The Ice Age (34 page)

He started talking once they began driving. He told her he felt terrible about what had happened, that he knew he had fucked up, and that he needed drugs counselling. Stacey just stared ahead as Mick talked about how his meth use had gotten out of control without him realising, and how he'd been so depressed on the ‘day in question' that he'd driven himself to Emerald Lake, intending to hang himself in the bush.

Emerald Lake is a plain, muddy lake, surrounded by natural waterways and a rather stunning jumble of native and introduced species, with the largest nursery in the southern hemisphere — the Puffing Billy tracks run right through it — separating what is rickety Australian bushland from what looks almost like medieval European forest.

It was at this junction, where the native bush meets the introduced forest, that Mick said he was preparing to hang himself. He was just preparing the noose when, in a state of meth-psychosis, he saw what he thought was the devil coming towards him. Petrified, thinking perhaps he had somehow ‘already crossed over into hell', he grabbed the devil and wrestled it to the ground.

Moments later, he realised it wasn't the devil — it was a jogger with a red hoodie on who was actually trying to save his life. He ran off, bewildered, and yet somehow shocked to his senses; he got back into his car and drove off.

Still Stacey didn't answer, though her bemusement had turned to curiosity. She knew Mick had been through some terrible things in his life, and his meth use had been at least daily for quite some time. As the car pulled into their driveway, Mick said he wanted to keep talking for a little while in the car. He lowered his voice and rested his head in his hand.

‘It was just my way of escaping,' he said. ‘I've been through so much awful stuff with my family, and what I went through in jail.'

She let him back in the house. Although she was ambivalent about his story, she was worried that he didn't have anywhere else to go, as well as the fact that if his story were true, then homelessness would be an extraordinarily harsh price for him to pay. The next day she took him to the doctor, where he repeated what he'd told her the day before, pledged to get off the meth, and got a prescription for anti-depressants and Valium.

On the day of the court case, some five months later, Stacey sat in the pews at Dandenong Magistrates' Court. They had been waiting all day for the committal hearing to begin. She had decided to put aside her suspicions and her prejudices, and deal with what seemed to her to be the facts. The rope, which suggested he had tried to hang himself, and his meth abuse, which suggested he was having psychological problems, and his mostly very good behaviour since he'd gotten out of jail.

They entered the courtroom just after 3.30pm. She sat behind Mick and his defence team. The case would begin with the prosecution pulling out a huge manila file of evidence against Mick — most of it, to Stacey's surprise and horror, based on his prior convictions.

Even Mick's solicitor was unaware of the vast majority of these prior offences; he didn't have a copy of the file, and his client hadn't told him about most of them. Out of fairness to the defence, the committal hearing was reset, so Mick's solicitor would have time to read the file.

Mick would be free to go, for now, and on the way home he explained to Stacey that most of the offences occurred during the time he'd spent in prison, and were related to drugs, gangs, and weapons — all of which had been to help him survive the tough prison environment.

The next day, sitting in the messy old-school offices of his country-town solicitors, Mick's lawyer said to the couple, ‘We need to talk about your criminal history.'

‘My history, why?' replied Mick.

‘Well, Michael, it might look bad that you were convicted for rape in 1994,' the solicitor said.

Stacey felt herself shut down. He had, of course, told her that he was in jail for murder — had that really even happened?

The clutter in her mind meant she stopped hearing what was being said in that meeting, though she noticed that, by this stage, Mick looked as if he wanted to grow a shell and crawl into it. Stacey knew the ball was in her court. When they got into the car, she deliberately displayed no emotion, instead leaving him to ‘fear the worst' as she put on a kind of psychotic calm to keep him on the back foot.

As she drove off, she waited another sixty seconds and then, in a quiet voice, said:

‘So Mick, do you want to explain what the fuck is going on?'

‘I can't talk about it honey, I just can't. It's not true. There is a truth in it — but it wasn't me. It's a horrible situation, and it's too traumatic to talk about.'

And silence fell upon the vehicle for the rest of the trip.

A week later, and Stacey would find out she was two months pregnant with his child — their second and her fourth.

A month later, and the court case for the ‘devil hallucination' attack would go to court. Mick pleaded guilty, though his lawyers argued furiously that the incident was the result of meth psychosis.

The prosecution's case, however, offered a different interpretation of events. They argued that Mick had acted with cunning and malice: he had snuck up on the 32-year-old female jogger, and he had punched her in the face and thrown her to the ground. This account was corroborated by two eyewitnesses — witnesses that Mick had also seen at the time.

And the rope, the Crown argued, was not even tied in a noose — there was no evidence that Mick was trying to hang himself. There was no evidence, for instance, showing that he prepared himself, a tree, or a rope in any way to end his own life. Following the incident, Mick actually tore off his number plates and threw them in the bushes.

The victim's impact statement stated that she was now suffering daily headaches from the incident, and had moved interstate to escape the intrusive memories.

Mick was sentenced to twelve months.

Stacey was devastated. She knew her sisters would be quietly laughing about it behind her back; she was hormonal from her pregnancy, and largely financially dependent on a man who had been a good provider. Soon she would have four kids to look after, and her mother was only happy to help with her rent as long as Mick was in jail — without him around supporting the family, she worried she would end up homeless.

Despite the evidence and despite her instincts, Stacey decided she would try to accept Mick's version of events. She believed that what he really needed help with was his drug addiction; she wanted to do the right thing for her family, and she wanted to make sure she was treating the cause not the after-affect. She was deeply conflicted, though, and refused to let him move back in.

At the same time, though, she wasn't quite ready for a divorce. She still wasn't sure how much Mick was responsible for his crime, and how much it was associated with his crystal-meth use — but she was not willing to take the risk of finding out with her children. Mick moved into a boarding house in Dandenong, and not long after he was released from prison, Stacey would receive another phone call to say that her husband had been apprehended a second time, this time for savagely raping a St Kilda prostitute at knife point. Mick denied the woman's version of events, but ultimately it was her word that the court believed, and the last most of the extended family and Stacey's family heard about it was a news story reporting that Mick had been jailed for nine and a half years.

Although Mick claimed meth was involved in the rape, there was no evidence that Mick was using meth at the time, or at any stage in the lead up to the attack. Any suggestion he was acting because of meth or as a result of meth-induced psychosis was rejected by the court.

So, it would seem that meth's reputation can be used by the particularly unscrupulous to attempt to evade responsibility for their crimes. Similarly, it runs the risk of being used by communities to stop them facing up to the more fundamental truths about our long-standing flaws, foibles, and evils.

Let me explain this further: broadly, I see three ways that a person may use methamphetamine as a way to evade personal responsibility for committing a violent act. First, a person may plead ‘not guilty' to murder because they were affected by the drug. Second, a person may plan a violent act — and then take the drug — and later use this as an excuse to reduce their charge to manslaughter. And third, a person may lie and say they were on methamphetamine when they committed a violent act, when they actually weren't. A murderer is often not apprehended at the time of the murder, so blood testing for drugs would not always happen. Given that many people think of meth as a transformative ‘devil's drug' that makes good people bad, the risks of it being used to evade responsibility in both a moral and legal sense, as well as a way of explaining violent acts to loved ones, remains a significant issue.

So while the panic about crystal meth is understandable, rape, violence, and murder are arguably part of the human condition or, at least, of our society. Demonising the drug allows us to fall back on simplistic, lazy thinking — we run the risk of blaming ‘technology' for what is and has always been a human problem. On the other hand, many researchers in the field believe that many murders wouldn't have taken place if it were not for the fact that the perpetrators had taken the drug. In the domestic-violence cases, meth combines with a range of other factors, as we have previously discussed: anabolic steroid use, alcohol, the perpetrator's pre-existing mental-health problems. It makes it very difficult to ascertain what the proportionate response to the drug should be.

Along with the murders of Nicole Millar and Jazmin-Jean, I looked at eight other cases where one person killed another person while on methamphetamine. I picked these cases at random from an Australian legal-database search. I wanted to see what the circumstances were of these murders, how much of a role meth played, and how the court decided on the convicted person's culpability for the act.

Among the eight (10 including Nicole Millar and Jazmin-Jean), I found that none of the perpetrators had committed murder before, but nearly all had prior convictions for violent acts. In four of the cases, the killer (including the killers of Millar and Jazmin-Jean) had been using testosterone as well as meth in the lead up to the murder. In some cases, the killer had no apparent reason to kill the victim, but they did have a complex relationship with the victim. Take for instance, 33-year-old Damien Peters who in 2001 said he killed his former flatmates and lovers, Andre Akai, 50, and Bevan Frost, 57, after contracting HIV from Mr Akai, and ‘suffering years of mental and physical torture'. While Peters' case was the first ‘murder-meth' story to make the news — largely because Peters had no history of violence and because he disembowelled his victims and then flushed their organs down the toilet — Peters was actually using a cocktail of drugs, including methadone, testosterone, anti-depressants, and Valium as well as crystal meth at the time of the murders. Peters was sentenced to seventeen years in prison, and the fact that he was withdrawing from methamphetamine and displayed symptoms of ‘battered wife syndrome' reduced his sentence. However, it is significant that almost all of the other murders were committed by men who had past histories of violence, including kidnapping and assault. In virtually all these cases, meth was considered to be the factor that pushed them over the edge. In one case, 25-year-old Ross Kondaris killed his grandparents after using crystal meth and becoming psychotic; after examination by three psychiatrists, the court found that he had pre-existing schizophrenia, and could not be held responsible for his crime. He was put on an indefinite custodial order in a psychiatric hospital. Indeed, in this latter case — one of many that Victoria Police had jointly announced as ‘32 murders associated with crystal meth' — crystal meth was actually
not
considered to a factor in the murder because Kondaris' psychosis was held to be the result of schizophrenia rather than drug use.

Questions of fact and responsibility will ultimately be decided on a case-by-case basis in the courts, depending on the evidence and the circumstances surrounding the criminal act. The diversity of circumstances makes creating a strict rule about meth and personal responsibility seemingly impossible.

At trial, meth use can be argued as either a mitigating or aggravating factor when a person is found guilty. So for instance, the fact that a person has no prior criminal record and came from an abusive home would often mitigate the severity of the sentence. Whereas a person pleading not guilty, and acting in a particularly malicious way to the victim, would be considered aggravating factors that would increase the sentence length. Drugs and alcohol are traditionally put into the category of mitigating circumstances, particularly if it can be shown that during the act the person was either not fully aware of the consequences of their actions, acted on impulse, acted because of psychotic delusion, or had in some way performed an act which the evidence showed they would almost certainly not perform were it not for the drugs and/or alcohol in their system.

But the courts have (in my opinion very cleverly and appropriately) turned meth's reputation on its head and used it to increase, not reduce, the accountability of people who commit violent acts while high on meth. So if somebody knew
before
taking meth that the drug had a tendency to make them more violent, then the fact the person was on meth at the time of murder will increase the sentence not reduce it. The application of this approach played out in the sentencing of Nicole Millar's killer, David Hopkins.