A bit later, we heard a noise at the main door and were shocked to see that the guards had returned to unlock us. All the girls excitedly blew trumpets, set up a tape player in the sewing room and danced wildly. I did my usual, I watched. But it was good to be outside. I desperately missed standing underneath the night sky, looking up at the twinkling stars. This night the stars and moon were hidden behind clouds, but it was a beautiful feeling when raindrops started splashing on my skin and hair in the dark. By 9 p.m., we were back in our cages, and as I looked through the bars at the rain still falling, I realised how much I’d come to appreciate the preciousness of life . . . any life.
The next day, I decided to treat myself to a long shower and told all the girls to do what they needed to do in the shower room first. It was a self-indulgent half hour: washing my hair, putting a treatment in, shaving my legs and using a chocolate-ginger-coconut body scrub. As I was ladling water over myself to wash it off, I focused on the spit on the floor. It was disgusting. It was nothing new, but I’d never get used to it. I held my heart and told myself: Not too much longer, Pelle, and you’ll be having a real shower. This year will be better, it will be!
‘The darkest hour is just before the dawn. Schapelle, that hour is now.’ I contemplated those words when someone wrote them to me. It was a good sentiment, but was this really the darkest time that I would experience on this awful journey? Or was there still more to come?
I didn’t have to wait long to find out the answer.
19
No Dawn
SCHAPELLED: TO BE SCREWED – BRUTALLY. URBAN ONLINE DICTIONARY OF SLANG
Police have seized photographs of Schapelle Corby with a man who has just been charged with marijuana smuggling. The alleged drug dealer is pictured alone with Corby in some photographs and with Corby and another couple in others. They were found during a recent police search of the alleged dealer’s home in South Australia. He was the target of a joint SA–Queensland police operation into a hydroponic marijuana smuggling ring allegedly operating between two states.
The photographs were taken before Corby was charged in October last year with importing 4.1 kg of marijuana into Bali in her body board bag . . . The chance discovery of the photos comes as Corby, 28, is preparing to appeal against her drug smuggling conviction and sentence . . . Balinese prosecutors are expected to seek access to the photographs seized by police in SA. They will want them to try to cast doubt on claims by Corby in her trial that she had no connection with drugs or drug dealers.
Herald Sun, 10 December 2005
When Merc came in stressed and upset to tell me about this story, I was almost blasé. I shrugged it off; I was tired of the lies that I could do nothing about from in here. Being cut off from the outside world made me lose my reality compass. I didn’t fully understand how bad it was. I had no idea who was in the shots or when or where they were taken, but I knew I’d never knowingly been involved with any drug dealers.
Merc was asking me if I could remember ever being photographed with a guy in his forties, as a couple.
‘I’d never go out with a guy that old, Merc!’ I was more pissed off with this implication than anything else.
But poor Mum and Merc had a true perspective of the damage it was causing me as people across Australia read the Saturday-morning headlines. They both knew that public opinion was now in the balance – 90 per cent of Australians were no longer so sure of my innocence, no longer swept up in the hysteria of my trial, but more calmly asking, did she or didn’t she? Is Schapelle a drug dealer or a very unlucky traveller? People were seesawing, ready to be tipped either way. Then bang . . . a smoking gun, photographic proof of a drug past.
The Melbourne journalist who wrote the story had a red-hot scoop – even if the story was all wrong.
It made me look like a liar and a drug smuggler. But it was worse . . . much worse. It was an extremely crucial and sensitive time for me. I was in the middle of my last appeal when these headlines were splashed in newspapers right across Indonesia. The prosecutors were instantly clamouring for copies of the photos to use against me – as proof they’d been right all along. The Indonesian courts could still give me the death sentence.
My mum was beside herself, turning into a protective lioness, fighting to find the truth and protect her baby from this deadly journalistic beat-up. She and Merc started scrambling for answers, but as it was the weekend, they didn’t have much luck. They didn’t sleep; they spent every single hour of that stressful week end twisting their brains, trying to work out where those photos could possibly have been taken. They were dreaming up theories: maybe I’d been unwittingly snapped in the background of a restaurantor party, or maybe they were digitally mocked-up fakes.
Then, on Monday morning, Mum rang the journalist, quickly uncovering disturbing news.
First, he revealed that she was also in the photographs. Mumasked what she was wearing – hopeful it would be a clue to finding out when and where they were taken. But the reporter was hedging. ‘You look like you’re going out to dinner.’ She was baffled: ‘I don’t go out for dinner! What am I wearing?’ He couldn’t say. He didn’t know. He dropped his bombshell. He hadn’t actually seen the photos. It took a split second for Mum to absorb what she’d heard. Then she lost it.
‘How dare you! How dare you write this about my girl, when you haven’t even seen the photos?’
He promised to ‘fix’ it if he was wrong. But his story had already hit its mark. People believe what they read, they remember the bad stuff. How can you fix it? How do you undo a front-page story? Surely he should have checked his facts before it went to print, before he hurt me and my family.
Mum was fuming. ‘You’re bloody wrong!’ She hung up in disgust.
Her next call was to the South Australian Police. She spoke to a senior policeman on the investigation, who admitted that he’d been warned by his superiors to say nothing. Mum was desperate, hurting badly. She wouldn’t let him hang up. He didn’t. He had a heart. He also knew the truth . . . he knew that the story was all wrong. He didn’t want to lose his job, but he did want to help, so he spoke cryptically. ‘You’ll know where the photos were taken the instant you see them.’ Then it was like a game of verbal charades: he gave her clues, she put it together. It was her best chance yet of unravelling the truth.
‘There are other people in the shots,’ he hinted.
‘Who are the other people?’
‘Friends.’
‘Schapelle doesn’t have forty-year-old friends.’
‘They were your friends. You took them into the jail to see Schapelle . . . That’s all I’m saying.’
It was her first major break. The photos were taken in Kerobokan Prison after my arrest.
‘My friends don’t go to Bali!’
‘But you used to drink at a bar . . .’
Mum nearly dropped the phone. She’d just solved it. She started shaking and called out to Greg downstairs, ‘I did it, I took them there!’ She was devastated. ‘It’s my fault!’ she cried. She’d hurt her baby.
The policeman was still on the line. She spoke to him again.
‘I know who you mean . . . I met them at a bar . . .’
She couldn’t think of its name. The policeman prompted her: ‘The Secret Garden.’
‘Yes!’ Mum clearly recalled two men from Adelaide whom she’d met at a bar and brought in to see me. She so rarely brought anyone in, knowing I usually hated it. But she remembered one of them telling her his granddaughter had followed my case and that the other man was a postman.
Mum was distraught. She hung up. Game over.
Mum stood in her kitchen and broke down sobbing, bent over and gasping for breath. She doesn’t usually cry, but she couldn’t stop. My beautiful mum was hurting so much, shaking so fiercely that she couldn’t even call Merc, who she knew was also deeply distressed. She couldn’t believe how a journalist could get it so wrong.
When she’d calmed down a bit, she phoned the journali
st, yelling, ‘Look what you’ve done, look what you’ve done!’ She told him the photos were taken in Kerobokan Prison. He sounded shocked. She hung up.
Anyone who’d seen the photographs knew where they were taken. Maybe the journalist had been played, used as a patsy to smear my name with lies he’d been given. Whoever had leaked him his scoop had to have known they were not taken before my arrest – it was impossible not to know that if you’d sighted the photos. In one of the pictures, Mum and Greg and the two Adelaide men were standing right outside the front doors of Kerobokan. In another they were holding ‘Free Schapelle’ stubby holders and most of the packet was of shots taken all around Bali.
But this reporter blindly wrote a story that made me look like I had a drug past, without even eyeballing the evidence he was using against me. His entire story hinged on photos he had not seen, but his bullshit would be read and accepted as fact by hundreds of thousands of people, millions once it hit radio and TV and the Indonesian media. The only reason this was a red-hot story was because it had supposedly shown I’d been involved with drugs before Bali. The true facts didn’t add up to a story at all.
Making a front-page story using evidence he hadn’t seen was a gamble for this journalist but obviously worth the risk to him. For me, it wasn’t just a flutter, it was Russian roulette. This blatantly false story could be the bullet the prosecutors needed to finally get me life or even the death penalty.
The journalist clearly knew the potentially lethal repercussions of his ‘scoop’, writing this in the days following:
The photographs have led to speculation doubting Corby’s claims of innocence after she was arrested in Bali with 4.1 kg of cannabis, and Indonesian prosecutors now want to see them as they try to have her 15-year jail sentence lengthened.
News Ltd, 13 December 2005
Even after we knew the photos were taken in jail, and we knew the police also knew it – as they’d interviewed the alleged drug dealer in the centre of this fiasco well before the story was printed – this reporter kept slinging more mud day after day after day, refusing to admit the photos were taken in jail. My family wanted to strangle him.
Then, after a week of headlines, the story died. We had the photos, indisputable proof the story was wrong. Mum didn’t get the photos from the police – they’d refused to even show them to her, despite her flying to Adelaide to try to clear it all up. The Adelaide postman, who was in the photos but not on drugs charges, felt for us and gave Mum his set of copies. But the damage had been done. This Melbourne reporter did not write a retraction, he did not admit he’d been wrong and certainly didn’t fix it. He wrote a short story with the correct facts . . . which sure didn’t add up to a red-hot front-page scoop.
The Herald Sun revealed a week ago that police in South Australia had seized photos of Corby with a man who was recently charged with marijuana smuggling. The alleged drug dealer is pictured alone with Corby in some photographs. Police initially thought they were taken before Corby was charged in October last year with importing 4.1 kg of marijuana in Bali.
Herald Sun, 17 December 2005
He’d lost his little gamble but clearly didn’t want to make too much noise about it.
He was also onto a new story, busy packing his bags to go on a trip to the Solomon Islands a few days later with my nemesis, police boss Mick Keelty. So who was his source? Who’d leaked these lies? It must have been a trusted informant for the newspaper’s editors to run a story based on hearsay. We’d been told by the good-hearted SA cop that it was not leaked by the South Australian Police, which was believable, given it went to a Victorian reporter.
We were not the only ones speculating that Mick Keelty was his source. The police boss was under journalistic fire about it, his denials making headlines. But, as usual, he couldn’t help slinging more mud, adding weight to the story, twisting the knife. Despite admitting he’d seen the photos, he told the media on 12 December: ‘If any evidence existed about Schapelle Corby, there was always a risk that it would come to light eventually.’
Five weeks later I learnt my appeal had failed. My sentence was reinstated to twenty years. It was brutal.
It blew out the small flame of hope that had kept me sane. It was the first time that I really lost all hope of ever being freed. I spiralled into a deep black depression. I will never know what impact that story had on the judges’ decision, but my lawyers believed it did hurt me. It also helped the mud to stick when two more stories broke in quick succession. I felt battered.
My brother James was arrested for breaking into the house of a drug dealer, stealing money and marijuana, which he’d taken home and stashed in Mum’s coffee jar. I got this bad news the same day as the news of my reinstatement. It was devastating. I have no idea why James committed this crime. But I do know he had nothing to do with the marijuana in my bag, because I saw inside it before checking in, and James didn’t go anywhere near it.
But James gave the police a perfect chance to attack us again. Without a shred of evidence linking him to the marijuana in my bag, a senior Queensland policeman stated in an affidavit given to the court that there was a link. This same policeman had marched James in front of all the cameras outside court, rather than taking him through a more discreet entrance with the other two defendants.
He (Mr Kisina) is suspected of some involvement in the exportation of cannabis for which his sister has received a 20-year imprisonment sentence, the affidavit says.
The Australian, 21 January 2006
A few days later the senior policeman was made to retract his words:
Queensland police admitted yesterday they did not have evidence to support allegations that Schapelle Corby’s half brother was involved in the Bali drug run that put her in jail.
The Australian, 24 January 2006
But he’d already inflamed the story, increased the damage caused by James himself, undoubtedly confirming what many people were already thinking. But no more claims about a link between James’s crime and my arrest have ever been made – because it simply doesn’t exist.
About ten days later, my family was headline news again. It was more lies and more hack journalism, but this time the source was no secret – it was the Australian Federal Police. The ABC’s 7.30 Report ran a story about my dad’s former neighbour being charged with ‘running a sophisticated, commercial marijuana operation just one month before Schapelle Corby’s fateful trip to Bali’.
None of us had seen Dad’s old neighbour Tony for more than a year before I went to Bali. We all knew Tony and his girlfriend but had no idea he grew marijuana. Central to this story was that my lawyers had rejected an offer by the AFP to DNA-test the marijuana from my bag. Therefore, no comparison between it and Tony’s marijuana could be made. Friends told me that even morning chat-show hosts were talking about how I’d refused to allow testing of the marijuana, which could have proved it was from Tony’s place.
The Australian Federal Police have told the ABC’s investigative unit that when the AFP offered to forensically test Schapelle Corby’s boogie-board bag and its contents, her lawyers rejected the offer.
7.30 Report, 30 January 2006
We’d seen a lot of untruth reported, but this was the trusted ABC. It had it blatantly wrong. The request for assistance to test the marijuana had been my request, as legally it was my decision to make. I’d given my consent to the Australian consul back on 3 December 2004. Vasu had also been pushing hard for the tests. It wasn’t shades of grey, it was black and white. The ABC was wrong: wrong to trust the AFP and wrong not to independently check its facts.
There were press reports stating that we were pushing for DNA testing, and even the AFP had issued a press release of its own stating that the Bali police had refused its help to test the marijuana: ‘The head of the Bali Police wrote back in January2005, stating the AFP assistance was not required.’ Also, if we’d refused an offer to test the marijuana, it would have made major headline news – no doubt about that whatsoever.
But in an interview the day after the ABC story, Mr Keelty unbelievably repeated the lies, sticking the knife in yet again.
‘I think the reality was if it was tested, and the tests didn’t come out with what the defence counsel expected, then it may assist the prosecution and not the defence,’ AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty said today.
The Australian, 31 January 2006
My family and I believed Mr Keelty was running a media campaign against me. My case had caused him major headache, turning airport crime into news that people were suddenly hungry to read. It had opened a can of worms, and the AFP was trying to screw the lid back on. In the process, they had to discredit me to try to calm public fears about our airports. I felt they wanted to turn people against me, make them believe I was just a low life drug smuggler who got lucky getting my big bag of dope through their airports.
Right throughout my trial, Mr Keelty undermined my defenceat every turn. I was fighting for my life, in a foreign country with the death penalty lurking. I just wanted him to shut up. It would have been contempt of court anywhere else, surely. It seemed unfathomable to me and my family that the boss of the Australian Federal Police could make such damaging and prejudicial comments while I was before the courts. But that is what he did.
He started his attacks on me as soon as John Ford went public with a plausible explanation of how the dope got into my bag – baggage handlers. It put the fear of God into people who used airlines, and Mr Keelty knew he was sitting on the explosive cocaine news and a world of airport crime. The day Merc and Lily told me the news of Mr Ford, Commissioner Keelty was already publicly ridiculing him and his evidence, before the police had even interviewed this man.
‘At best it’s hearsay on hearsay . . . To actually transfer drugs from one part of the country to another, from state to state, and end up overseas, is a big leap. Then to connect to a person coming off a plane, it’s very wild. There are a lot of things to have gone wrong for that to have happened like that.
No More Tomorrows Page 28