No More Tomorrows (14 page)

‘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 for 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.

And there was an even bigger shock to come. The Australian Federal Police (AFP), Qantas and Sydney airport knew almost from day one that they had strong, compelling information that might help to back up my story. But they also realised that this piece of information was far more sinister and frightening than the issue of lax security. So they kept it quiet while feeding the media the line that they were doing all they could to help me. They knew they were sitting on dynamite. They knew that on the very same day I travelled, within minutes of my flight, airport staff had been involved in evading security in order to help move a large amount of cocaine through Sydney airport. The authorities knew that some of those airport workers we trust with our bags – and our lives – were criminals.

It didn’t prove my innocence but it backed up my story, because it offered a highly plausible alternative scenario. But it took Qantas, the AFP and the airport months to even admit there was any problem with crime among airport workers, and only then because it came out in a Sydney court during a bail hearing. It would have been so much easier for them if I’d gone down quietly as just another guilty drug smuggler who got lucky by getting her drugs through their security. That was a lot less difficult for the public to swallow.

Every courier, whether they are coming into Australia or whether they are going into Vietnam, going into Thailand, will say the drugs are not mine. It’s the universal excuse . . . If Schapelle Corby wasn’t a very attractive lady, the reaction might have been quite different.

Mick Keelty, Federal Police Commissioner,
Sydney Morning Herald
, 12 May 2005

Well, thanks for the compliment, Mr Keelty!

From early on, Commissioner Keelty threw regular comments to the press about my case. Usually his comments were damaging, often wrong, and never helpful.

I was a fly in the ointment. Apart from scaring people with my story, I was putting Australia’s busiest international airport in the firing line. Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport had managed to keep its serious level of crime quiet until my boogie-board story hit the news, as there had never been much interest in it before. But suddenly it was dinner-party conversation – or so thousands of people who’ve written and visited me have said. It’s been a while since I was at a dinner party myself.

I know that plenty of news about crime at Sydney airport has come out since – people send me clippings all the time. One showed just how bad the situation had become: a New South Wales Government report was written in early 2003 by a high-ranking NSW policeman, but it was kept secret for two years. It found its way into the press a month after my case had been heard.

The underlying theme of this paper is reflected in my knowledge that our airport in Sydney has been infiltrated by organised criminals, is susceptible to terrorist activity and is a haven for criminals, criminal networks and global organised crime. I know this because every police agency directly involved in airport policing I have visited over the past four years accepts it as fact.

This document will demonstrate that we have closed our eyes and crossed our fingers. To date we have either been lucky or don’t even know what is going on.

Detective Chief Inspector Jason Breton,
report to the NSW Premier’s Department, 2003

There were bigger agendas than mine at stake from the start.

My luck was running no better in Bali. They’d caught a drug smuggler red-handed, and the Balinese police were not interested in any further investigation. The drugs were in my bag: case closed. They would connive to get the second piece of evidence they required to convict me, but it wouldn’t involve any investigation.

There was no lab testing for fingerprints. No testing for the origin of the marijuana or its THC level, which, I found out, is how you tell its strength and therefore how valuable it is. There’d been no checking of the other bags in my name for evidence, and there was no questioning of Merc and Wayan – who were supposedly going to sell the marijuana for me. There was no search of their house or car, no search of my house in Australia either. They had obviously never watched
CSI
.

There was no investigation into the fact that the plastic bag had been cleanly sliced open by the time it reached the customs counter with me (which is why I could smell the stuff soon after opening my boogie-board bag). In fact, the marijuana was in
two
bags, one containing the other, each with blue zips at one end. It was packed so that the zips were at opposite ends, and so for the marijuana to be exposed at one end of the double covering, the zip of the outer bag was open and the inside bag had to have been cut.

Lily and Vasu didn’t tell me about there being a second bag until sometime in December. ‘Well, let’s fingerprint that!’ was my shocked response. They realised there were two bags after they’d been to Australia to search for space bags with two vacuum plugs but could only find them with one.

Why hadn’t I been told this earlier? Why hadn’t anyone pushed for fingerprints? Any chance of having the first bag fingerprinted had vanished that Friday night when everyone had frantically touched it. Now there was a second chance, as it was highly likely that none of the prying hands had actually touched the outside surface of this inner bag. We pushed and pushed for them to fingerprint, but the police refused.

It was up to me to formally request that the Indonesian Police test the marijuana for its origin and THC content and, although I was a bit worried about whether they would be done properly and accurately, I confirmed to the Australian Consulate on 3 December 2004 that I would like the tests done. I had been told that the AFP couldn’t get involved in the testing without a formal request coming through the Indonesian authorities. I had no idea what the tests would discover, but I was innocent and so I had to try everything. I signed a piece of paper to give my permission, but it didn’t happen, because the Bali police refused to do it.