Jessica Wongso, the woman I wrote about in True Crime Case Histories — Volume 3 who was convicted of poisoning her friend Mirna Salihin with a cyanide-laced Vietnamese iced coffee at a Jakarta café in 2016, walked out of Pondok Bambu Women’s Prison on August 18, 2024 — a free woman, at least physically. She had served roughly eight years of her twenty-year sentence.

The Indonesian Justice Ministry granted her parole based on “good behavior,” citing a total of 59 months — nearly five years — of accumulated sentence reductions. Smiling and waving to reporters as she climbed into a waiting car, her first words to the assembled press were that she was “hungry and craving some sushi and fresh drinks.” Her own celebrity attorney, Otto Hasibuan, admitted he was caught off guard by the sudden release. Jessica will remain under parole supervision until March 27, 2032.

A lot of what made her release possible — both legally and in the court of public opinion — traces back to the 2023 Netflix documentary Ice Cold: Murder, Coffee and Jessica Wongso, which dropped in September of that year and quickly became one of the most talked-about films in Indonesia. The documentary cast doubt on the conviction, highlighted the chaotic media circus around the trial, raised questions about the autopsy (which Mirna’s family had limited for religious reasons), and suggested the Indonesian justice system had used Jessica as a convenient scapegoat. Indonesians split into camps almost overnight, and a wave of online sentiment shifted toward the idea that Jessica had been railroaded.

Jessica has used that renewed attention. In October 2024, just two months after her release, she filed a second judicial review with the Supreme Court — her legal team claimed to have “new CCTV footage” from the Olivier Café that allegedly showed the original courtroom evidence had been misleading. She has continued to maintain her innocence at every opportunity. Her lawyer told reporters that even though Jessica was now physically free, she still wanted to use the appeal to prove she never committed the crime.

That appeal didn’t go anywhere. On August 14, 2025, the Indonesian Supreme Court rejected her second judicial review. It was the same outcome as her first review back in 2018. The conviction stands.

So where does that leave things? Jessica Wongso is out of prison, twelve years early, but she is still — legally and officially — the woman who poisoned Mirna Salihin. She’s also become something rarer in the years since the trial: a true-crime celebrity, a Netflix subject, and a kind of Rorschach test for what people believe about Indonesia’s judicial system. For Mirna’s family, particularly her father Edi Darmawan Salihin — who has been the most vocal voice for her conviction since day one — the early release was a gut punch.

Whether you came away from the original story convinced of her guilt or with lingering questions, one thing is hard to dispute: Mirna Salihin has been dead for nearly a decade, and the woman convicted of killing her is now ordering sushi.