No More Tomorrows (38 page)

I said, ‘Of course I will.’

The prosecutor asked for life. I went to the holding cell among all the chaos to see Schapelle. I was holding her hand while she was crying. I find out down the track that she [Mercedes] ran out of there to do a live interview for thirty thousand dollars with
New Idea
. So that is the situation I find myself in. I’m holding her sister’s hand while she’s making thirty thousand dollars with
New Idea
and that, from my point of view, sickens me.

What I would love is for Schapelle to have her say. It seems to me when I see her that so much of what is going on outside that jail cell is not disclosed to her.

Sunday
, 26 June 2005

The truth was I’d explicitly and repeatedly told Robin, ‘Do not come to the holding cell.’ Merc certainly did not ask him to look after me there, she knew I hated being their show pony – especially so if I got bad news in court. Merc did do an interview for
New Idea
a bit later, but Robin knew about it days beforehand. Merc was sobbing when we hugged in court that day, anything but the cold heartless response that man claimed.

Two days after his vindictive, vicious lies on the
Sunday
programme, Robin released his ‘insurance letter’, the one I was pressured to write the day after my verdict. It was clearly calculated to look like I’d just written it and was siding with him and not my devoted sister and mum. How could anyone be so evil?

Convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby has pleaded for a Gold Coast lawyer to rejoin her fight for freedom. Corby, 27, has written a letter to Australian lawyer Robin Tampoe from her prison cell in Bali, begging him to continue working on her defence. The latest twist in the Corby saga followed days of conflict between Corby’s mother, Rosleigh Rose, and Mr Tampoe and mobile phone entrepreneur Ron Bakir.

In the letter obtained by the Philip Clark
Drive
program on 2GB, Corby said she ‘needs’ Mr Tampoe but will ‘understand’ if he does not accept her offer.

AAP Bulletin
, 28 June 2005

I felt an awful sense of total betrayal, mixed with loathing. When I’d trusted someone and then lost that trust in them, I found myself wanting so much to believe and to once again trust. I’ve now learnt that once lost – it’s lost, finished, gone, no more, the end.

Life in jail didn’t get any easier. I spent hours sitting on my bed looking out my cell window, just people-watching, assessing every individual female prisoner, getting information that would help me choose my friends carefully. I was slowly becoming introverted and more often in my own faraway world, lost in my thoughts, lost in nothingness with nothing to do, nowhere to go and no one to really talk to.

The deep pain of my situation infiltrated every single moment. During the night, I’d wake up crying, every hour on the hour. I’d realise,
Yeah, I’m still here
, and lie down, crying myself to sleep again. A little wooden box of my belongings was right at my head, and because we were all so squashed up with little room to sleep, I’d wake up with a start, then lie back down and hit my head almost every time. But I couldn’t move it because there was nowhere else to put it.

I had to hold everything inside, which might be why when I woke each morning the horror of my situation hit me again. I had to say to myself,
OK, you can be strong today.
I had to change the way I was thinking, because I didn’t know how long I’d be in this hellhole. I’d start the day by clearing out all the bad energy and thoughts, fighting to get rid of the negativity.
This is today; you never know what tomorrow is going to hold.
I was living from moment to moment, the only way I could survive.

18

The Bali Nine Check In

I
HATED THE
B
ALI
N
INE
. I
FELT SURE THEIR CRIME OF
trafficking heroin a month before my verdict had contributed to me getting twenty years. I believed the judge hit me hard because their brazen drug-smuggling racket had mocked Indonesian drug laws. Three of nine Australians – most of them teenagers or in their early twenties – were caught with heroin strapped to their thighs at Denpasar airport. One guy was already seated on the plane, while another four were nabbed in a local hotel room surrounded by heroin and drug paraphernalia.

Renae Lawrence was the only female in the group. I was terrified of her before she arrived. I didn’t want to share a cell with her. I had panicked thoughts that she’d cause problems for me, pick on me, start fights and ram my head into the cement walls. I even taught Dewi, one of the girls in my cell, a line to say if Renae attacked me: ‘Who are you? You’re a prisoner, you’re a criminal . . . you’re lower than a snake’s belly. How dare you come in here and do this!’

My fears were fuelled by news stories, scary photographs and frenzied gossip. All the girls who’d shared a cell with her at Polda had been telling crazy stories about this
freak
for weeks. She refused to let anyone else sleep if she was awake. She’d kick them in the head, sexually hit on them, punch them. So, by the time she checked in at Kerobokan, I imagined Renae as an aggressive, psychopathic lesbian. I was scared to death of her.

A frantic whisper swept around the women’s block as soon as she walked through the door. Her myth made her larger than life.

‘Oh, Renae’s here! It’s Renae!’

Everyone was staring, pointing and whispering at the notorious psychopath. All eyes were on her, including mine. As I sat watching her through the bars on my cell window, my fears instantly vanished. This girl couldn’t have contrasted more with the images in my head. She looked like a frightened mouse as she took that first terrifyingly lonely walk up the gravel path towards the guards’ table. When she reached it, she stood timidly giving her details, saying nothing to the thirty or forty girls ferreting wildly through her bags in their usual scavenging fashion.

As she was walked to her new cell, her face was full of terror, like she was about to be put in a cage and fed to the lions. She almost was. She was to share with the Black Monster, until Sonia viciously objected, screaming, kicking and slamming the cage door shut. The guards didn’t argue; they just walked Renae to another cell, her big blue eyes spilling tears as she trailed behind them like a lost lamb, clinging to her pilfered bags. I felt sorry for her as I sat listening to her cries, knowing exactly what she was going through. But I didn’t go to her. I kept my distance for a few hours to let her breathe and take in the dump that was her home for now . . . and maybe for ever.

I finally went to meet Renae just before lock-up. She was a mess. She was sitting on the cell floor, sobbing and broken, with her head hopelessly hanging.

‘Come on, this isn’t going to help you,’ I told her.

She slowly looked up at me, her eyes red and swollen. ‘How do you do it? How do you do it, Schapelle?’

‘You just have to, Renae. You
have
to.’ It was impossible not to see the fresh scars on her sliced-up wrists. ‘And you can’t do
that
– you can’t. Just forget about doing that again.’

But she had so much anger inside. She was living hour by hour and didn’t know how to control her emotions. She’d already tried to kill herself at Polda and then lost it a couple of days after checking in, slamming her fist into the cell wall over and over until the bones in her hand were broken. The guards unlocked my cell so I could go and try to calm her down, settle her a bit. But I couldn’t. I had no chance of holding her back, as she kept smashing her swollen fist into the concrete wall and screaming like a tortured animal. A few male prisoners ran in and began grabbing her arms. She went crazy until we finally got her to the ground. I pushed a little blue sleeping tablet into her mouth, and within a minute she calmed down.

One night about two weeks later, she again started smashing her already broken hand into the wall. The guards came in and unlocked my cell to help and when I got to her cell, she was shaking, crying hysterically and gasping for air. I tried to soothe her, giving her a hug and holding her good hand while we waited for the doctor to arrive. She had to let out her anger and said it was either the wall or one of the girls. Luckily, she chose the wall.

I soon told Dewi she had to forget the snake’s-belly line I’d taught her. Renae and I were unlikely friends: we were worlds apart as people, and outside in the real world I doubt we’d have even met, let alone become friends. She spent her spare time blowing up cars, I spent mine having facials. But inside Hotel K, we bonded as easily as kids in kindergarten. We both needed someone to talk to and support us through our black days. The broad brushstrokes of being Australian, speaking English and being stuck in here were enough to draw us together, and we became friends . . . for a while.

But I tried to avoid talking about her crime. I didn’t want to know, I didn’t want to think about what she’d undeniably been involved in. I also blamed Renae and the other eight for hurting my case.

When they were arrested, there were headlines everywhere screaming: ‘Corby death penalty!’ Bali was making an example of me. They were showing the world that this little holiday isle really was tough on drug traffickers. The prosecutors regularly told my lawyers I would be a lesson to the world. But the lesson wasn’t working, the headlines weren’t hitting home, no one was listening if nine Australians were trafficking drugs a month before my verdict. They were arrested in April; I was sentenced in May. The judges felt they really had to make a point. They hit hard. My sentence was one of the highest-ever for trafficking marijuana.

Merc looked into it and easily found plenty of cases to highlight the wildly disparate sentences for drug cases.

Two Indonesian brothers were caught importing 8.5 kilograms of marijuana through Jakarta airport. Like me they were charged under Article 82, which carries the maximum punishment of death. But unlike me they didn’t get anything close to twenty years – one brother got five years, the other six.

Another man, who was on exactly the same charges as me but had been caught with 160 kilograms of marijuana – forty times more than the amount found in my boogie-board bag – was sentenced to five years less than me.

Even people caught with harder drugs received lighter sentences than mine. A man who flew into Bali with 5.2 kilograms of cocaine hidden in the lining of his surfboard bag was sentenced to life but got fifteen years on appeal. A known drug dealer caught smuggling forty kilos of crystal meth from Hong Kong to Indonesia in gravestones got seven and a half years.

A man caught with 4,700 Ecstasy pills strapped to his legs as he flew into Indonesia from Taiwan was sentenced to four years and six months. Another man caught boarding a flight to Australia with 5,852 Ecstasy pills strapped to his thighs and stomach was sentenced to ten years in jail. A brother and sister who were caught with 2.62 kilograms of pure heroin in their shoes when they were spotted walking strangely as they came off a flight from Taiwan were each sentenced to twelve years.

It was impossible to understand and comprehend how the Indonesian justice system worked, how they decided on what sentences to hand down. They seemed to just pluck a number from thin air, rather than relying on legal precedents like courts in most countries did. There was no uniformity, no fairness.

What was even more incredible were the ridiculously low sentences given out for murder. There were several people in Kerobokan Prison doing just five or six years for gruesome slayings. Or, in the most extreme and obscene case, Bali bomber Abu Bakar Bashir, guilty of conspiring to bomb the Kuta nightclubs in October 2002, which killed 202 people, was sentenced to just thirty months. This terrorist, who’d given his ‘blessings’ for the bombings, was freed four and a half months early for good behaviour! He was out in two years, showing absolutely no remorse for all those killed and injured in the bombings.

The man who’d supplied the equipment for the bombs in the second Bali attack, in 2005, which killed twenty people and injured a hundred, was so happy with his eighteen-year sentence the day before his twenty-ninth birthday that he called it ‘the sweetest birthday gift’. He warmly shook hands with the judges and gave the thumbs up, smiling, when his sentence was delivered. This terrorist obviously knew he’d got away lightly.