Scattered (35 page)

C said: ‘We just did it because we felt like it, it is hard to explain. I knew we had wanted to kill someone before.'

They made plans, and when Eliza woke up they were ready.

They changed into old clothes. Eliza came into their bedroom and turned away from them while she was reading a yearbook from Collie High School. C jumped on her, pressing a chemical-soaked cloth to her mouth. B wrapped speaker wire in two loops around Eliza's neck. She struggled, screaming: ‘What are you doing?' . . . ‘Oh you freaks, what's wrong with you psychos?'

B said she saw Eliza's emotions shifting from anger, to fear, to the realisation she was going to die.

‘She was face up to me as I was doing it. She started to get scared, she started to cry. It was all blood coming out of her mouth.'

When Eliza was dead, B and C carried her roughly downstairs to the dirt-floor cellar. They sat and had a drink, and smoked some dope before digging a 40-centimetre-deep grave in which they buried Eliza. They threw her handbag, clothes and mobile phone away, rang Eliza's and B's mothers to say she was missing, and helped police in the search.

C returned to Perth, but by the Wednesday, three days after the murder, she told B that the grave was too shallow and they were bound to be caught; consequently, she was going to turn herself in to a city police station. That day, B also surrendered and confessed to Collie police.

B and C pleaded guilty to murder. At their sentencing hearing in Perth Children's Court in April 2007, the dominant reaction was bafflement. The girls expressed no remorse, detailing the crime in a matter-of-fact way, emphasising that they did it purely out of curiosity. They had chosen strangulation because they wanted it to be ‘non-messy', C told police. ‘As our friend, we did not really want her to suffer. We knew it was wrong but it didn't feel wrong at all, it just felt right. We were willing to take the risk. We said if we did get caught, shit happens, and we will deal with it.'

The prosecutor, Simon Stone, said the lack of reason for the murder or remorse afterwards were the most disturbing factors in the case. Eliza's family believed the girls treated both the murder and the sentencing as ‘a joke'.

Perth Children's Court president Denis Reynolds sentenced them to life imprisonment, describing the murder as ‘gruesome and merciless in the extreme'.

Judge Reynolds told the court that while drugs ‘formed an integral part of their lifestyle and psychological health', they were not the ‘catalyst' for the murder.

‘The facts of this case put it in the worst category of the most serious offence in the criminal code. It was planned,' he said.

‘I think it fair to say that none of the professionals, the psychiatrist and psychologists . . . have been able to fully explain [the pair] committing the offence.'

Defence lawyers agreed. ‘In more than ten years in the law I've never come across anything remotely like this,' criminal lawyer Michael Clarke, who defended B, told the
Australian
. ‘When I got the material facts and read through, it all seemed fine until I got to the part where they got up and decided to kill their friend. There was something clearly missing there as to how we made that jump. It's one thing to wake up and decide that—to actually do it is another thing altogether.'

Clarke said the hearing was ‘thorough and fair' but ‘it just didn't provide an answer . . . It bothered me that I couldn't find the golden key.'

There was much in the girls' psychological histories and conduct to suggest a homicide/suicide pact, an emotional attachment to each other that could only be sealed in blood, a kind of
Heavenly Creatures
obsession with each other and with death. Yet although Judge Reynolds was duty-bound to assign the girls total responsibility for their actions, and deny that ice was a ‘catalyst' for the murder, anyone who has read these pages will see the common thread running through other killings to this one. At the party, these girls were
high
, with dopamine and serotonin released into their synapses in an overwhelming flood. Their pulses were quickened, their libido was aroused, their blood pressure was up, they felt sharp, alert, alive, and fully concentrated on the moment. Just as their impulses were loosened, the safety catch in their brains had been switched off. There seemed no reason for them to say no to any action, no matter how stupid or bizarre or cruel. Such concepts didn't exist for them. They were racing along a free, cold, nerveless highway where everything was permitted. And when they were finished, they did what Matthew Gagalowicz, Novica Jakimov, Justin De Gruchy and others did: they covered it up with the utmost care and concentration, as if they were soldiers at war.

This is not to mitigate their actions at all, but the brain's chemistry is undeniable; there are rock-solid rules that every ice user's brain chemistry follows. Ice users are all on essentially the same trip. The differences between one user and another are in their individual circumstances. In some very rare cases, those circumstances lead to murder. There is no single golden key, but ice, in this case as in so many others, was an essential ingredient. It was not as crucial, as a cause of the murder, as the terrible instability of B's and C's childhoods, or the morbid codependency of their friendship. But it was more crucial than, say, the wire used as the murder weapon. The role of ice has become clear in this pattern of crimes committed over the years 2000 to 2006; it was, with all due respect to Judge Reynolds, precisely the word he chose. It was the catalyst.

Not every story about an ice-related crime ends in ruined lives. A great many of the ice users who committed the crimes that are detailed in these pages were career criminals, and it can be argued that although crystal methamphetamine accelerated the timing and escalated the violence of the crimes, the perpetrators were in large part an embodiment of criminality merely seeking its opportunity. There are also cases, however, of ordinary individuals with no criminal records whose only contact with the justice system came after an isolated incident involving ice. And there are cases where it ended well: where recovery, once ice was removed from the equation, was not only possible but likely. Daniel Paul Lidonnici was one of those cases.

In October 2005, Lidonnici was a 21-year-old who liked a good time and had done a few drugs over the years. An only child, he had enjoyed a relatively happy childhood in Melbourne and studied marketing at TAFE after finishing year twelve. He dropped out of the course after six months and worked in various office jobs while studying accountancy and business. He had a steady girlfriend, Hayley di Cecco, and worked with her at her father's flower stall on Wednesday evenings and in the kitchen at Seaford RSL on Sundays.

On weekends, Lidonnici did drugs—pot, speed, ecstasy, special K and eventually ice—as well as binge drinking. He didn't touch hard drugs during the week. It was a nightclub, partying thing, kept within the weekend waster's boundaries.

Over the second-last weekend of October 2005, Lidonnici, di Cecco and some friends were up for two days, going to dance clubs and taking ecstasy, ketamine, cannabis and ice. On Sunday afternoon, Lidonnici drove di Cecco to St Kilda to collect her bag from a friend's flat. On the way, they picked up a friend, Ayla Ramsay. The three were going to go to another recovery session in Heidelberg.

Inside the St Kilda flat, however, Lidonnici started acting strangely. He made some irrational comments and stared blankly at the walls. His girlfriend told him to snap out of it. Lidonnici reacted angrily, closing the flat's door and locking them all inside.

The girls tried to calm him down, but his replies made no sense. Ayla Ramsay grabbed his car keys and offered to trade them for the keys to the flat. Di Cecco, concerned, said, ‘I've never seen you like this before.' She tried to phone Lidonnici's friend Nathan to get him to calm her boyfriend down. Lidonnici lunged at her and wrestled her to the floor. To Nathan on the phone, he said there were people in the flat trying to get him. After the call, Lidonnici dialled emergency 000 and some other friends saying someone was trying to kill him.

Lidonnici, terrified and terrifying at the same time, took a carving knife from the kitchen and held it to his own throat. Di Cecco got it off him while he was calling the police, but he went after her and grabbed another knife, pointing it at her and telling her that if she moved he'd stab her.

‘What's the address of this flat?' he said urgently.

‘I don't know,' di Cecco wept.

‘Tell me or I'll kill you!'

When the police arrived (at Lidonnici's request), he yelled out: ‘If you come in, I'll kill her.'

The police broke in and hauled di Cecco out. Lidonnici was holding her around the legs, stabbing her with the knife. Lidonnici let go and the police cornered him. He threatened to kill himself. The police tried to disarm him with a shot from a Taser. Lidonnici, impervious to the charge of the gun, rammed the knife into his own chest. The police came at him but he fended them off with another knife. Eventually they subdued him with several Taser shots.

The remarkable thing about Lidonnici's psychotic event was how isolated it was. He and di Cecco were in hospital for more than a week (Lidonnici's wounds were life-threatening and he lost his gall bladder as a result); when they were discharged, they got back together. Lidonnici had only sketchy memories of the afternoon, but said he thought di Cecco and Ramsay were conspiring with other people to kill him. He didn't believe the police were really police; instead, in his mind, they were players in the conspiracy.

A psychiatrist, Dr Nicholas Owens, reported that Lidonnici's actions were caused by acute amphetamine intoxication ‘which resulted in your experiencing acute paranoid delusions of a persecutory nature (namely that you were going to be harmed by someone attempting to get into the flat), together with confusion and misidentification about the police and the phone calls you were making'.

Lidonnici's disturbed state only lasted as long as he was drug-affected.

He pleaded guilty to a number of charges. At his sentencing hearing, the court was told that di Cecco was living with him at his parents' house and envisaged a long-term future with him. He had no previous criminal record or anger-management problems. He was shocked and remorseful about what he had done, and stopped taking drugs or going to nightclubs.

Justice Hollingworth of the Victorian Supreme Court said:

I accept that your behaviour at the flat was totally out of character for you and would not have occurred but for your drug consumption. Nevertheless, your significant drug consumption over that weekend was entirely voluntary and was part of regular weekend drug usage at the time . . .

No long-term harm has been caused by your actions and the principal victim is fully supportive of you. You are remorseful, have co-operated with the police and pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity. I am satisfied that there is little risk of you repeating your stupid and dangerous youthful drug-taking. In my opinion, the interests of the community will not be served by your being sent to an adult prison, even for a short time . . .

I think you deserve to be given a chance. I will not send you to jail. Do not let the court or yourself down, Mr Lidonnici.

Daniel Lidonnici was sentenced to community service and fined for drug possession. His ice-using days were, he believed, firmly behind him.

By the mid-2000s, courts around the country were developing a new sensitivity to the properties of ice and its relationship with crime. In December 2006 NSW District Court Judge Michael

Finnane sentenced a man named Matt Loria to home detention rather than jail after Loria's ‘mental processes were disordered' when he threatened to rob a Bondi pokie den with a toy pistol. Loria, a surf instructor and father, and a friend had stayed up throughout the previous night using ice to watch cricket on television from England. ‘I can't believe I did that,' Loria said of the attempted robbery. ‘That was just so stupid I don't know what I was thinking.'

Courts were showing a greater understanding in isolated cases, but were still grappling with the question of whether drug use amounting to a mental illness could be used as a defence against a criminal charge.

One case that tested this was that of Andrew Kastrappis, a 43-year-old Adelaide man who was charged with criminal trespass and indecent assault after an incident on the night of 17 June 2005.

Kastrappis lived on his own in a unit block in Pooraka, a working-class suburb north of Adelaide. His mother had died when he was twelve, but through adulthood he enjoyed a supportive relationship with his father and stepmother, and from his mid-thirties he had a girlfriend.

Kastrappis had left school after year ten and worked in a paint factory for twenty years, from 1980 till 2000, when he suffered a back injury and left work to live on a disability pension.

He used cannabis and speed from his early twenties, and had a few drug and driving-related offences on his record, but nothing remotely close to assault or trespass until 2005. That was the year he started smoking ice.

As we have seen in so many other cases, the introduction of ice to a drug user's regime precipitated an act that was entirely out of character.

On the night of 16 June 2005, Kastrappis forced open the back door of a neighbouring unit. The resident, Ms Matthews, was asleep, but woke with a jolt when she felt something brushing her lips. She sat up to see Kastrappis, naked beneath a coat, waving his penis close to her face.

‘You have to sleep with me,' Kastrappis said urgently. When Ms Matthews refused, he grabbed her by the pyjama pants and, pulling them down, said: ‘If you don't, I know 200 guys who are going to come over here and they'll give you trouble.'

Ms Matthews fought him off—Kastrappis was acting as if he was more scared than she was—and asked him what he was talking about.