by Malcolm Knox
Gagalowicz returned to the bathroom while the other three sat, stunned and silent, in the lounge room. Eventually they started playing cards. They were all, throughout these events, high on ice.
Some time later, Gagalowicz came into the lounge room and said they had to get rid of the body. He drew a diagram to show where he’d cut off Smith’s head, arms and legs. His girlfriend phoned someone to ask to borrow their car, but was unsuccessful.
The ensuing days, which nobody has been able to recount with any accuracy, seem best described as a plunge into even deeper anarchy, with the quartet injecting ice frequently. It increased their energy and sense of invulnerability, eroding any conscience about what they had done and were doing. They were skidding along on the surface of events.
Gagalowicz put Smith’s body into the laundry, where it soon began, in the summer heat, to emit a smell. He and Farrington went to the shops to buy topsoil, lime, a trowel and seeds. Seduced by his own plans to escape punishment, Gagalowicz told his friends that nobody would find the body under his new vegetable patch.
At one point, Gagalowicz picked up a whiteboard texta and wrote I am God, as well as other gibberish, on the bathroom wall. He sprayed shaving cream, Jackson Pollock-style, all over the bathroom. When he had removed the body parts from the laundry and buried them in the garden—Farrington helping him dig the hole and throw grass clippings over the disturbed ground—Gagalowicz let off a cockroach bomb in the laundry to neutralise the smell of rotting flesh.
Two months were to pass before Smith’s remains came to light. Gagalowicz and his girlfriend had begun quarrelling, evidently wilting under the strain of what Gagalowicz had done and the knowledge of the body in the backyard. The couple moved out and went to Canberra, where they both checked into a seven-day detox clinic at Arcadia House. They left after three days, moving in with the girl’s parents in southern Sydney until Gagalowicz moved back to his parents’ house. About a fortnight after he killed Smith, Gagalowicz ‘celebrated’ his nineteenth birthday. He was still taking crystal meth, either from what remained of Smith’s stash or what he could buy with the proceeds of his latest Centrelink cheque.
Meanwhile Farrington and Lewis stayed at Farrell Road, where Farrington threw some broken doors and sticks and other rubbish onto the grave to keep covering it up.
It wasn’t until mid-April, nine weeks after the killing, that Gagalowicz’s now ex-girlfriend cleared her conscience and told her parents what she knew: there was a dismembered body buried in the yard of the Farrell Road house. Her parents took her to Sutherland police station in Sydney’s south on 16 April to make a statement, and police officers then drove to Bulli where they dug up Smith’s remains. The torso, arms and legs were wrapped in plastic garbage bags, which were in turn wrapped in a doona and stuffed into a suitcase. Smith’s wallet was with those parts. His head was in a garbage bag inside a pillowcase.
Matthew Gagalowicz was arrested on 19 April—suffering a psychotic episode and collapsing on the day of his arrest—and charged with murder. He pleaded not guilty to murder, saying he was impaired by his ice addiction and had not intended to kill Smith. After a four-day trial in April 2005, a jury acquitted him of murder but found him guilty of manslaughter.
In sentencing Gagalowicz to eight years’ imprisonment, with a non-parole period of four years, Justice Michael Adams pointed to a number of issues that would come to exercise courts when weighing up crimes committed by ice users having psychotic episodes. Was the drug’s effect—mirroring a mental illness such as paranoid schizophrenia—itself a kind of mental illness? Could a perpetrator on ice really know the difference between right and wrong, and could he have the ability to formulate an intent to kill?
And then there was the horrifically excessive violence of the crime itself. Though he could not remember more than one or two blows, Gagalowicz had hit Smith’s head with the baseball bat at least twelve times. Smith’s head was smashed in like an eggshell. Associate Professor Johan Duflou, the chief forensic pathologist who examined Smith, said the force with which Gagalowicz had attacked his victim was ‘well in excess of what I tend to usually see’. Then there was the focused, almost methodical manner with which Smith had been dismembered and buried, clearly showing a purposeful plan of cover-up. It appeared that the ice users—not only Gagalowicz but Farrington and possibly the girls—had the ability to detach themselves from what had happened and go about the business of concealing the crime with a degree of vigour and care that they applied to little else in their lives. Concentrating on disposing of the body pushed away the mayhem of their day-to-day lives, and gave them a purpose. If Gagalowicz’s girlfriend hadn’t later repented and told her parents, Smith’s body might never have been recovered.
How was a court to deal with what was in some ways a new order of crime? In Gagalowicz’s sentencing hearing on 8 July 2005, Justice Adams said that ‘both the character of this attack and the subsequent dismemberment are acts of such extraordinary violence that, although in one sense they are rationally connected to the intentional killing or causing of grievous bodily harm to the deceased and destroying the evidence, they in fact signify the effects of a severe mental illness’.
Mental illness can exonerate an accused person. Did this mean that Gagalowicz was legally incapable of committing murder?
Justice Adams went on:
In all the circumstances, having regard in particular to the extent of the violence with which the deceased was killed, I have concluded beyond reasonable doubt that the offender intended to kill the deceased. Whilst I think that the offender’s reasoning was very substantially distorted by his mental condition and that it was this condition which induced his loss of self-control, he was not acting as an automaton; to use the vernacular, although his intention to kill was ‘mad’, it was nevertheless present. I reject the reasonable possibility that the offender intended only to cause grievous bodily harm: the violence is simply too extensive for this possibility to be reasonably open. At the same time, had it not been for the psychosis which he was suffering at the time, I do not believe the offender would have committed this dreadful crime.
It was a subtle judgment, saying in effect that Gagalowicz was not mentally ill, but he acted like a mentally ill person. He was responsible for his actions, but he acted like someone who had no idea what he was doing. He was not so under the influence of the drug that his intoxication might have exonerated him, yet he wouldn’t have done what he had if he hadn’t been taking the drug.
The complexity of the judgment eluded Smith’s family and other victims of crime representatives, who reacted with dismay and outrage to what they saw as the leniency of the sentence.
Manslaughter attracted a maximum penalty of 25 years in New South Wales, and Gagalowicz, who had shown good prospects for rehabilitation and expressed genuine remorse and sorrow for Smith’s family, might be out in four. It was unacceptable to the Crown, which appealed to the Court of Criminal Appeal (CCA).
Passing its judgment on 22 December 2005, the CCA took a much harder line on Gagalowicz. Justice Adams had taken account of the effect of Gagalowicz’s missed insulin injections, but the CCA dismissed this as any kind of mitigation. More importantly, it refused to allow any mitigatory effect of Gagalowicz’s troubled childhood and adolescence:
There is nothing in his history that in our view gives rise to any mitigation of the respondent’s culpability due to his drug use at the time of the killing. The history does not suggest that the respondent became involved with amphetamine other than as a result of a choice he made albeit when he was a teenager. The history is not remarkably different to that of many drug users in the community.
In other words, he ‘chose’ to take drugs and becoming addicted to ice was no different from any other addiction. Finding Justice Adams’s sentence ‘manifestly inadequate’, the CCA added two years to Gagalowicz’s non-parole period. As we shall see, it also laid down a much harsher precedent for later courts to follow, and a philosophy on crystal m
eth that was, arguably, still to catch up with the reality of the drug.
It’s never entirely possible to establish a link between where methamphetamine originates and where it ends up. Unlike plant-based drugs such as cannabis, cocaine and heroin, methamphetamine is synthesised from more or less universal components. Yet it’s eminently plausible that the Wollongong area ice which Rick Smith bought, used and sold to Matthew Gagalowicz and his friends came from a supplier called John Anthony Hezemans.
The crystal meth wave had hit the Illawarra in 2002. A working-class industrial and rural area with high unemployment south of Sydney, the Illawarra shared some characteristics with those areas of the United States struck hardest by the crystal meth epidemic. From a user’s point of view, the first thing to understand about ice is its cost-effectiveness. It gets you higher for longer, for less money, than any other drug. It’s the cheap sherry, the Frigate overproof rum, of the drug world. If your sole concern was to get extremely high as cheaply as possible, ice would be your drug.
An Illawarra health worker, Mick Fernandez, had noted the advent of ice back in August 2001. Working for the Illawarra Area Health Service social health team’s First Step program, Fernandez said there had been a sharp rise in ice use due to the heroin drought. It took the Gagalowicz–Smith killing to bring home a full awareness of the presence of ice in the Illawarra, but although the crime was carried out in February 2003 the trial, and its publicity, didn’t take place until early 2005. By then the region was awash with the drug; indeed, one user told the Illawarra Mercury in April 2004 that he never came across ice until he moved from Sydney to Wollongong.
One of the first media reports of ice in Australia came from the Illawarra. Back in 1999, Allan James Wakeford of Mount Warrigal was on ice when his car veered to the wrong side of the Princes Highway near Dunmore, hitting two motorcyclists. Wakeford was jailed in October 2001 for two and a half years.
Then there were small-time users like 32-year-old Warilla man Jason Leslie Horne and his 23-year-old Dapto girlfriend Melissa Edwards. In 2002 the unemployed couple shared a costly ice habit. Horne was convicted for break and enter, and jailed in Tumbarumba, in the southern NSW alps. But Edwards was pregnant with their child and told him she would harm herself if he didn’t escape from jail.
‘She told me that her mum had kicked her out of home. She had nowhere to go and she more or less said that if I didn’t escape that night, she was going to kill herself and the baby,’ Horne told a court.
Edwards created a diversion during which Horne escaped, and they went on a drugs and crime spree for eight days before being arrested in the Illawarra, at an Albion Park service station, on 28 October 2002. They had broken into homes in Kiama, Gerringong and the Southern Highlands to steal goods which they would exchange for ice.
But they, like Matthew Gagalowicz, were at the end of the line. Much further up were dealers like John Anthony Hezemans.
Hezemans, who grew up around Warrawong, in the Port Kembla area, had used drugs since his mid-teens. He was smart enough not to addle his brain too badly, and like many users who keep their wits about them, he turned to part-time supply, generating enough income for his own drugs, eventually building up a full-time network with himself at the top. It is what can be called organised crime, but it doesn’t involve mafiosi or Triads or codes or secret societies; it’s just a matter of a user whose friends ask him to get drugs for them. He does so reliably, and then he starts doing it regularly, and to make his time worthwhile he skims off a cash margin between what he’s bought and what he’s sold. Then he sees the possibilities of selling larger amounts, not so much to individuals as to other users down the line who have the same idea that he started out with—to be the connected guy, the one who scores drugs to on-sell to all his friends for a big party—and suddenly our original man is a drug kingpin. Very often it is a low-key, suburban, hobby-like kind of business, more like tupperware parties than The Godfather.
Hezemans became a plumber, but by July 2003, when ice hit the Illawarra, Hezemans, then 41, was doing no more work with monkey wrenches. Instead he headed an Amway-style operation from his home in Bent Street, Warrawong, that generated more than $10 000 a week in commissions for himself. He used lower-level dealers who paid him their welfare money in exchange for drugs, which they could then run and sell at a profit. Among those dealers at the next rung was his de facto wife, Michelle Shaw, and his eldest son, as well as a 44-year-old named Neville Barry Maher, who drove up and down the south coast selling ice to people like Rick Smith, who sold it to people like Matthew Gagalowicz. In a three-month period when police had him under surveillance, Neville Maher conducted more than 1100 small ice deals, often no more than a point (0.1 gram) at a time, netting about $100 000 from desperate Illawarra users. Maher’s father had recently died, and while grieving he became addicted to crystal methamphetamine. To finance his habit, Maher was one of several distributors in Hezemans’s pyramid, which Wollongong District Court Judge Joe Phelan would liken to a cooperative. As an indicator of his greed—or perhaps his wish for a ‘cover’ of legitimate income—Hezemans also drew Commonwealth welfare payments for himself.
More than 150 police participated in Operation Motifs, the three-month surveillance offensive that ended with a sweep on Hezemans’s home and eight other addresses in southern Wollongong in July 2003. Hezemans pleaded guilty to a handful of methamphetamine supply charges. He was also caught harbouring a courthouse escapee, Maher’s brother Geoffrey, to which he pleaded guilty. Geoffrey Maher had escaped from Wollongong Court earlier that month. His four-day run ended with a seven-hour siege at Hezemans’s house. Hezemans also pleaded guilty to kidnapping a man who was believed to be involved in the murder of a Port Kembla prostitute, Maria Scott.
For all those convictions, Hezemans was sentenced to a total of four years in jail. (Neville Maher, who showed genuine contrition for his crimes, entered rehab and was top of his TAFE class in land management while in jail, ultimately received a suspended sentence plus time served.)
The rash of ice-related incidents and arrests in regional areas gave ample support to the police belief that, by the middle of 2003, ice was not just a city drug. As well as the wave from Sydney southwards to the Illawarra, it was also radiating north into the Hunter region, which has many socioeconomic similarities with the Wollongong area. In June 2003, Clinton Morgan, a 21-year-old from the Newcastle suburb of Blackalls Park, became possibly the first Australian to die from the direct toxicological effects of ice when he expired in John Hunter Hospital. The same year, a Newcastle gardener named Graham Lomas suffered an ice-related psychotic episode during which he believed he was being pursued by underworld figures. Fleeing his imaginary assailants, Lomas hijacked a car and injured its female occupant.
Meanwhile, the Sun-Herald newspaper did a report on the use of ice in the unemployment-stricken Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney. ‘Half the town is on it,’ a twenty-year-old Katoomba ice user, Emily, told the paper. A worker at the Upper Mountains Youth Service said, ‘I raised with police a few months ago that crystal meth was in high use here. There has been quite a lot of violence and robbery associated with it. That’s what we’ve heard on the street.’
It was in 2003 that the mainstream media woke up to ice. While the Sun-Herald was sending reporters to the Blue Mountains, the Daily Telegraph sent a journalist to Jindabyne during the ski season. More than Thredbo or Perisher, Jindabyne has a reputation as a hard-partying town, in part because it has a younger, more penurious and transient population, and it’s where the ‘lifties’ and other ski resort workers live. A professional snowboarder, Steve Milligan, had been murdered there earlier in the year, and police suspected it was due to Milligan’s sideline in methamphetamine dealing. Soon, the Telegraph’s Angela Kamper was trawling the Jindabyne nightclubs and was offered ice on numerous occasions.
Elsewhere in the countryside, Inspector Daryl Venables of the Wagga Wagga police said that ice had spread there by 2003.
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sp; Why was ice moving so swiftly into country towns? It had taken heroin decades to penetrate towns like Wagga and Jindabyne, yet ice had done it in a matter of months. One theory was that the cup was simply full in the cities and the drug had to find other places to go. Besides, ice was so cheap and so easily manufactured and trafficked that it had a natural head start over a drug like heroin. Another explanation for ice’s popularity is shockingly basic: people loved it. It made them feel great for a long time.
If the story of ice’s surge after the heroin drought could be told through a single human case study, Dudley Aslett would be the exemplar. There is a logical argument to say that the heroin drought, by leading to a switch of drug among injecting users, wreaked untold havoc: heroin users, who would have been happy to nod off and pursue their lives of petty crime, of greatest danger only to themselves, were now turned into crazed homicidal maniacs by their new addiction. Of course it’s never that simple. But Dudley Aslett showed how a devastating chain reaction, ruining the lives of epicircles of people around him, can start with a user’s switch from heroin to ice.
By the beginning of 2003, Dudley Mark Aslett was 31 years old and had spent most of his adulthood in jail. His rap sheet included 55 jailable offences, not to mention some other minor ones for which he escaped with a fine or a caution. Aslett was in more or less continuous custody between the ages of eleven and 33. As soon as he got out, he reoffended. He couldn’t help it.
The tabulation of Dudley Aslett’s offences does not portray an individual beyond the pale of civilisation. He was a career criminal, and as a criminal psychologist, Anna Robilliard, said of his record, it presented ‘a picture of wilful disobedience to the law, a complete failure on the Prisoner’s part to respond to any of the opportunities that have been provided for rehabilitation and for supervision, as well as an escalating pattern of criminality’.
