by Malcolm Knox
August–September 2007: NSW and federal police busted two large meth syndicates in Queanbeyan and Canberra, arresting ten men and seizing more than a million dollars’ worth of the drug.
This brief digest of law enforcement action shows how active police became once they were alert to crystal meth and its dangers. It is the tip of an impressive iceberg. With so much interdiction in one form or another, it might be expected that ice would go the way of heroin, and a drought would follow.
So when NDARC compiled its summary of Australian drug trends in 2006, law enforcement specialists were hoping to see the first signs of drought: falling availability and purity, and rising prices.
Instead, the price—around $50 for a point—was stable across all the Australian states. Purity was stable to rising. Availability was, in the view of users, either the same or becoming easier. There was evidently a much larger iceberg down below, still finding its way to users. And the real story of ice, as always, is best told from the user’s end.
As the history of domestic violence shows, love and intoxicants are the worst marriage of all. Todd James Bookham was in love with Karen Lee Anne-Marie Fairbairn, but he was also in love with drugs.
Bookham, born in 1983, was atypical of some of the people we have seen committing crimes under the influence of ice, in that he came from a happy and stable home in northern Victoria, and most of his relatives and friends knew him as caring, fun-loving and loyal.
The second of three sons, Bookham started to struggle with school in his mid-teens. He dropped out after year ten and studied for an apprenticeship in welding, but he couldn’t hold down a job for long. For some reason, when he liked the company the work would end, and when the work was ongoing he couldn’t get on with the boss.
Throughout his employment ups and downs, he was living with his parents. His father seemed constantly disappointed in him, which led to Todd placing enormous pressure on himself.
Aside from some drink-driving infringements, Bookham had no criminal record. He wasn’t a criminal; he was a troubled young man who suffered from depressive episodes so severe that he once shaved all his hair off to stop himself from pulling it out in clumps.
At eighteen, Bookham fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl who soon became pregnant. He was overjoyed. She wasn’t. When she suffered a miscarriage, Bookham was convinced that she had terminated the pregnancy. She broke up with him and he plunged into his worst suicidal depression, leading to a spell at the Baudinet Centre for treatment.
Around the time of his twenty-first birthday, Bookham finally moved out of his parents’ home, into a share house with some friends in Swan Hill. He was able to put aside his feelings of worthlessness and have a good time. Through his friends, he met Karen Fairbairn, a vivacious and spirited young local.
Drinking and drug-taking were the household’s chief bonding activities. Bookham threw himself into it, smoking cannabis and taking ecstasy and amphetamines, including ice. When his mother saw him, she was increasingly disturbed by his mood swings—weeping one moment, strutting around self-importantly the next. Sometimes he would come home, bury his head in his hands and gibber nonsense to her or to himself. One night he went to his car muttering about committing suicide by stabbing himself or smashing into a tree; his mother stood in front of the vehicle to stop him leaving.
He was, his mother said, ‘definitely out of control’ with his drug-taking. Unlike his previous girlfriend, Karen Fairbairn took drugs with Bookham, but she also had her limits. In the end what made her question Bookham’s sanity wasn’t the amount of drugs he was taking, but what they were doing to him.
He started to accuse her of having an affair with her stepsister, Annette Mary Jayne Elliott. Fairbairn told him he was being ridiculously paranoid. He backed off, but then accused her again. Their relationship turned into a running battle of suspicion and denial. Eventually she told him they needed to take a break from each other. Bookham, devastated, refused to accept it.
Gearing up for New Year’s Eve 2004, Bookham drank all day on 30 December, and smoked dope and ice. He had smoked marijuana for years. He’d started taking ice only recently.
He moved his belongings out of the Swan Hill house, but just before midnight he rang Fairbairn. Elliott, who worked at the Swan Hill Club, had come to visit her stepsister at 9.30 pm, bringing her six-year-old son Cody with her. When Bookham insisted on coming over to talk to Fairbairn, Elliott went and collected him.
Bookham and Fairbairn met outside her house. She said she would only give him five minutes. They sat side by side on a step, and Bookham said he loved her and wanted to work things out.
‘It’s too late,’ she said. ‘It’s over. I don’t love you anymore.’
Bookham put his left arm around her neck and his right around her waist. At first it seemed like an affectionate hug, but as he pulled her in she realised he was putting her in a headlock.
‘If you move,’ he said, ‘I’ll slit your throat.’
‘As if you’d do that,’ she said, holding her nerve.
But he would. He brought out a hunting knife and ran it across her throat, making a shallow fifteen-centimetre cut.
‘Fuck, you’ve cut me!’ she screamed, pulling away from him and pressing her hands to the wound.
Annette Elliott rushed to the door. Bookham stood and charged at her, tackling her backwards into the house, screaming accusations at Karen’s ‘lover’. He stabbed Elliott in the chest, rupturing her diaphragm and stomach.
Cody, the six-year-old boy, was standing watching, screaming and crying as his mother rolled around on the floor fighting Bookham.
Fairbairn came in and, ignoring the pain from her slit throat, jumped onto Bookham, trying to pull him away from her stepsister. As furniture was smashed around them, Bookham got up and ran out the door.
Fairbairn checked on Elliott, helping tend to her chest wound. Then she got up to see if Bookham had left.
He hadn’t. He was loitering outside. When he saw his ex-girlfriend at the door, he rushed back. She slammed it in his face, and he stabbed it with a knife, screaming out, then running away again.
In his disordered state, Bookham ran to a phone box and called for an ambulance. When help came, he said the women had attacked and stabbed him. He displayed some scratches on his legs. The knife was found rammed into a tree.
Karen Fairbairn’s injuries were easily treated, though the psychological scars would persist. Annette Elliott had to be airlifted to the cardiothoracic unit of St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, where her left lung, stomach and diaphragm were repaired. She suffered an infection and, later, anxiety and insomnia. She became morbidly protective of her son and suspicious of other people. Her little boy suffered nightmares and became very aggressive at times, knocked off-balance by what he had seen.
Once he was arrested, Bookham changed. Drug-free, he expressed deep contrition for what he’d done, and followed counselling programs diligently. It helped that most of his family and friends forgave and supported him.
He pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of Fairbairn, receiving an eight-year prison term, and guilty to intentionally causing serious injury to Elliott. He would have to serve seven and a half years before becoming eligible for parole; the courts believed he had every chance of rehabilitating himself. Seven years would be a good test of that.
In late 2005, Mark Thomas and Vicki Wolf were going through a temporary separation. Mark lived in the Waverley house, looking after their daughters, who were in grades four and two at a private school, while Vicki was renting a serviced apartment in the city. Mark wasn’t working; he was ‘on sabbatical’ from the food company where he was an in-house legal counsel. Vicki was still at the commercial law firm where she had started, and was still an associate partner. The jackpot of partnership was eluding her more stubbornly than she’d expected. Mark had given up crystal for a while; Vicki hadn’t.
They’d discovered, back at the end of 2003 and start of 2004, that they had dif
ferent tolerances to crystal. Mark, usually an even-tempered man, had begun to suffer from sharp mood swings. ‘Driving the car to the shops could feel like I was in a NASCAR race,’ he says, ‘and I was a bad loser.’
He would scream at other drivers, cut them off intentionally, work himself into a lather of hatred looking at a neighbouring driver while waiting at a red light. When he let fly at them—or any stranger; once, in a supermarket, ‘I just went off my head at this woman because she didn’t say thank you to me when I let her into the queue’—he was flooded with relief, a delicious cascade of warmth from the top of his head down.
The rages, he soon identified, were at their worst on Mondays. Then, on Tuesdays, he’d spend the whole day wanting to kill himself.
‘My life was shit. I was a total failure. I kept just looking back over the whole thing, like I was stocktaking, and all I could see was where I’d come up short. It was relentless. I know that sounds nonsense to someone from the outside, who’s seeing me as this rich young lawyer with the beautiful wife and kids, the house and that, but I never believed in defining myself by the trappings, you know, not even at the best of times, and now it was more than just, “the trappings aren’t important”, it was, “I am shit and the trappings are just more proof that I am shit”. I wasn’t well. And this was always happening on Tuesdays.’
Vicki also had the bursts of rage, mainly at work, early in the week. Mondays and Tuesdays were the days when she and Mark would have quarrels that sent their daughters running to their bedrooms. But when Mark tried to connect the pattern of anger with the Friday–Saturday sessions, Vicki would have none of it.
‘She’d just say it was bullshit, that I was dodging the real issue, which was whatever I’d done that made her unhappy,’ he says.
Vicki says: ‘I didn’t want to make the connection.’
So in 2004 Mark took a break from crystal, and Vicki didn’t.
‘That was the worst decision,’ she says. ‘I thought he should have just grown up and stopped feeling sorry for himself. I was like, “Come on, a party’ll cheer you up”. I thought he did the damage to our marriage by giving up [crystal]. I still think that whatever we did, give up or keep smoking, we should have done it together. I’m not saying it was his fault that I didn’t give up. I’m just saying that’s how it was.’
They didn’t separate because of this decision. They separated because Vicki had an affair.
She was hanging out more with Peter, the colleague who had reintroduced her and Mark to shabu in 2001. Peter, by that time, had been smoking for a couple of years, and didn’t lose his head and go crazy when he was on crystal. He’d built up a tolerance; Vicki saw that as cool. She’d embarrass herself by dancing on tables and speaking too loudly and dragging Mark off to have sex, and meanwhile Peter was just grooving along, ‘like an adult’, as she put it.
She gravitated to Peter at work and began to have lunch with him. If Mark called, she’d ignore his number or pretend the reception was bad and call him back later. She was enjoying her secretiveness more than ever. She and Peter would go, on Thursdays, to meet the young dealer and his skater friends in a house they rented in Cronulla. She’d tell Mark she was working late, and duck away with the thrill of a teenage truant. And these kids were cool too. They were into BMX riding, and skateboarding, and surfing. When they did crystal, they’d go out and try new stunts. They weren’t like pathetic dope smokers; they used crystal for a purpose. When they smoked, they planned what they’d do with their bikes or boards. And then went out and did it.
While she was living with Mark, Vicki couldn’t go on big crystal blow-outs, so rather than quit smoking she found herself using the drug in a utilitarian way. She’d have a smoke and sit up all night doing her tax return. She’d smoke when she brought home repetitive work tasks, to catch up (she didn’t seem as productive in the office anymore, and her billable hours—the six-minute units into which she had to chop her working days— had been in a steady decline). Meanwhile she hated her job, and much of her conversation was a litany of complaint about the people she worked with, particularly the partners who had it in for her and wouldn’t promote her. There was an organised conspiracy to overlook her and other associates of her age, skip a generation and give partnerships to practitioners in their twenties. She couldn’t stand the bullshit, the politics, the campaigning. She wasn’t into it; she wouldn’t sell her soul for a crummy partnership. Why would she want to be a partner with those unreconstructed misogynist wankers anyway?
She would pour this out to Peter, who, like Vicki, had been overlooked. He said they were being ‘managed out’ of their jobs and he was planning to take a redundancy if, as was rumoured, they were offered. Peter had bought an investment unit in Chinatown and was renting it to the skateboarders, who had set up a meth-cooking facility to earn them all some money and keep him, Peter, in supply.
Which soon meant Vicki too. She had avoided smoking alone with Peter out of a self-created sense of ‘boundaries’—in other words, she knew what might happen. He was an attractive, unmarried guy, and she had a husband who was getting on her nerves. ‘Don’t go there,’ she told herself. But one day she had to drive to Newcastle to meet a group of important clients. She had a point in the glovebox to smoke before the meeting. Other staff from the law firm were going as well, but Vicki had intentionally missed their minibus so that she could travel alone. She couldn’t face these meetings without a smoke on the way.
But at the last minute, Peter called her: he’d missed the minibus too. Could she give him a lift?
They drove up the old Pacific Highway and pulled over at a waterside park in Belmont. They had a smoke. Vicki knew what would happen, and it did.
Telling Mark was the easy part; separating from the girls was harder. But there was no question about it. Mark was, at the moment, a better parent. He’d taken the break from his job so as to spend more time with the girls, and was taking it seriously, as if to make up for Vicki’s negligence. Mark had gone all square on her. He wanted to be a better father. Now that she’d told him about her ‘thing’ with Peter, he flaunted his commitment to fathering like a reproach.
It wasn’t that Vicki didn’t want to be a better mother—of course she did. But she also wanted to keep partying, she wanted to press ahead with her 60-hour-a-week career ‘even though it was killing me’, and she wanted to take some time away from Mark. Not all of these desires were compatible. She told herself that she’d had sex with Peter as a way of bringing things to a head, an avenue for telling Mark she wanted a separation. And maybe things would sort themselves out with a bit of space.
She was keenly aware that it was a bad look, however, for a mother to have left her children, even if temporarily. So guilty was she that Vicki dropped out of contact with her parents. A tight-knit family group, their interest in her circumstances offended her sense of privacy and alienated her from them. They talked a lot with Mark and swallowed his side of the story, which only made Vicki resent them and guard herself more zealously.
She knew she was messed up, but this was a necessary phase of self-discovery, she thought. She’d be better for it. She took out a short-term rental on a serviced apartment and saw the kids most weeks—during the week, rather than on weekends, which she spent with Peter and the young skateboarding guys.
By now, Vicki was only straightening out from the past weekend on Wednesday, and by Thursday she and Peter would be arranging deals. Sometimes they’d have an early start for the next weekend. Life was a weekend. Wednesday was her ‘CFD’—crystal-free day.
It sounds from this distance as if her life was spinning out of control. It didn’t seem like that to her at the time, though. ‘I was quite steady and rational, in my mind at least. I actually thought I was the only person who was being rational, and Mark and my family were the ones who were losing it.’
She and Peter didn’t go to parties as much. Vicki didn’t want to run into friends or acquaintances and face the relentless questioning over
Mark and the girls. She really didn’t want to see anyone except Peter. When she smoked now, she liked to stay home and clean, or do paperwork, or watch television, or play the computer games on which Peter was hooked. More and more she saw crystal as an efficiency-assisting medication. She hated wasting her time. Getting high was not an escape from life’s mundane tasks, it was a way of making them tolerable and even enjoyable. It wasn’t about tuning in and dropping out, it was about work and usefulness. It was a drug of the age.
She liked that it helped her keep her weight down. She heard the stories of girls using it as a weight-control drug to counter the effects of alcohol, ‘and I guess I was seeing it the same way’, she says. ‘It was all bound up with me making the best of my life. I was drinking a huge amount, and the crystal was, you know, to offset the alcohol. Peter and I were smoking heaps of dope, too, to take the edge off the crystal and help us come down, but dope has its own after-effects and I’d smoke some crystal to clear my head of the herbal haze. That was how the logic worked. I know it sounds stupid, but everything made sense to us then, as if crystal was helping us on this sort of health kick.’
The initial rush of smoking crystal was still there, but the overall effect over the five or six hours of a high was to normalise her. She was no longer taking it to enhance her already good mood, as she had in the early days with Mark. Now she smoked to push away a negative mood: subdue the jitters, the anxiety, the anger, the self-recrimination. Crystal wasn’t making her manic anymore; it calmed her down. ‘It didn’t take me high; it straightened me out.’
She was using one to two grams a week. It wasn’t a big habit in the scheme of things, and the scheme of things was that she knew people who smoked or blasted five or ten grams (who was keeping count? Not her, not them). The scheme of things wasn’t as it used to be. Vicki’s entire settings of normality had shifted. She had a high-paying job, she had a nice apartment, she drove a Lexus, and she wasn’t doing anyone else any injury. She even rationalised her separation from Mark and the girls by this contorted logic of minimising harm. She would have been hurting them more by staying at home and growing increasingly unhappy. So she told herself.
