The Ice Age (33 page)

On the first day of winter 2010, Nicole was in the car with David as she drove Kane to school. Hopkins had taken testosterone and had been drinking alcohol the night before. He had also been smoking both hash and crystal meth. The pair then drove to a Safeway service station. Kane later testified that when he'd observed them talking ten minutes earlier, they had been getting along just fine.

At 8:16am, as David was filling the car with petrol, he took the petrol pump nozzle out of the petrol tank and carried it to Nicole's door; at the same time, he pulled a knife from the left side of his belt. He then re-entered the car through the passenger door with the nozzle in his right hand and the knife in his left — he aimed the nozzle at Nicole, and began pumping fuel all over her. She was screaming for help and continuously sounding the car horn. David responded by pointing the knife at Nicole, and stabbing or slashing her in the neck and throat area while continuing to pour petrol over her. Nicole had a strong instinct for survival, and she tried frantically to get out of the vehicle; Hopkins — pumped on meth and steroids — overpowered her, dragging her back inside the car. He took a cigarette lighter from his pocket, and lit the petrol on Nicole. Covered in fuel, Nicole immediately caught on fire from head to toe. She stumbled out the driver door engulfed in flames.

For a period of precisely three minutes and twenty-one seconds, Nicole sat on the forecourt of the garage, burning from head to toe. Horrified witnesses attempted to get to her to extinguish the flames. One person had a fire extinguisher. But all who came towards her were threatened by David, who was still holding the knife. While preventing them from coming to Nicole's aid, Hopkins also verbally abused her as she sat in agony.

Nicole fought hard for her life. Police arrived on the scene and arrested David. Nicole was flown by air ambulance to the Alfred Hospital, where she arrived at 9.45 in the morning. She was still conscious, writhing in pain. The doctors assessed her injuries as being non-survivable. An anaesthetist attended her at 10.00am, putting a tube in her throat, and administering an anaesthetic so that she would fall into a deep sleep. Just before she lost consciousness, a barely recognisable Nicole — whose milky-white skin was a melting mess of red and black burns that had covered 90 per cent of her body — told the anaesthetist, ‘Please don't let me die'. However, the staff already knew there was nothing they could do, and at 6.00 that night, she died in her sleep.

It's the fate of Nicole Millar, and others, that led many to call meth what it seems to be: an evil drug that makes ordinary people commit horrendous acts.

On 27 March 2014 the
Herald Sun
published an article that reported that ice had been linked to the killings of 14 people across fourteen months in Victoria.

Mr Clive Alsop, a Magistrate at the Latrobe Valley Magistrates' Court, told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry that he had observed a direct link between ice and domestic violence: ‘In one region of Gippsland a major resource has been set aside for the assistance of women who have to leave home because of domestic violence [and] 100 per cent of the people who are seeking services at this person's establishment are there because of ice related difficulties.'

And Dr Andrew Crellin, director of Emergency at Ballarat Health Services, told the inquiry that one of the main problems medical staff faced when dealing with meth users was their high levels of aggression.

Given how horrific meth-related crimes can be, and how often they occur with apparently little or no motive, it is not surprising that we commonly hear that meth not only leads to evil acts, but is itself an evil drug. Amid this genuine and legitimate outrage, though, is a complicated question of accountability — to what extent can we hold a person legally and morally responsible for an act they carry out when they're using meth? Is it the drug or the person? And if it's a combination of the two, where exactly do we draw the line between them?

In my own experience, I believe that there are a number of factors contributing to the way I behave when I'm on meth. I have a family history of psychosis and a personal history of trauma. I have a tendency to engage in reckless behaviour and an even higher tendency to develop addictions. I have also identified that while I had persecution fantasies when I was younger, and still did when I was older, once I started using meth, these were replaced with grandiose fantasies of inflicting needless pain on others. Which I can only put down to the fact that I had, at various times in the preceding years, taken testosterone to increase my muscle mass, as well as doing heavy weightlifting and kickboxing classes. I believe this changed me, both physically and psychologically. As I will explain further in this chapter, testosterone figures in many meth-related murder cases — both Sean Lee King and David Hopkins had a long history of using anabolic steroids in the lead up to their brutal acts.

Another thing that these murders have in common is that in each case the perpetrator killed his partner. Men killing their wives and girlfriends is a social issue that is discussed far less often that it should be. And methamphetamine, at least until very recently, has received far more media attention than domestic violence, though I imagine the impact of the latter is almost certainly both more common and more devastating. Domestic violence is the leading cause of death and injury in women under 45 in Australia, with more than one woman murdered by her current or former partner every week. And yet, it is often the case that when these murders are reported in the media, they are done so in the context of methamphetamine rather than the longer-standing, wider-spread problem of male violence against women. Is it easier to blame an ‘evil drug' than to address issues of patriarchy, or to peer into the ‘evils' occurring in the western institution of the family?

Now seems a good time to introduce Beck's younger sister Stacey, and take you to the day, in the summer of late 2009, that changed her life. It was a warmish evening, and the then 26-year-old had just arrived at her Pakenham home. She had come from a day at TAFE, where she was studying early childhood education. Stacey had a distinct sense of satisfaction after she ended a day at TAFE: she was the first of her sisters — the same sisters who loved to torment her about her weight, her lack of hygiene, and her lack of luck with men — to study at a tertiary level.

Sometimes when Stacey (whose weight has fluctuated between moderately overweight to morbidly obese throughout much of her life) would get home after a hot day, sweaty and bothered, one of her sisters would yell out ‘the fat bitch is home'. Often she was too tired to fight back, but when she did, it was a sight to behold. I once saw her hit Beck in the head with a broom. So I guess when her sisters threw those verbal attacks they knew it was bear-baiting and they knew awful consequences might follow, but they did it for the thrill.

A few years after Stacey left high school, she still hadn't had a serious relationship; she had been having casual sex, though, and she fell pregnant with twins in her early twenties. At this time, like many other times, Beck's ex-partner Nick was back in jail, and he would occasionally ring Stacey for a bit of a chat. Stacey would be happy enough to keep him company, and was even happier the day he told her that he had a friend in jail who had seen photos of her and was keen to meet her.

He was an older guy who liked big women, Nick explained, and he thought Stacey was very attractive. Stacey was at first sceptical, not because he was in jail — she knew many men who had been to jail, men who were flawed but essentially decent — but because, in her experience, she'd found that guys who claimed to like ‘bigger girls' were often simply looking for an ‘easy root', or someone they could degrade during sex. When Stacey first spoke with the man on the phone, she found him to be self-deprecating, broken, and genuine: a ‘nice guy'. She had daydreamed about having a criminal boyfriend like her sister — she thought it was glamorous and exciting, and he made her feel sexy and wanted. He said things to her that no man had before, and soon she was making plans for them to meet when he got out in three months.

Naturally, Stacey interrogated the man — Mick was his name — about why he was serving such a long sentence. He explained that as a young man in a rough, tough Queensland town in the late 1980s, he'd become caught up in drugs and with the wrong crowd: a bikie gang who paid him to do seemingly innocuous jobs. One day, Mick recounted, with more than a tinge of sadness and regret in his voice, his boss had explained that a man owned the gang money, and it was job do the ‘deed'. Not on his own, of course, but Mick was told if he did not assist a couple of heavies in killing the debtor, he would be digging two graves: one for the debtor and one for himself. So Mick reluctantly, and in a haze of alcohol, pot, and speed, had helped in the murder of a lower-chain drug dealer who owed tens of thousands, and assisted in disposing of the body. He said thinking of his actions now made him feel sick to the stomach; that he still had nightmares about it; that he was a changed person.

He told Stacey she was absolutely beautiful, and within a few weeks of his release, and after more than eight years in jail, Mick met up with a heavily pregnant Stacey.

The couple would wed, have another baby together, and have — apart from Mick's casual meth use — a fairly normal, non-eventful, crime-free, working-class life. They both worked, they were debt-free, and had been together for nearly eight years on the day Stacey arrived at their modest but respectable three-bedroom brick home in Pakenham, tired but upbeat. She had overcome no shortage of nastiness and setbacks to get to where she was: a home, a husband, three kids, an education and a good job, stability, and good friends.

Cleanliness was still not her strong point, though, and as she walked into her messy lounge room, a waft of unclean dishes in the air, she saw Mick's legs sticking out from the end of the couch.

He was supposed to be at work at his factory forklift job, a half-hour's drive away, in ten minutes.

‘Bloody get up,' she said, trying to hold back her laughter.

‘Oh shit, I must have dozed off,' he replied, and the skinny little man with brown hair, blue eyes, tattoos, and a ‘tail' got up, rubbing his eyes, and hurried out the door saying, ‘I'll only be a little bit late'.

Oddly enough, he took her car not his.

‘He must have been half-asleep,' she chuckled to herself.

When she peered out the front to call the kids in later that evening, she noticed that the numberplates were missing from Mick's car.

‘That's weird,' she thought. ‘Typical bloody Pakenham,' assuming that someone had stolen them from the car while it sat in the driveway; at the time, petrol prices were very high, and she thought they were most likely to have been stolen by a petrol runner.

She rang Mick, who expressed surprise and agreed that he would need to go the police tomorrow to report it. He arrived home that night while she was asleep, and the next day he seemed particularly annoyed about the numberplates going missing. He said he was worried, given his criminal record, about driving the car without the plates and being caught by police. Stacey needed to take the children to a maternal-health service fifteen minutes' drive away — she agreed it would make more sense if she, rather than him, drove the un-plated car.

As she sat in the waiting room, flicking through some magazines, her mobile rang.

‘Hello, is this Stacey Hughes?'

‘Yes.'

‘This is Sergeant Brady from Pakenham Police.'

‘Okay.'

‘We have just intercepted your husband Michael.'

‘Right?'

‘We've pulled him over because we believe he has assaulted a female. He has, in turn, informed us that he has a crystal-meth addiction. He has further informed us that you have his Commodore. We're not concerned that you are driving it without number plates, but we need you to bring this vehicle to Pakenham police station for the purposes of evidence.'

‘Um, yes, okay — but can I ask what's going on?'

‘We think that Michael might have been trying to harm himself because of depression related to his crystal-meth addiction. Before you bring the car down, I need you to tell us if there is a black satchel in the car.'

After Stacey went to check the car, and confirmed the satchel was there, the officer asked her to check for a rope, which she also found.

Stacey cancelled the appointment with the maternal-health nurse, and drove back through the winding roads of Cockatoo and through the bushy back roads of upper Pakenham.

Her thinking was incoherent and rife with uncertainty and contradiction. She knew he had been using meth: she'd found used syringes around the house, and she knew he disappeared into the garage to use. For the most part, though, he had been easier to get along with when he was using, and he'd also get a lot done around the house. Stacey couldn't help wondering if this whole situation could have been avoided if only she had stepped in and said something about his meth use, rather than just enjoying the apparent side benefits of it.

She handed the car over to the police, and, a short time later, Mick came out of the cop shop and got into Stacey's car. Mick was physically smaller than Stacey. She was a woman who had had often fought off her sister's vicious verbal attacks with brooms, fists, and a ferocious anger that would leave many a grown man shaking in their boots.