No More Tomorrows

by Corby, Schapelle

  Diary entry, 26 October 2004

  I knew I had to stay strong and adapt as best I could to living in a little cell – for a while at least. I had no choice, so I might as well try to make the best of it. I survived by refusing to let myself go, working hard to keep my spirits up, keeping the positive energies flowing, exercising, reading, writing and keeping my mind occupied as much as possible. I wanted to remain the healthiest I could, because I knew my life depended on it.

  I am determined to keep mind, body and soul healthy. I don’t know how long I’ll be waiting for my day in court but I will not cause more anxiety, stress and pain to the people who love me and are doing everything they can to help me. I will never be able to repay or thank them enough, so I’ll start with respect. RESPECT.

  Diary entry, 4 November 2004

  I got down on my knees and scrubbed clean the filthy toilet. I did some exercises. I finally managed to eat, and I spent days reading positive affirmations and escaping into good books. I’d probably only ever finished a couple of books in my whole life; now I was getting through one a day. I also started teaching myself some Indonesian words from a dictionary that Lily had given to me.

  Occasionally, there were light moments in the long dark hours, and I always tried to squeeze the most out of them. I began to see washing my hair as a treat, saving it up to spoil myself. It had taken a while to get used to washing in cold water with a bucket and scoop, but when I did I would feel 100 per cent after washing my hair.

  The guys in the cell behind mine often helped to lift my spirits. When they heard me cry, they’d sing to me. We’d talk and sing to each other through the walls. I was even teaching one of them a bit of Japanese. If they heard me crying, they’d yell out: ‘Corby, you OK, Corby? You want a cup of tea, Corby?’

  They were always looking after me, making sure I was all right. Most days when they were released into the communal area outside my cell for five minutes, they’d stand at my cell door talking to me and laughing. It was so good to have human contact, and we’d pretty much laugh for the whole five minutes. If a nasty guard was on duty, however, they were not allowed to talk to me, and I’d be told to sit out of sight in the far corner of my cell. The rare times when I was also allowed out made me feel so happy – almost like one step closer to freedom.

  Many of the guys didn’t get outside help from family like I did, so I used to share the food and drinks that my family and friends brought in for me. The guys thought it was like Valentine’s Day when I returned from a visit one day with a gigantic melted Toblerone. Everyone grabbed a spoon and we ate the lot.

  I saw a bit of Chris Currall because he used to get severe claustrophobia and was regularly allowed out to the communal area. He’d sit near my cell with a cup of tea and a cigarette, each time looking thinner and sicker. I felt bad, as I wasn’t allowed to give him anything. In the first few days, Merc brought him food and eye drops, but the lawyers told us to stop, as the police might try to implicate us in a drug syndicate.

  Though we were never allowed outside for exercise, the police organised a little Polda PR one day to make it look like we were. After being told to put on our dark-blue Polda T-shirts and shorts, we were hauled out of our cells and made to stand in a line and strike three poses for photos: 1. hands together above our head to look like the end of a star jump; 2. hands straight out to the sides to look like the start of a star jump; and 3. down on the ground as if we were doing a push-up. As soon as the three pictures were taken, we were slammed back into our cells. The guys called them ‘the bullshit shots’. It was quite amazing.

  I stole some moments of joy late one night when I was released with one of the guys to drain water from outside my cell during heavy rains. Our cells were inches away from being flooded. I grabbed my shower bucket and started scooping up water and throwing it through the cage bars where the guards usually sat.

  Within seconds I was soaking wet. It was such a great feeling, as I love the rain and it had been so long since I’d felt it. All the guys in the back cell were watching me and laughing. They thought I was crazy, as I’m sure they’d never seen a girl standing in the rain before. They were going wild, like it was show time at a boys’ high school. We were all laughing hysterically, especially when a guard came around the corner at the exact moment I threw a bucket of water out. He was soaking wet. Whoops!

  He looked at me, shocked for a second, and then started laughing, too.

  Very early one morning, a guard came and unlocked my cell door. I warily jumped up and stood in the middle of my cell, confused, wondering what he wanted. I let out a wary ‘Hello’. Then he said, ‘Come, come look at the sky.’ He was pointing to the cage door that led to the outside world. I jumped at the chance and dashed over with a huge smile on my face.

  It gave me such a calm feeling to look up at the vast blue sky. How nice of the guard to offer me this. It was beautiful.

  As I walked back to my cell, tears were streaming down my face. I hadn’t seen the stars and moon for so long, but it was amazing to see the early-morning sky. Little things became so precious.

  The pain of my situation never went away, though, no matter how hard I fought. Living with fear, hurt, anger and devastation, along with my physical aches and pains, became as natural as breathing.

  How could this be happening? I don’t know what’s my real reality.

  I have this painfully sick numbness in me, though I think I’m in a daze, I don’t really know.

  Diary entry, 30 October 2004

  Most of the guards weren’t nice, they were creeps who enjoyed making life harder: laughing at me, refusing me visits, mocking me and taunting me. They’d do little things to upset me: for instance, a guard once opened a bag of food Merc had brought me, knowing ants would quickly ruin it. After a few minutes, he gave me a cheesy smile, singing out, ‘Angry Corby!’

  I couldn’t help exploding ‘YES!’ as I stared back at this pathetic little man.

  He spent the rest of the day saying ‘Yes! Yes!’ in a voice mimicking mine. I just had to sit there and take it.

  Another time, I stood at the cage door trying to catch a slight breeze when one of the guards started screaming out, ‘Tidur, tidur!’ (Sleep, sleep!), flinging his arms wildly to tell me to ‘move over to your corner’ like I was some kind of animal he had locked up. That sort of thing happened all the time. They were horrible, spiteful creeps who enjoyed abusing their little bit of power.

  Sometimes they’d unlock my cell in the middle of the night, come in and just stand there looking at me. I always pretended to be asleep, but it terrified me, because if they tried something, the guys were locked up in the cell behind, so there was no one to help me.

  The creepy guards also made me paranoid about using the toilet. Because the bottom of the cell door was quite high off the ground, I’d hold up a sarong just in case the sleazy guards bent down to watch.

  I hit a low point when I was told the disturbing news that Amrozi, the Smiling Assassin, had lived in the same cell as me for five months. I felt sick knowing that I was using the exact same hand-held bucket to shower that he did and sleeping in the exact same spot. What had my life come to? One of Merc’s best friends had lost her husband to his bombs, which exploded in two busy nightclubs in Kuta. His bombs killed 202 innocent people. I scrubbed everything in the bathroom because I didn’t want to touch anything that monster had touched. And I changed my sleeping position.

  It was such an eerie, horrible feeling to know the terrorist had been in the cell, and I felt like he still had a presence; I suppose he did: his DNA was on the wall. ‘Cobra’ was written on the wall in what looked like human shit – the guards told me that he’d written it. I was so haunted by his writing that it had a strange pull on my attention. I would just stare at it, and I started obsessing over what he’d really written it with. It could have been dried mud, but how did he get his hands on mud? I didn’t want to believe it was shit, but in the end I just had to find out, so got up close and
smelt it. It still stank.

  I took out my diary and wrote down every single thing that was written on the walls inside that cell, exactly how it was written, just in case there was a hidden code or secret message from the bombers. I also took photos of the writing.

  Scrawled right next to where I put my head to sleep were the words ‘Sumudra, Freedom fighter’. I pulled up all the carpet, thinking maybe they’d hidden something, a little note, but I couldn’t find anything. If my obsession with the prison-wall graffiti seems a bit strange, I did have a lot of time on my hands!

  After thirty-six days of living in that little Polda cell, I was moved to Kerobokan Prison. I knew by then that there were no ‘Get out of Jail Free’ cards coming my way, no quickly faxed evidence from Australia. But my lawyers were fighting to obtain it, and they had to win. They had to, so I could get back my normal happy life.

  8

  Evidence!

  I OFTEN WONDER WHAT I MUST HAVE DONE IN A PAST LIFE to suddenly become so unlucky in this one. Since ‘Black Friday’, nothing – absolutely nothing – has gone my way.

  None of it made any sense from the start. I spent endless hours lying on my hard cell floor, trying to get my head around it, trying to think of something I’d missed and firing impossible questions at the cell walls: who, when, where, why? Why was the stuff in my bag? Why had my bag handle been cut? Why were the zips done up differently? Why?

  My mind spun wildly with imaginative conspiracy theories, as I tried desperately to make sense of this insanity. But still nothing made sense and no answers bounced back from the dirty yellow walls. I just had to hope that, outside, my lawyers were having more luck.

  I needed them to try to find evidence to back my story, to tell the truth, to counter the dynamite evidence against me, of the drugs being found in my bag. There had to be something, some piece of evidence to indisputably prove that I did not do this. Even if we didn’t find out the whole story – the who, when and where – that didn’t matter as long as we had the crucial bit: that I did not put them in.

  But my luck was running the wrong way.

  From day one, Lily and Vasu struggled to get direct answers to direct questions about possible evidence. ‘Is there a baggage X-ray scan?’ ‘Do you have a recorded weight?’ ‘Is there CCTV footage?’ They were simple questions. Yes or no? But my lawyers just smacked up against a matrix of confusion. Trying to figure out the lines of responsibility was like taking a non-stop ride on the Sea World Corkscrew.

  ‘Sorry, we can’t help. Please call this person – please call that person – call Qantas – call the Airport Authority – call Customs . . . Sorry, that’s carried out by “other agencies”.’

  My lawyers were infuriated that they couldn’t get any answers, and it became obvious that security at Australian airports was definitely not a synchronised, smooth-running, well-oiled machine. We discovered there was not one but many ‘agencies’ involved in airport security, and clearly there was no streamlined approach to either security or the handling of a crisis.

  It was a PR crisis for the airports and the airline because of the one undisputable fact that a whopping 4.2-kilogram bag of marijuana had sailed undetected through not one but two ‘high-security’ Australian airports. And it was already big news by the time these people were scrambling for their non-answers.

  ‘The CCTV vision did exist, but, sorry, it’s been wiped. No, sorry, the CCTV vision never existed, the camera was switched off.’

  ‘The X-ray machine was switched off . . . Oh, in fact, it was switched on, but it only scans for explosives.’

  ‘The images are stored for seven days . . . no, thirty days . . . no, just seventy-two hours.’

  I needed answers fast – very fast – while the evidence might still exist. My life was at stake; I could get shot dead or locked up for twenty years for this. But as I optimistically waited in my cell for answers, everyone back home was scurrying for cover. It took weeks of endless phone calls to ultimately get nowhere, while any evidence just vanished in the Bermuda Triangle of butt-covering and spin-doctoring.

  I know that at least one piece of possibly life-saving evidence went that way. One answer that came too late. It was brutal. Qantas admitted that almost a month after my arrest – a month after we’d first started asking for it – evidence was destroyed. A Qantas lawyer gave us the news in an email nearly two months after my arrest, saying that vision recorded at Brisbane Domestic Airport in October 2004 that might have had shots of me checking in was destroyed about twenty-five days after my arrest.

  Qantas uses digital video recording equipment to record images from the cameras installed at Brisbane Domestic Terminal. Images are stored in these for a limited period before being overwritten. The retention time is typically about one month.

  Unfortunately, during October, the recording equipment at Brisbane had been suffering from an intermittent fault and on or about 2nd November the unit underwent substantial repairs which appear to have resulted in the loss of the data pertaining to the period of interest.

  Qantas email, 1 December 2004

  Unfortunately. This was my life! What the hell was the problem with these people? Aren’t Qantas supposed to help their passengers? Not only had my lawyers been screaming out for this evidence from day one but my mum had driven to Brisbane airport four times, begging to see any videotape from that day. She begged them – begged them – but no one could even tell her whether it existed or not.

  Each time, she got a different story. First it was: ‘Yeah, we have it, but we’re too busy to look through it.’ Too busy? Wasn’t this situation exactly the reason why they had multi-million-dollar visual security? Apart from assisting one of their passengers, it might also have helped them discover how 4.2 kilograms of marijuana had got by their airport security.

  Mum asked if she could look at the tape. ‘I’ll make the time,’ she told them. ‘I’ll look at it – please . . . please!’ But: ‘No, sorry, it’s against the Privacy Act.’ So while I was locked up in my filthy Polda cell like a caged animal, sure that Qantas would be doing everything possible to help me gather evidence, they were too busy to even look at some footage.

  Mum didn’t let it rest. But all of a sudden, she was being told different stories: ‘The tape never existed’; ‘It had existed but it had been wiped.’ This was within the first few weeks, before Qantas officially claimed that it was destroyed. Why was it so hard to get an answer? What were they hiding? My lawyers couldn’t find out whether it existed either. To then be told in that December email that yes, it had really existed but no more, was gut-wrenching. No one from Qantas had even bothered to view the tape.

  We’ll never know what was on it. Maybe it showed the size and shape of my boogie board, or perhaps it just showed me looking happy and relaxed as I checked in. It may or may not have been the killer blow we needed, but now we will never ever know.

  Qantas did send its international security manager to Bali about a week after my arrest, but he simply talked about how the baggage-handling procedures worked. He told Lily that no ‘unauthorised’ people had access to the bags during the time that they were transferred from domestic to international terminals. With what we later found out regarding certain ‘authorised’ airport workers in Sydney, this wasn’t much of an assurance.

  We did eventually get one piece of evidence from Qantas: the total baggage weight of all four bags checked in under my name – sixty-five kilograms. But unfortunately it was not a legal requirement for Qantas to weigh bags individually, and the total weight was useless because of bad police work in Denpasar, where they didn’t bother to search, weigh or keep as evidence the other three bags checked in under my name – those belonging to Katrina and Ally, as well as my suitcase.

  It took weeks of phone calls, emails and fob-offs to find out that my bag was definitely not scanned at Brisbane airport.

  The baggage checked-in under Ms Corby’s name was not X-rayed in Brisbane Domestic Airport when Ms Corby checked-in fo
r the QF 501. At this point in time, the Australian Government does not require X-ray screening of baggage destined for domestic aircraft.

  Qantas email, 1 December 2004

  The full truth on the X-ray issue only came out when my trial was well under way, when we discovered that Brisbane Domestic Airport did not even have an X-ray machine. Maybe this was why it had been so hard to get an answer. It wasn’t exactly a good look in these times of international terrorism. Great for domestic drug traffickers, though!

  Qantas told us that luggage on its flight to Indonesia on 8October had been passed to the Sydney Airport Corporation for screening. ‘Sorry, no images, can’t help’ was the gist of the Corporation’s lawyer’s eventual abrupt response.

  If bags were scanned, how did a 4.2-kilogram bag of marijuana – about the size of a fluffy pillow – get through? What if it had been a bag of anthrax? Would that have sailed through as well? Was it actually ever scanned?

  How dangerously insecure were Australia’s airports? How could a 4.2-kilogram bag of drugs get through two major airports? What became of those millions of taxpayers’ dollars spent on aviation security after the 11 September attacks? Wasn’t it an open invitation to terrorists? ‘Come on Down Under!’

  But I know that the average person watching my story unfold on TV and in the newspapers and magazines was not as scared or captivated by how the drugs slipped through airport security as they were by the idea that I might be innocent. If I really was just a happy girl going on a carefree holiday and ended up facing the death penalty because someone else had put drugs in my bag, that was spine-tinglingly scary. It shook people up. I know, because hundreds of people wrote to tell me, many saying they were now afraid to fly. I guess that’s why the airport bubble-wrap business went boom. If it could happen to me, it could happen to them. And this wasn’t a Nicole Kidman movie; it was real life.