Jessica Vo was 23 when she first discovered she was wanted for murder.
After leaving Peru three months earlier, she saw her photo on a foreign news segment, along with five of her friends, describing them as the faces behind the murder of 45-year-old Lino Rodriguez Vilchez.
It would be the beginning of a four year ordeal, during which the threat of being extradited, and listed as a fugitive under an Interpol red notice, was constantly looming.
It all started in November 2012, when Jessica embarked on a three month trip to the South American nations of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru.
“The trip was a gift from my boyfriend at the time, to celebrate overcoming ovarian cancer,” she tells Mamamia.
Jessica, her boyfriend Hugh, and Hugh’s younger brother Tom met three other Australians — Andrew, Sam and Harrison — on the flight over, and the six became travel buddies for their South American adventure.
When they arrived in Peru in January, they rented a 15th-floor apartment on the Malecon Cisneros — an expensive, popular street that snakes along Lima's scenic coastline. On January 19, just hours into their two-night stay, they heard a loud thud.
It was this thud — the sound of doorman Lino Rodriguez Vilchez hitting the ground after falling to his death — that would place the six Australians in what would later be described as simply "the wrong place at the wrong time."
"We were asked to help in the initial police investigation, which we found to be strange as we were not witnesses," recalls Jessica.