The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  Mick would be free to go, for now, and on the way home he explained to Stacey that most of the offences occurred during the time he’d spent in prison, and were related to drugs, gangs, and weapons — all of which had been to help him survive the tough prison environment.

  The next day, sitting in the messy old-school offices of his country-town solicitors, Mick’s lawyer said to the couple, ‘We need to talk about your criminal history.’

  ‘My history, why?’ replied Mick.

  ‘Well, Michael, it might look bad that you were convicted for rape in 1994,’ the solicitor said.

  Stacey felt herself shut down. He had, of course, told her that he was in jail for murder — had that really even happened?

  The clutter in her mind meant she stopped hearing what was being said in that meeting, though she noticed that, by this stage, Mick looked as if he wanted to grow a shell and crawl into it. Stacey knew the ball was in her court. When they got into the car, she deliberately displayed no emotion, instead leaving him to ‘fear the worst’ as she put on a kind of psychotic calm to keep him on the back foot.

  As she drove off, she waited another sixty seconds and then, in a quiet voice, said:

  ‘So Mick, do you want to explain what the fuck is going on?’

  ‘I can’t talk about it honey, I just can’t. It’s not true. There is a truth in it — but it wasn’t me. It’s a horrible situation, and it’s too traumatic to talk about.’

  And silence fell upon the vehicle for the rest of the trip.

  A week later, and Stacey would find out she was two months pregnant with his child — their second and her fourth.

  A month later, and the court case for the ‘devil hallucination’ attack would go to court. Mick pleaded guilty, though his lawyers argued furiously that the incident was the result of meth psychosis.

  The prosecution’s case, however, offered a different interpretation of events. They argued that Mick had acted with cunning and malice: he had snuck up on the 32-year-old female jogger, and he had punched her in the face and thrown her to the ground. This account was corroborated by two eyewitnesses — witnesses that Mick had also seen at the time.

  And the rope, the Crown argued, was not even tied in a noose — there was no evidence that Mick was trying to hang himself. There was no evidence, for instance, showing that he prepared himself, a tree, or a rope in any way to end his own life. Following the incident, Mick actually tore off his number plates and threw them in the bushes.

  The victim’s impact statement stated that she was now suffering daily headaches from the incident, and had moved interstate to escape the intrusive memories.

  Mick was sentenced to twelve months.

  Stacey was devastated. She knew her sisters would be quietly laughing about it behind her back; she was hormonal from her pregnancy, and largely financially dependent on a man who had been a good provider. Soon she would have four kids to look after, and her mother was only happy to help with her rent as long as Mick was in jail — without him around supporting the family, she worried she would end up homeless.

  Despite the evidence and despite her instincts, Stacey decided she would try to accept Mick’s version of events. She believed that what he really needed help with was his drug addiction; she wanted to do the right thing for her family, and she wanted to make sure she was treating the cause not the after-affect. She was deeply conflicted, though, and refused to let him move back in.

  At the same time, though, she wasn’t quite ready for a divorce. She still wasn’t sure how much Mick was responsible for his crime, and how much it was associated with his crystal-meth use — but she was not willing to take the risk of finding out with her children. Mick moved into a boarding house in Dandenong, and not long after he was released from prison, Stacey would receive another phone call to say that her husband had been apprehended a second time, this time for savagely raping a St Kilda prostitute at knife point. Mick denied the woman’s version of events, but ultimately it was her word that the court believed, and the last most of the extended family and Stacey’s family heard about it was a news story reporting that Mick had been jailed for nine and a half years.

  Although Mick claimed meth was involved in the rape, there was no evidence that Mick was using meth at the time, or at any stage in the lead up to the attack. Any suggestion he was acting because of meth or as a result of meth-induced psychosis was rejected by the court.

  So, it would seem that meth’s reputation can be used by the particularly unscrupulous to attempt to evade responsibility for their crimes. Similarly, it runs the risk of being used by communities to stop them facing up to the more fundamental truths about our long-standing flaws, foibles, and evils.

  Let me explain this further: broadly, I see three ways that a person may use methamphetamine as a way to evade personal responsibility for committing a violent act. First, a person may plead ‘not guilty’ to murder because they were affected by the drug. Second, a person may plan a violent act — and then take the drug — and later use this as an excuse to reduce their charge to manslaughter. And third, a person may lie and say they were on methamphetamine when they committed a violent act, when they actually weren’t. A murderer is often not apprehended at the time of the murder, so blood testing for drugs would not always happen. Given that many people think of meth as a transformative ‘devil’s drug’ that makes good people bad, the risks of it being used to evade responsibility in both a moral and legal sense, as well as a way of explaining violent acts to loved ones, remains a significant issue.

  So while the panic about crystal meth is understandable, rape, violence, and murder are arguably part of the human condition or, at least, of our society. Demonising the drug allows us to fall back on simplistic, lazy thinking — we run the risk of blaming ‘technology’ for what is and has always been a human problem. On the other hand, many researchers in the field believe that many murders wouldn’t have taken place if it were not for the fact that the perpetrators had taken the drug. In the domestic-violence cases, meth combines with a range of other factors, as we have previously discussed: anabolic steroid use, alcohol, the perpetrator’s pre-existing mental-health problems. It makes it very difficult to ascertain what the proportionate response to the drug should be.

  Along with the murders of Nicole Millar and Jazmin-Jean, I looked at eight other cases where one person killed another person while on methamphetamine. I picked these cases at random from an Australian legal-database search. I wanted to see what the circumstances were of these murders, how much of a role meth played, and how the court decided on the convicted person’s culpability for the act.

  Among the eight (10 including Nicole Millar and Jazmin-Jean), I found that none of the perpetrators had committed murder before, but nearly all had prior convictions for violent acts. In four of the cases, the killer (including the killers of Millar and Jazmin-Jean) had been using testosterone as well as meth in the lead up to the murder. In some cases, the killer had no apparent reason to kill the victim, but they did have a complex relationship with the victim. Take for instance, 33-year-old Damien Peters who in 2001 said he killed his former flatmates and lovers, Andre Akai, 50, and Bevan Frost, 57, after contracting HIV from Mr Akai, and ‘suffering years of mental and physical torture’. While Peters’ case was the first ‘murder-meth’ story to make the news — largely because Peters had no history of violence and because he disembowelled his victims and then flushed their organs down the toilet — Peters was actually using a cocktail of drugs, including methadone, testosterone, anti-depressants, and Valium as well as crystal meth at the time of the murders. Peters was sentenced to seventeen years in prison, and the fact that he was withdrawing from methamphetamine and displayed symptoms of ‘battered wife syndrome’ reduced his sentence. However, it is significant that almost all of the other murders were committed by men who had past histories of violence, including kidnapping and assault. In virtua
lly all these cases, meth was considered to be the factor that pushed them over the edge. In one case, 25-year-old Ross Kondaris killed his grandparents after using crystal meth and becoming psychotic; after examination by three psychiatrists, the court found that he had pre-existing schizophrenia, and could not be held responsible for his crime. He was put on an indefinite custodial order in a psychiatric hospital. Indeed, in this latter case — one of many that Victoria Police had jointly announced as ‘32 murders associated with crystal meth’ — crystal meth was actually not considered to a factor in the murder because Kondaris’ psychosis was held to be the result of schizophrenia rather than drug use.

  Questions of fact and responsibility will ultimately be decided on a case-by-case basis in the courts, depending on the evidence and the circumstances surrounding the criminal act. The diversity of circumstances makes creating a strict rule about meth and personal responsibility seemingly impossible.

  At trial, meth use can be argued as either a mitigating or aggravating factor when a person is found guilty. So for instance, the fact that a person has no prior criminal record and came from an abusive home would often mitigate the severity of the sentence. Whereas a person pleading not guilty, and acting in a particularly malicious way to the victim, would be considered aggravating factors that would increase the sentence length. Drugs and alcohol are traditionally put into the category of mitigating circumstances, particularly if it can be shown that during the act the person was either not fully aware of the consequences of their actions, acted on impulse, acted because of psychotic delusion, or had in some way performed an act which the evidence showed they would almost certainly not perform were it not for the drugs and/or alcohol in their system.

  But the courts have (in my opinion very cleverly and appropriately) turned meth’s reputation on its head and used it to increase, not reduce, the accountability of people who commit violent acts while high on meth. So if somebody knew before taking meth that the drug had a tendency to make them more violent, then the fact the person was on meth at the time of murder will increase the sentence not reduce it. The application of this approach played out in the sentencing of Nicole Millar’s killer, David Hopkins.

  In sentencing him to a 30-year minimum term, Justice Betty King, an outspoken and flamboyant judge — known for her bright-red curved reading glasses and her inclination to take on some of Melbourne’s worst figures — told Hopkins:

  I have viewed the CCTV footage of this horrific event. For a period of three minutes and 21 seconds Ms Millar sits on the forecourt of the garage burning from head to toe … Not only have you doused her in petrol and set her on fire, you then take even more horrific action, in that you then prevented any person coming to her assistance or aid … The behaviour is an example of the worst kind of viciousness and sadistic behaviour this court is ever likely to see … Whilst there may be other cases that may also fall into the worst case scenario and possibly even be worse than this it defies my capacity to imagine them. What you did to this woman on this day was unspeakable.

  Exactly how much crystal meth drew this highly unstable man into violence is unclear, but Justice King regarded it as a significant contributing factor:

  I am satisfied that you were not psychotic either on that day of the murder or for the whole of the previous week, be that a drug induced psychosis or otherwise, but I do accept that you were in a drug fuelled rage … Rage — drug fuelled or otherwise — is not an excuse, it is no more than part of an explanation for your behaviour. Like the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, it may go some way towards explaining your behaviour which was inexplicable behaviour towards another human being for whom you supposedly had affection.

  In the New South Wales Supreme Court in the early months of 2013, Sean Lee King’s case turned on his defence team’s argument ‘that as a consequence of smoking crystal methamphetamine (“ice”) and consuming alcohol during the day on which he murdered the deceased, he was not capable of forming any relevant intention’ to kill his ex-girlfriend. The defence team utilised a statement from John Andrew Farrar, a forensic pharmacologist, ‘that the ability of the accused to form an intention to kill the deceased would have been substantially impaired’.

  However, Justice Geoff Bellow, after careful consideration, said that while he accepted that ice increases aggression, and he was satisfied that King was affected by the drug, the fact that King had called 000 after the murder showed he was functioning well enough to realise that his actions would result in murder, and that he had been intending to kill his ex-girlfriend when he started to attack her. And in a ruling consistent with Justice Betty King’s approach eighteen months earlier, Justice Bellow ruled that because Sean Lee King knew that ice made him aggressive that ‘the offender’s intoxication should be regarded as an aggravating factor. It is one which carries with it significant moral culpability for the predictable consequences of the choice that he made to continue taking drugs in the knowledge of their likely effect upon him.’

  At this time, it’s worth revisiting the conclusions of Ira Sommers and Arielle Baskin-Sommers, who in noting the number of people who became violent while using crystal meth, asserted that developmental factors are also important contributors to violence:

  It has been theorized that the best predictor of future violence is a past history of violence. Accordingly, abnormal deviant behaviour in childhood has been found to be a fairly reliable predictor of aggressive behaviour in adulthood. Much of the evidence that links methamphetamine use with violence is based on clinical reports. Unfortunately, clinical reports are replete with methodological problems. They are limited most severely by their inability to control for the non-drug state or trait characteristics of study patients.

  Whether or not crystal meth is in fact the ‘Devil Drug’ — a drug that may both bring out our worst and also produce a new level of human evil — is still very much open for discussion. One should be wary of anything, however, that resembles a definitive conclusion about human evil, our concept of hell, and the world’s most powerful stimulant.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Winter

  IT WAS WINTERTIME in the Valley. The cold had closed in, and seemed to be trapped in that flat landscape, which extended to an ocean whose breeze originates from the Arctic Circle and lingers along the Valley’s hills.

  Smithy would often light a fire in the backyard on winter mornings, and his guests — normally two or three of them, and almost always from the local boarding house — would stand around it in thick winter jackets, looking serious and grim.

  If Beck was over, she would be inside, and she, too, would hover, often moving about the house aimlessly: sometimes making a set of curtains on the sewing machine, at other times moving stuff from one side of the house to the other, or reorganising drawers — all with little quantifiable result at the end. Her face was usually pale and wrinkled, and she often had scabs on her chin.

  Sometimes she’d bring over spare packets of anti-depressants (we took the same ones), and Ventolin, and food. The food was especially welcome, because at that stage, Smithy hadn’t left the house for two months, and wasn’t doing any grocery shopping for the boys.

  Sometimes she yelled at me, sometimes I had to push her out the door, sometimes she was banned from Smithy’s for a couple of days. She would often be having a go at either one of us, but never both at once — sometimes she would listen to us from outside, when we didn’t know she was there, and then attack us for saying things she didn’t like. Three or four days later, though, she’d return, and it would never be mentioned again.

  Always unpredictable, Beck’s inner life was, at least from the outside, both a space in which wildly original ideas developed and a conduit for other people’s tastes and desires — by which I mean that she eventually felt these as her own. When I asked her about Smithy masturbating in front of me, she assured me that ‘he doesn’t like you especially, he does this to everyone’
.

  Indeed, Smithy was often sexually obsessed with whoever was around him, and at that time this included — and was mainly — me. When Smithy would masturbate in front of me and ask for details of my sexual fantasies, Beck would rearrange the drawers, or find some other task that kept her in the room, despite how ill at ease she appeared to be. Her look of bewilderment would gradually give way to a frown, a creased forehead, and slumped shoulders. Smithy, in turn, would miss the subtext — (that she kind of wanted to join in, but didn’t; probably wanted to tell him to stop, but couldn’t) — and look at her with deep, wondrous suspicion before concluding, and then asserting: ‘Stop stealing my fucking pot.’

  There we were: taking drugs, living in our imaginations, living out our dreams and nightmares, becoming possessed. My ex-boyfriend Nathaniel haunted me in the years we broke up, whether I was on drugs or not. But on crystal meth I talked about him constantly, I thought about him constantly, I wondered what he might be like now that he was older — twenty-one — I wrote poems about him, songs about him, grieved the mistakes I made, wondered how it might have turned out if we had met a little later.

  One day, when I’d had a dose of crystal meth the night before, and was walking around the kitchen thinking about Nathaniel, a visitor to the house said to me, ‘I’ve been keeping track and you’ve been walking around that bench for seven hours.’

  Two nights later, when I was yet again high, our other roommate walked in the door with his young girlfriend. The more I looked at her, the more I thought about it, the more I believed she looked like Nathaniel — short in stature, slightly androgynous, brown hair, brown eyes, dark skin.

  Later that night, I started thinking this apparent ‘fact’ through again, and it occurred to me that at around the same time Smithy and I had had that fight (the one that ended with him on top of me on the lounge room floor of their old Pakenham house) Nathaniel had also broken up with me. I concluded that they had orchestrated this event, because Smithy didn’t like the way I treated Nathaniel, and he wanted to turn Nathaniel into a transsexual, so that he and his mates could have their way with the new female Nathaniel. Then, over time, I further concluded that Nathaniel was now named Kristie, and had started a relationship with a guy in that group of friends, who also happened to be Smithy’s roommate.