra and had returned to Newcastle to spend the summer with her family. Anu was born in the Punjab region of India, but had relocated to Australia with her parents when she was two-years-old. Both her mother and father were medical practitioners and Anu was the eldest of their two children. She was well spoken, intelligent, and excelled academically, but was also known to behave questionably at times.

Joe and Anu hit it off and by mid-1996, they entered a long distance relationship while Anu returned to study law at Canberra’s Australian National University, 450 kilometres south of Newcastle.

In September 1996, Joe permanently relocated to Canberra to live with Anu. The couple moved into a semi-detached brick townhouse on the busy, tree-lined thoroughfare of Antill Street in the suburb of Downer, four kilometres from Anu’s university. They had grand plans for their future and opened a joint bank account called “Anu and Joe’s Marriage Account.” In November, Anu finished her studies for the year and the couple spent three weeks in Newcastle, staying with Joe’s parents. Maria Cinque described Anu as the perfect houseguest, but deep down, she had an instinctive feeling that Anu was not right for her son…