The Ice Age (35 page)

In sentencing him to a 30-year minimum term, Justice Betty King, an outspoken and flamboyant judge — known for her bright-red curved reading glasses and her inclination to take on some of Melbourne's worst figures — told Hopkins:

I have viewed the CCTV footage of this horrific event. For a period of three minutes and 21 seconds Ms Millar sits on the forecourt of the garage burning from head to toe … Not only have you doused her in petrol and set her on fire, you then take even more horrific action, in that you then prevented any person coming to her assistance or aid … The behaviour is an example of the worst kind of viciousness and sadistic behaviour this court is ever likely to see … Whilst there may be other cases that may also fall into the worst case scenario and possibly even be worse than this it defies my capacity to imagine them. What you did to this woman on this day was unspeakable.

Exactly how much crystal meth drew this highly unstable man into violence is unclear, but Justice King regarded it as a significant contributing factor:

I am satisfied that you were not psychotic either on that day of the murder or for the whole of the previous week, be that a drug induced psychosis or otherwise, but I do accept that you were in a drug fuelled rage … Rage — drug fuelled or otherwise — is not an excuse, it is no more than part of an explanation for your behaviour. Like the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, it may go some way towards explaining your behaviour which was inexplicable behaviour towards another human being for whom you supposedly had affection.

In the New South Wales Supreme Court in the early months of 2013, Sean Lee King's case turned on his defence team's argument ‘that as a consequence of smoking crystal methamphetamine (“ice”) and consuming alcohol during the day on which he murdered the deceased, he was not capable of forming any relevant intention' to kill his ex-girlfriend. The defence team utilised a statement from John Andrew Farrar, a forensic pharmacologist, ‘that the ability of the accused to form an intention to kill the deceased would have been substantially impaired'.

However, Justice Geoff Bellow, after careful consideration, said that while he accepted that ice increases aggression, and he was satisfied that King was affected by the drug, the fact that King had called 000 after the murder showed he was functioning well enough to realise that his actions would result in murder, and that he had been intending to kill his ex-girlfriend when he started to attack her. And in a ruling consistent with Justice Betty King's approach eighteen months earlier, Justice Bellow ruled that because Sean Lee King knew that ice made him aggressive that ‘the offender's intoxication should be regarded as an aggravating factor. It is one which carries with it significant moral culpability for the predictable consequences of the choice that he made to continue taking drugs in the knowledge of their likely effect upon him.'

At this time, it's worth revisiting the conclusions of Ira Sommers and Arielle Baskin-Sommers, who in noting the number of people who became violent while using crystal meth, asserted that developmental factors are also important contributors to violence:

It has been theorized that the best predictor of future violence is a past history of violence. Accordingly, abnormal deviant behaviour in childhood has been found to be a fairly reliable predictor of aggressive behaviour in adulthood. Much of the evidence that links methamphetamine use with violence is based on clinical reports. Unfortunately, clinical reports are replete with methodological problems. They are limited most severely by their inability to control for the non-drug state or trait characteristics of study patients.

Whether or not crystal meth is in fact the ‘Devil Drug' — a drug that may both bring out our worst and also produce a new level of human evil — is still very much open for discussion. One should be wary of anything, however, that resembles a definitive conclusion about human evil, our concept of hell, and the world's most powerful stimulant.

Chapter Thirteen

Winter

IT WAS WINTERTIME
in the Valley. The cold had closed in, and seemed to be trapped in that flat landscape, which extended to an ocean whose breeze originates from the Arctic Circle and lingers along the Valley's hills.

Smithy would often light a fire in the backyard on winter mornings, and his guests — normally two or three of them, and almost always from the local boarding house — would stand around it in thick winter jackets, looking serious and grim.

If Beck was over, she would be inside, and she, too, would hover, often moving about the house aimlessly: sometimes making a set of curtains on the sewing machine, at other times moving stuff from one side of the house to the other, or reorganising drawers — all with little quantifiable result at the end. Her face was usually pale and wrinkled, and she often had scabs on her chin.

Sometimes she'd bring over spare packets of anti-depressants (we took the same ones), and Ventolin, and food. The food was especially welcome, because at that stage, Smithy hadn't left the house for two months, and wasn't doing any grocery shopping for the boys.

Sometimes she yelled at me, sometimes I had to push her out the door, sometimes she was banned from Smithy's for a couple of days. She would often be having a go at either one of us, but never both at once — sometimes she would listen to us from outside, when we didn't know she was there, and then attack us for saying things she didn't like. Three or four days later, though, she'd return, and it would never be mentioned again.

Always unpredictable, Beck's inner life was, at least from the outside, both a space in which wildly original ideas developed and a conduit for other people's tastes and desires — by which I mean that she eventually felt these as her own. When I asked her about Smithy masturbating in front of me, she assured me that ‘he doesn't like you especially, he does this to everyone'.

Indeed, Smithy was often sexually obsessed with whoever was around him, and at that time this included — and was mainly — me. When Smithy would masturbate in front of me and ask for details of my sexual fantasies, Beck would rearrange the drawers, or find some other task that kept her in the room, despite how ill at ease she appeared to be. Her look of bewilderment would gradually give way to a frown, a creased forehead, and slumped shoulders. Smithy, in turn, would miss the subtext — (that she kind of wanted to join in, but didn't; probably wanted to tell him to stop, but couldn't) — and look at her with deep, wondrous suspicion before concluding, and then asserting: ‘Stop stealing my fucking pot.'

There we were: taking drugs, living in our imaginations, living out our dreams and nightmares, becoming possessed. My ex-boyfriend Nathaniel haunted me in the years we broke up, whether I was on drugs or not. But on crystal meth I talked about him constantly, I thought about him constantly, I wondered what he might be like now that he was older — twenty-one — I wrote poems about him, songs about him, grieved the mistakes I made, wondered how it might have turned out if we had met a little later.

One day, when I'd had a dose of crystal meth the night before, and was walking around the kitchen thinking about Nathaniel, a visitor to the house said to me, ‘I've been keeping track and you've been walking around that bench for seven hours.'

Two nights later, when I was yet again high, our other roommate walked in the door with his young girlfriend. The more I looked at her, the more I thought about it, the more I believed she looked like Nathaniel — short in stature, slightly androgynous, brown hair, brown eyes, dark skin.

Later that night, I started thinking this apparent ‘fact' through again, and it occurred to me that at around the same time Smithy and I had had that fight (the one that ended with him on top of me on the lounge room floor of their old Pakenham house) Nathaniel had also broken up with me. I concluded that they had orchestrated this event, because Smithy didn't like the way I treated Nathaniel, and he wanted to turn Nathaniel into a transsexual, so that he and his mates could have their way with the new female Nathaniel. Then, over time, I further concluded that Nathaniel was now named Kristie, and had started a relationship with a guy in that group of friends, who also happened to be Smithy's roommate.

So a few nights later, I still believed this, though I'd also had periods where I believed it to be a delusion, and longer periods where I completely forgot about it. But on this night, as soon as Kristie walked in the door, I looked her up and down, thinking that Nathaniel had done a pretty good job at becoming a woman, except for his shoes, and so I walked up to her and said, ‘Everything looks okay, but I don't like your shoes.'

Then I called my Mum again, who once again talked me down, and then sent me a stack of emails telling me that I needed to get off ice and that it was destroying my brain. In return, I told her that she needed to apologise for kicking me out of home, as well as for ignoring the bullying I was going through in high school When she refused, I refused to stop taking the drug. And on it went.

One thing that didn't really change, though, was my belief that I was on The Journey — that some kind of creative discovery was in store for me, and that I was getting closer to realising it.

Smithy would usually ask me if I wanted meth when he was going to score. When I was trying to keep down my doses, and sometimes even succeeding, I would say ‘no, thank you', but would often, much to his annoyance and long after the meth had arrived, change my mind, and ask if I could have some. The following happened on one of those nights.

‘You bloody always do this, Luke,' Smithy said. ‘If you want some, you need to ask me in advance.'

I apologised, saying I would pay him back, and he agreed to give it to me.

‘There's only one issue,' he said. ‘There are no fresh needles; you're going to have to get a used one out of The Bag.'

‘The Bag' was a large, sturdy bag that sat at the top of Smithy's wardrobe. It was a suitably dreadful jumble of freshly used, hepatitis-inducing needles, bloodied swabs, and bent spoons. For future reference, if you ever see a bent spoon with white stains on it, stay away; it is not something you should be using for your Petit Miam.

I kept reaching my hand in and then pulling it out again, as if I had dropped my wedding ring in a bag full of mousetraps. I finally took the plunge, and laid my hand on one of the 50 or so needles in the bag. It had a red cover on it, just like every single other one, and was surrounded by bloodied cotton swabs, and, for some reason, it seemed like the one to choose — who knows, it might have even been mine.

So I carefully picked it out and unscrewed the lid; when I looked down the shaft, I could see a glob of dried blood in the end — it looked like something not even a mosquito would eat, and I almost vomited. Nevertheless, I went in the kitchen and started washing out the needle. No matter how hard I squeezed, and how much bleach I put in the bottom of the syringe, I could not get that last remaining bit of dried blood out of it — it was as if it had been painted on. Then there was a knock at the door.

You can't see directly into the kitchen from the front door, so I wasn't worried until I heard Smithy's mother's voice.

Oh no, I can't let her see me like this; she thinks I am one of the few decent people hanging around with her son
, I thought.

Panicked, I ran into the garage with the syringe and rushed to put the lid on; at that moment, my fingers slipped and the tip of the needle went straight into the top of my index finger. A surprising amount of blood flowed for a good ten minutes while I hid in the main bathroom until she left.

A few nights after the dirty-syringe episode, Smithy was listening to triple j loudly in the lounge room. For the most part, the biggest threat as perceived in my psychosis was the radio — particularly triple j. I would think that Smithy was texting them and telling them what I was doing, that the songs were about me, and that the presenters on the radio were doing impersonations of me.

On the Friday night at the end of the same week, Smithy had two female visitors to the house, who had visited before. After they left, I started to wonder if they were who they said they were. Why were they so worried? Were they actually relatives of mine who had been sent in to see if I was okay?

While I was sitting there thinking about this, Smithy walked in, his Popeye-zombie eye flaring again, and said he had given them the last of his meth for free. He did this, apparently, because one of the women had sent him a sext telling him that she and her sister were about to take a bath together.

This text message struck me as being part of their subterfuge, and added to my desire to work out whom they really were. I asked him first if I could text them, and he said no, very angrily, and then I asked if they were prostitutes. The answer was, again, no. Not having my usual capacities to just let things lie, I then asked him — relatively innocently and probably naively — whether he thought that maybe they were winding him up in order to get free crystal meth.

‘Are you sure they're not just manipulating you, Smithy? I mean, do these girls ever pay for the drugs you give them?'

‘That's none of your fucking business.'

‘Well, I just find it highly unlikely that two sisters would get in a bath together, and that the only time they talk sexy to you is when they're half an hour away.'