by Malcolm Knox
The Turning Point Drug and Alcohol Centre, in Fitzroy, Melbourne, interviews users about their attitudes towards certain drugs each year. It found that crystal meth use declined between 2003 and 2005. In 2003, two-thirds of ecstasy users had recently used crystal, but by 2005 fewer than half had. ‘People see the harmful effects in their friends, or they may experience it themselves,’ says the lead researcher, Jennifer Johnstone. American psychiatrist epidemiologist Ernest Drucker backed up this idea of drug education, telling a conference in Melbourne that ‘most [users] get the hell scared out of them and don’t come back to the drug’.
Vicki Wolf and her boyfriend Peter had moved up to Queensland in 2006. They both had taken six-figure redundancy payouts from the Sydney legal firm where they’d worked, and were able to rent a handsome apartment overlooking Broad-beach. Peter had friends on the Gold Coast, and Vicki wanted to get away from the niggling and guilt trips laid on her by her husband Mark. She would miss her daughters, but she saw this trip up north as a ‘sabbatical’ to freshen herself up and get a new outlook on life. She convinced herself that she was moving a thousand kilometres away for her children.
She wasn’t slowing down on the crystal. Queensland had a claim to being the methamphetamine capital of Australia, with 212 clandestine labs found in 2004 and amphetamines being the primary drug of choice for 40 per cent of drug rehab patients. Sean Cousins, president of the Gold Coast Drug Council, said in 2006 that ‘there is nowhere else in the Western world that has a worse problem of amphetamines than south-east Queensland’. It may have been a hyperbolic claim, but for Vicki and her well-connected boyfriend the Gold Coast had it all: sun, beaches, nightclubs—and crystal on tap.
Peter had been ‘blasting’ or injecting since 2002 or 2003. Vicki was scared of needles, and put up with the ragging from him and his blaster friends; yet she also envied them. Smoking was fine, but she could see that it was the blast of the spike that took Peter back to the thrill of the first use, something she herself had lost. He didn’t push her to inject, or chastise her for wasting the drug. He just said, once, what she’d never forget: ‘It’s like everything good that’s ever happened in my life is all happening at once.’
In 2006, in their Gold Coast apartment, she asked him to do it. He complied without a word.
‘It felt like a thousand orgasms,’ she says now. ‘That’s all I can say. I thought it was so good, I’m never going to do that again.’
Even at this point, Vicki was scared of becoming ‘addicted’. What she was already, she had another name for. She liked her lifestyle, and she liked what crystal did for her. But she didn’t want to go down the road of ‘addiction’, which for her—in another hasty reconfiguration of her internal rules and parameters—meant being an addicted injecting drug user, a junkie.
Peter, though, was feeling the pinch. Unlike Vicki, who still maintained the fig leaf of her CFD, or crystal-free day, Wednesday, Peter blasted crystal every day. He would stay awake for up to five days on end, much of it playing video games. He didn’t seem to suffer from paranoia or depression, and his hygiene did not slide downhill towards the notorious ulcerated ‘meth mouth’ of many habitual ice users. Neither Peter nor Vicki would ever develop the bugs-under-the-skin syndrome in which meth users scratch or dig holes in their arms and legs searching for imaginary insects. In fact, Vicki and Peter both made sure they looked quite acceptable—tanned, if thin.
But when he came down, Peter began to suffer. He would smoke a lot of dope and drink a lot of vodka, then lie down to sleep, and his senses would keep racing. The inundation of neurotransmitters into his synapses couldn’t stop, even with the hammer-blow of prescription tranquillisers. He would puff and pant and thrash about in bed, get up and watch more television, go for a walk, but nothing would work. Sometimes he lay beside Vicki masturbating, mechanically and without pause or end in sight. It didn’t shock her; sex between them, by this stage, was often a similar affair, both of them on parallel tracks trying desperately to get themselves off. It was exhausting.
Yet it didn’t exhaust Peter when he was hit by the insomnia. He couldn’t come and he couldn’t stop.
The episode ended with him blasting some more crystal, slipping off to someone else’s place and bashing up a friend, who Peter thought, bizarrely, had laced his coffee with meth. Vicki didn’t see this happen and couldn’t believe Peter would act violently. But when she was woken by a phone call from one of his friends and went to the other apartment, Peter acted as if he was terrified of her.
‘He scrambled across the floor on his bum, you know, backwards, and kicked furniture towards me,’ she says. ‘He was so scared, I just burst into tears. It wasn’t him. It was like he had Alzheimer’s or something. If he lashed out at someone, it was only because he was so terrified.’
The friend who had called Vicki over said Peter had injected some ‘psychosis in a satchel’—crystal that was 80 per cent pure. What they’d been taking, all these years, probably varied in purity from 15 to 70 per cent. He’d been awake for days and had gone through an extended insomniac horror. If he was ever ripe for a psychotic reaction, it was now.
Vicki didn’t know what to do with Peter. Neither did the other people in the flat, except to tell her to ‘get rid of him’. She had a small smoke to settle herself down and helped Peter out into the lift. ‘He was gibbering about killing himself, it wasn’t like him. I mean, I was looking at him and thinking he’s turned into someone else.’
When they got outside, Peter ran away from her. Vicki chased him, but couldn’t keep up. She returned to their apartment and watched television. She smoked some dope to bring herself down—the ice she’d smoked in the other flat had indeed been stronger than she really wanted or needed.
She waited for Peter to come back.
Some time in the next few days, he turned himself into a police station 20 kilometres north of the Gold Coast and confessed to a robbery and murder which he hadn’t committed. He said he’d robbed and killed Vicki. She found out where he was when the police knocked at her door.
‘They were not especially pleased to see I was alive,’ she said. ‘They could see the state of the place and probably smell the dope smoke. They took one look at me, and looked at each other, and thought yep, Pete was having a psychotic episode but he wasn’t a murderer. It was like they were so over him, over crystal users, that they’d have preferred I was dead so they’d have a real case to deal with.’
When he straightened up, Peter decided never to do crystal again—‘Just like that,’ Vicki says, snapping her fingers. He took treatment at a $600-a-day private hospital and discovered that he might have had a pre-existing mental health problem. Vicki never discovered exactly what his problem was, but she learnt that 80 per cent of patients in the rehab clinic had a ‘dual diagnosis’. That is, they suffered from a combination of anxiety, depression, insomnia and other disorders exacerbated by drug use. ‘As far as we knew, it could have been the dope and alcohol as much as the crystal that was fucking him up.’ She still didn’t want to pin the blame on crystal meth.
When she visited him, ‘he was polite but didn’t want anything really to do with me. It was like he’d ruled a line under that period, and now he was going to start a new life.’
Vicki didn’t give up immediately. ‘No, I just networked with some of the users who were in rehab and lined up a new dealer.’ But when Peter moved back to Sydney a few weeks later, she discovered she was too lonely to go on.
‘There wasn’t really a turning point, except for Pete’s psychosis thing, but that happened to him, not me. I think I was just tired of it all, and when he wasn’t with me I couldn’t pretend I was up there because I was in love, or having a wild adventure, or finding my lost youth, or whatever ridiculous story I’d been telling myself.’
She simply couldn’t tell herself any more stories. So she, too, gave up. She did it without any other drugs, or any rehabilitation, or any visit to a doctor. She just stopped. She suffered terribly for
a fortnight, but disciplined herself with yoga and gym.
‘Everyone has their own rock bottom,’ she says. ‘Mine was kind of personal. I wasn’t going through the worst of it as a crystal user, a lot of people go through much worse than me, [mine] was kind of a middle-class rock bottom. I just started to think I’d wasted a lot of great opportunities with my career and I’d fucked up my relationship with my husband, my kids and my parents. I mean, on the one hand it’s not too bad, but on the other hand, what can be worse than that?’
The rising and falling tide of methamphetamine use is increasingly patchy across Australia. Victorian meth has always been of low purity—some experts say it should never be called ‘ice’. In New South Wales, injecting drug users respond elastically to the availability of heroin; when heroin is around, ice use drops. Western Australia, relatively isolated from the heroin trade, has always shown a disproportionate taste for crystal meth. It is to Western Australia that we turn for a story that has surely radiated outwards among teenagers and young adults as the most effective form of advertising for what crystal meth can do.
The Collie murder has a special horror probably because the killers were girls. Most of the perpetrators of crimes we have seen were men. Even though ice is unusual for a hard illicit drug in that numbers of male and female users are roughly on parity, violent crime statistics are skewed heavily towards male offenders. The Collie murder is an exception for that reason, and also for its absolute callousness.
In June 2006, three teenage girls went to a party together in the coal-mining town south of Perth. Two of them had just turned sixteen and the third, Eliza Jane Davis, was still fifteen.
The two sixteen-year-olds, C and B, had a complex history both together and apart. C’s father had died from a drug overdose when she was four, something she didn’t find out about until her teens. She was raised by her mother and stepfather, but in 2002 her mother died when their car smashed into a tree.
C was observed to be cold and detached at the funeral, unable to cry. She apparently blamed her stepfather, and fantasised about taking vicious and sadistic revenge on him, which she wrote on a computer. When he found these writings and confronted her, C ran away from home. She negotiated herself a series of foster-home arrangements in Collie, but could settle in none of them until, around her fourteenth birthday, she moved in with B.
B lived with her single mother, who worked as a disability carer, and three siblings. C and B had already become best friends: born four days apart, both slim and frail-looking, they saw themselves as ‘twins’, their destinies locked together. They both adopted the Goth/emo subculture, romanticising death and headlong substance abuse. They ganged up on B’s elder sister, and soon B’s mother was coming home to find large groups of teenagers playing music and taking drugs, her house in mayhem.
B and C were soon part of a roaming population of truant teenagers, going to derelict party houses for weekends of music, drinking and drug-taking. In 2004 and 2005, the illicit drugs tended to be cannabis and sometimes ecstasy.
B’s mother would later tell the Australian that she tried to take the girls to her church, but the minister ‘did not have God in his heart’ and provided no counsel other than to say blithely that the girls ‘would find their own way’.
‘I took C to see a counsellor at the family centre and the chaplain at the high school, because I could see she was in trouble,’ B’s mother said. ‘One day we were sitting in the front bedroom and C turned to me and said, “I wonder what it would be like to kill someone”. And then she said, “B and I are going to be together for life”. I thought, “That’s a weird thing for her to say”.’
Both girls experimented with self-harm, particularly after they were separated again when B’s mother asked C to leave the house and find somewhere else to live. The pair told friends they were going to catch a bus to Perth and jump together off the highest building they could find.
After B’s mother declined to take another truant teenage girl into her care, B walked out, living in friends’ houses for some months until early 2006, when she moved into a caravan with another school friend, Eliza Davis.
Eliza was, like B and C, a fan of the emo subculture but was more motivated by her studies. She moved into the caravan because her separated parents’ homes were both too far from Collie High School. Soon B was kicked out of the caravan, but she and Eliza found rooms at a nearby house and moved in. B’s mother, who moved to Perth, sent B money to enrol in a TAFE course, but the girl’s behaviour was growing more erratic: one day she found a homeless kitten and took it in, but when it grew sick she killed it and left it on the kitchen table.
C, meanwhile, was apparently growing jealous of B’s new friendship with Eliza. C had moved to Perth to live with a godmother, and then a foster brother, but was invited to a party in Collie in mid-June 2006. When she came to B’s house, she found Eliza cutting and dyeing B’s hair. ‘I think C walked into the house and she sees B and Eliza having a pal-sy time together, and I think C was very jealous,’ B’s mother speculated. ‘I have this vision of C walking in and going, “Hello, she’s taken my spot and she’s got to go”.’
At the party that night, all three girls drank, smoked marijuana, and snorted or smoked crystal methamphetamine. Ice had recently arrived on the Collie scene, and was proving a popular diversion. The party kicked on to the house where B and Eliza were living. Before dawn the guests left and the girls went to bed.
B and C woke up together and began talking. Eliza was still asleep.
‘Sunday morning me and C just woke up and we were just talking and then for some reason we just decided to kill her,’ B would tell police.
C said: ‘We just did it because we felt like it, it is hard to explain. I knew we had wanted to kill someone before.’
They made plans, and when Eliza woke up they were ready.
They changed into old clothes. Eliza came into their bedroom and turned away from them while she was reading a yearbook from Collie High School. C jumped on her, pressing a chemical-soaked cloth to her mouth. B wrapped speaker wire in two loops around Eliza’s neck. She struggled, screaming: ‘What are you doing?’ . . . ‘Oh you freaks, what’s wrong with you psychos?’
B said she saw Eliza’s emotions shifting from anger, to fear, to the realisation she was going to die.
‘She was face up to me as I was doing it. She started to get scared, she started to cry. It was all blood coming out of her mouth.’
When Eliza was dead, B and C carried her roughly downstairs to the dirt-floor cellar. They sat and had a drink, and smoked some dope before digging a 40-centimetre-deep grave in which they buried Eliza. They threw her handbag, clothes and mobile phone away, rang Eliza’s and B’s mothers to say she was missing, and helped police in the search.
C returned to Perth, but by the Wednesday, three days after the murder, she told B that the grave was too shallow and they were bound to be caught; consequently, she was going to turn herself in to a city police station. That day, B also surrendered and confessed to Collie police.
B and C pleaded guilty to murder. At their sentencing hearing in Perth Children’s Court in April 2007, the dominant reaction was bafflement. The girls expressed no remorse, detailing the crime in a matter-of-fact way, emphasising that they did it purely out of curiosity. They had chosen strangulation because they wanted it to be ‘non-messy’, C told police. ‘As our friend, we did not really want her to suffer. We knew it was wrong but it didn’t feel wrong at all, it just felt right. We were willing to take the risk. We said if we did get caught, shit happens, and we will deal with it.’
The prosecutor, Simon Stone, said the lack of reason for the murder or remorse afterwards were the most disturbing factors in the case. Eliza’s family believed the girls treated both the murder and the sentencing as ‘a joke’.
Perth Children’s Court president Denis Reynolds sentenced them to life imprisonment, describing the murder as ‘gruesome and merciless in the extreme’.
Judge Reynolds told the court that while drugs ‘formed an integral part of their lifestyle and psychological health’, they were not the ‘catalyst’ for the murder.
‘The facts of this case put it in the worst category of the most serious offence in the criminal code. It was planned,’ he said.
‘I think it fair to say that none of the professionals, the psychiatrist and psychologists . . . have been able to fully explain [the pair] committing the offence.’
Defence lawyers agreed. ‘In more than ten years in the law I’ve never come across anything remotely like this,’ criminal lawyer Michael Clarke, who defended B, told the Australian. ‘When I got the material facts and read through, it all seemed fine until I got to the part where they got up and decided to kill their friend. There was something clearly missing there as to how we made that jump. It’s one thing to wake up and decide that—to actually do it is another thing altogether.’
Clarke said the hearing was ‘thorough and fair’ but ‘it just didn’t provide an answer . . . It bothered me that I couldn’t find the golden key.’
There was much in the girls’ psychological histories and conduct to suggest a homicide/suicide pact, an emotional attachment to each other that could only be sealed in blood, a kind of Heavenly Creatures obsession with each other and with death. Yet although Judge Reynolds was duty-bound to assign the girls total responsibility for their actions, and deny that ice was a ‘catalyst’ for the murder, anyone who has read these pages will see the common thread running through other killings to this one. At the party, these girls were high, with dopamine and serotonin released into their synapses in an overwhelming flood. Their pulses were quickened, their libido was aroused, their blood pressure was up, they felt sharp, alert, alive, and fully concentrated on the moment. Just as their impulses were loosened, the safety catch in their brains had been switched off. There seemed no reason for them to say no to any action, no matter how stupid or bizarre or cruel. Such concepts didn’t exist for them. They were racing along a free, cold, nerveless highway where everything was permitted. And when they were finished, they did what Matthew Gagalowicz, Novica Jakimov, Justin De Gruchy and others did: they covered it up with the utmost care and concentration, as if they were soldiers at war.
