by Malcolm Knox
The pair spoke again, by phone, at 10.20 pm as Vitale approached Narwee. When Vitale pulled up, Jennings came out of the apartment and got into the car, directing Vitale to a park about 200 metres away. Jennings, who knew the park well, had a backpack slung over his shoulder. Inside the backpack were condoms and lubricant, a length of rope he’d bought at Wool-worths, and a small bottle of amyl nitrate. He also had a serrated 11-centimetre kitchen knife, which he always carried with him on these nocturnal encounters, just in case. He’d never had cause to use it, but he knew that he was sailing close to the wind. The danger was half the attraction.
It was now close to 11 pm, and nobody else was around. Making small talk, the pair entered the bushy reserve and after a few minutes came to a dry creek bed which was crossed by a bridge about one metre wide with metal railings on each side.
As agreed, they stopped at the bridge and Jennings took out his rope. He stood with his back to the railing while Vitale tied his ankles and wrists together, then secured them both to the metal. With Jennings thus immobilised, Vitale performed oral sex on him.
It was now about an hour since he had taken the full load of ecstasy and ice, and Jennings felt their effects overwhelming him. Instead of just feeling horny, he was overloaded. He heard footsteps in the bushes. He looked across and saw a man and a wolf. The wolf told him to be careful, as Vitale was out to get him. Freaking out, Jennings asked Vitale to stop. Vitale carried on.
For a few minutes, Jennings breathed deeply and tried to banish the vision of the man and the wolf in the bushes. He’d had these hallucinations before, since he’d been taking ice. Often it was a black man with a green outline, issuing warnings to him. Jennings would creep up to corners and peer around them, expecting the man to jump out.
Vitale untied Jennings, and they talked for a little while. Jennings calmed down, and they agreed to swap roles. Jennings tied Vitale’s ankles together, then bound his hands behind his, Vitale’s, back. They didn’t say much. Jennings didn’t tie Vitale to the railing, but stood him in the creek bed.
Jennings started performing oral sex on Vitale. Then, according to Jennings, Vitale departed from the script.
‘He was trying to get me, like, grabbing and spinning me and stuff like that,’ Jennings later told police. ‘He was trying to, like, grab me and, like, grabbing my arms and stuff like that.’
It seems that Vitale, whose bindings were only loose, was so sexually aroused that he wanted to have intercourse with Jennings. But the eighteen-year-old, flying on ice and ecstasy, panicked, thinking Vitale was attacking him. He heard the voice of the man and the wolf in the bushes again. They were screaming, ‘I’m going to get you! I’m going to rape you!’ Dizzy and disoriented, Jennings broke away from Vitale. Vitale, who was unaffected by drugs, thought Jennings’s resistance was all part of the sexual play. But Jennings was terrified, convinced that Vitale was not an aroused sexual partner but a homicidal maniac, his worst nightmare. Jennings found his backpack and pulled his knife out. As Vitale closed on him, Jennings swung the knife in a round-armed sweep. There was only one connection: the knife dug eight centimetres into the left-hand side of Vitale’s neck, severing both the left external carotid artery and the left internal jugular vein.
Jennings threw the knife down, picked up his backpack and sprinted back to his unit, passing Vitale’s car along the way. Still ‘freaking out’, as he said, he went inside and logged back onto the internet.
Vitale, meanwhile, was fighting for his life. Blood was gushing out of the neck wound. Partially freeing himself from the ropes on his ankles and wrists, he staggered out of the reserve into a suburban street. He came to the front door of a house and yelled out for help. There was no one in the house, but neighbours heard him and called an ambulance. Within minutes, helpful neighbours, the police and ambulance officers were surrounding Vitale, who had collapsed and fallen unconscious. He died before he reached hospital.
Police had little trouble establishing that it was Trent Jennings who had inflicted the fatal wound upon Giuseppe Vitale. Jennings, it turned out, had stolen a car to drive from Perth to Sydney back in September, and when he was arrested for that in January 2004 he told the story of what had happened between himself and Vitale a few weeks earlier.
At this point, the story was a tragic example of what an ‘overdose’ of ice can do. It isn’t like heroin, where the user will pass out and is no threat to anyone other than himself. With ice, taking too much can lead to symptoms that replicate full-blown paranoid schizophrenia. If a mentally ill person kills someone during an episode of psychotic paranoia, then the mental illness can be a defence against a murder charge.
In court in August 2005, the Trent Jennings case took a significant twist. Before his trial, Jennings was facing a charge of murder. Through his solicitor, he said he would plead not guilty to murder, but would plead guilty to manslaughter if that was the charge. But the Crown declined to downgrade the indictment. Prosecutors wanted to put Jennings away for murder.
If he’d been charged with manslaughter, Jennings’s intoxication could not have been used as a defence. The NSW criminal code has a strange position on this. Intoxication is only a defence in ‘crimes of intent’. As manslaughter means that the perpetrator does not intend to kill the victim, it is not a ‘crime of intent’. So if the Crown had charged Jennings with manslaughter, he would have taken a guilty plea and served a number of years in jail.
Professor Mark Findlay, the director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, notes that the ‘Crimes Act doesn’t discriminate between the sources of intoxication. Many people criticise that because there are such different intoxicants, with such different effects, and they believe the law should take that into account.’
Findlay explains that the High Court authority behind this theory is the case of R v O’Connor:
‘If you couldn’t have the required mental state for intent, you could claim intoxication as a defence. But that’s politically unpalatable, because it might mean you could get as drunk as you like and have a defence against a criminal charge.
‘So in NSW, the crime requires specific intent. Intoxication can only be a defence if it is self-induced and to such an extent that it denies specific intent.
‘But if you’re charged with manslaughter you can’t use [the defence of intoxication], because manslaughter is not a crime of intent. We have the strange situation where if I commit a serious offence I can claim intoxication and get off, but if I’m charged with the lesser offence, I can’t claim intoxication. It’s a ludicrous situation, in that it’s the charge laid against you that determines whether you can use intoxication as a defence.’
With Trent Jennings, the Crown went for the higher-risk charge of murder. In doing so, it opened up the possibility that Jennings could say he was mentally impaired by his intoxication, and thus escape conviction completely.
In his trial, three forensic psychiatrists who had examined him, one for the Crown and two for the defence, agreed that the story he told them about his hallucinations was genuine. Furthermore, Jennings continued to suffer from these hallucinations after he was in jail and was no longer taking ice and ecstasy. The episodes abated when he took anti-psychotic medication. Therefore, the psychiatrists believed that he did suffer from an underlying mental condition.
Legally, this was all-important. Justice David Kirby of the NSW Supreme Court explained the mental illness defence, known as the McNaghten rule:
The McNaghten rule has two limbs. The accused must demonstrate either that he was labouring under such a defect of reason, from a disease of the mind, that he did not know the nature and quality of his act or, alternatively, if he did know, then he did not know that what he was doing was wrong. The first limb, in lay terms, requires that the accused did not know what he was doing, whereas the second deals with his appreciation of the morality of what he was doing, that is, whether it was right or wrong.
One forensic psychiatrist, Dr Bruce Westmore, said Jennings fit
ted within the McNaghten rule:
I believe he was suffering from a defect of reason caused by a disease of the mind which totally deprived him of the capacity to know, again in a moral sense, that what he did was wrong.
He had a psychotic illness which was precipitated or aggravated by illicit drug use.
Another psychiatrist, Dr Michael Giuffrida, agreed:
Mr Jennings was suffering from a psychotic illness at the time of the offence which was characterised by florid auditory and visual hallucinations and the consequent delusional ideas that constituted a disease of mind giving rise to defect of reason such that Mr Jennings did not know that what he was doing was wrong.
Dr Stephen Allnutt, on the other hand, said that Jennings was suffering from a ‘drug-induced psychosis’. The difference, in relation to McNaghten, was that in Dr Allnutt’s view Jennings would have realised that what he was doing was wrong, had he stopped and thought about it.
‘But how,’ counsel asked, ‘can a man who’s having acute delusional beliefs stop and think about them?’
‘Because as I said, they do it every day,’ Dr Allnutt said. ‘They stop and think about all kinds of things.’
Medically, there is no clear line between the two positions. As Allnutt said, his view and the view of Westmore and Giuffrida were ‘all on the same patch’, being different interpretations lying on the single spectrum of psychosis. Legally, however, the difference must be black and white: Jennings was either guilty or not guilty. As in so many cases where imprecise scientific evidence must submit to the binary logic of legal decision-making, the judge had to come down on one side or the other of what was, clearly, a very fine matter of interpretation.
He came down on the side of the accused.
‘I accept that it was probable that Mr Jennings, although understanding what he was doing, was so disabled by disease of the mind, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong,’ Justice Kirby said. ‘I therefore find Mr Jennings not guilty of murder by reason of mental illness.’
The decision resulted in Trent Jennings going to a mental hospital rather than jail, his time inside to be determined by the Mental Health Review Tribunal rather than the terms of a prison sentence. More importantly, it opened up a fresh avenue for defence teams representing future accused who were on ice at the time of their deadly acts. And in the next two years, there would be no shortage of those.
PART THREE
COMING DOWN
2004–2008
By the beginning of 2004, much new knowledge was being accumulated about how ice was used in Australia. While attention was drawn to bizarre and horrific crimes, attacks on paramedics, wild behaviour in hospital emergency rooms, and police busts of meth labs and importation rings, surveys were showing that the vast majority of Australians smoking ice were doing it occasionally, with the purpose of enhancing their weekend party experience.
The Victorian Youth Alcohol and Drug Survey 2003 found that 52 per cent of under-25s had used cannabis at some time in their life, 18.6 per cent had used ecstasy or designer drugs and 16 per cent had used methamphetamine. Meth use was increasing most dramatically, but it’s likely that the figure was understated, as often young party-goers didn’t know what they were taking. At the Enchanted Forest rave at Angaston, South Australia, in December 2003, three hundred people who bought what they thought was ecstasy consented to having their pills tested. A majority contained methamphetamine, and six people at the rave were taken to hospital suffering its effects.
The Australian Drug Foundation reported that 60 per cent of Melbourne clubbers said they had recently taken some kind of party drug. An NDARC study found that ‘party drug’ users established a pattern of smoking the drug on Friday nights, staying up throughout Saturday, winding down on Sunday afternoons, and then crashing. These users didn’t like Mondays, sometimes known as ‘eccie Monday’ for the cause of the crash. And the NDARC report threw some more useful light on who the average ice user was. Contradicting the alarmist picture of a homeless junkie, the median clubbing user was 27 years old, male, employed, and with secondary qualifications.
Until he killed Giuseppe Vitale, Trent Jennings had been one of a large population of young adults who enjoyed dance parties and nightclubs with the help of ice and ecstasy. A British researcher, Gary Leigh, observed that ice was having an effect on dance-floor trends. He noted ‘darker, much more aggressive music’ between the hours of 2 and 6 am, when ‘the crystal vibe sets in’.
Among specific party subcultures, urban gay communities were at the leading edge of using crystal meth, the first cohort to discover its consequences and the first to take action to combat it. The commander of the NSW drug squad, David Laidlaw, believes members of the Australian gay community had been smoking crystal as early as 1998, ‘but they have now become aware of its highly addictive nature and impact due to the increased risk-taking behaviour associated with the drug, including the likelihood of contracting blood-borne viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C’.
In a Sydney Morning Herald article published on 12 January 2004, Jock Cheetham wrote that gay men were combining crystal with Viagra to produce ‘hypersexual activity’. One of his subjects, ‘Ricardo’, spoke of having been anally raped while on crystal meth. Meanwhile a central Sydney doctor, John Byrne, told me that his gay patients reported an overwhelming and sometimes out-of-character desire to be the ‘bottom’ in a sex act while on ice. The health risks are obvious. Perry Halkitis, from New York University, told Cheetham that this same tendency in the United States had led to a ‘triple epidemic—a drug epidemic, an HIV epidemic, and a mental health epidemic’.
‘It’s stressful enough being gay in this culture,’ Halkitis said. ‘Couple that with an HIV epidemic and you’ve got something like post-traumatic stress disorder. People lose hope in a state like that. Meth allows you to feel high, beautiful and relaxed.’
Greg Fisher no doubt felt high, beautiful and relaxed when he smoked crystal, but Fisher was to become Sydney’s highest-profile gay ice criminal. In the 1990s, Fisher had founded the ‘pink’ media firm, the Satellite Group, which he floated publicly in 1999. He eventually fell foul of financial regulators over a number of indiscretions, including using $220 000 of company funds for his personal benefit. To paper over his failing fortunes he dealt drugs from a unit in the Rex Apartments in Macleay Street, Potts Point.
With a secret camera, police filmed Fisher dealing cocaine, GHB, ecstasy and crystal meth from the unit. He had been charged previously with nineteen drug offences, but they had been dropped for lack of evidence. His narrow escape didn’t stop him dealing. His judgment was clearly clouded, as he was filmed smoking a white powder in a glass pipe during the surveillance operation.
But it was serious health problems, rather than jail, that posed the more immediate danger to gay crystal users. In 2004, the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research (NCHECR) found that ice use among urban gay men had gone from near zero to 21 per cent in five years. Sixteen per cent of gay men who had recently become HIV-positive reported having used ice at the event when they believed they contracted the virus. They ‘barebacked’, or had sex without condoms, or wanted to risk ‘bugging’ (spreading the virus). But on these occasions, ice was seldom used alone. Alcohol, Viagra, cocaine and other drugs were also usually taken. This made it impossible to say crystal taking led to HIV. Rather, it was ‘predictive’ of sero-conversion. Other research further complicates the picture, indicating that men who tend to engage in risky sex will do so regardless of whether or not they are taking crystal or any other drug.
While a persuasive story can be told of how gay individuals, feeling bulletproof on crystal meth, will then go out and have unsafe sex and contract HIV, there was little corresponding statistical evidence. At the time that ice use rocketed in the gay community, HIV infection rates did not go up in any commensurate way.
The AIDS Council of New South Wales (ACON) held its first forum on crystal meth in September 2004 and he
ard that the feared ‘triple epidemic’ hadn’t yet transpired. When researchers from the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society presented a paper saying there was no ‘causal link’ between crystal use and unsafe sex, community members responded with disbelief. Some said they had a number of friends who became HIV-positive after having unprotected sex while on crystal. While the ACON president, Adrian Lovney, said that ‘we shouldn’t be driving our response by anecdote’, a colourful community member and activist, Norrie May-Welby, responded: ‘Anecdotal evidence is a legitimate form of evidence . . . I say there’s enough smoke coming from the hills for us to call the fire brigade, without us doing a research project just to check no one is sending smoke signals.’
While this encounter may on one level seem the normal run of discussion when the convincing anecdote collides with the sober caution of scientific research, in the gay community it had a unique edge. One of the researchers, Garrett Prestage, encapsulated the concerns about contradictory responses within the community: ‘There’s a real reluctance to talk about recreational drugs in the community as a whole, because then what has to happen is you actually have to question your own usage,’ he said.
This was the bind that many gay community figures found themselves in. Drug-taking is not just a feature of urban gay life, but some would say it is a sine qua non. It is like any bohemian community being asked to confront sexually transmitted infections, or lung cancer, or alcoholism. If your behaviour is driven by the need to rebel against bourgeois conventions, what do you do when that behaviour starts to kill you? Which is more important— the lifestyle, and the statements it makes about self and community, or public health?