by Malcolm Knox
This is not to mitigate their actions at all, but the brain’s chemistry is undeniable; there are rock-solid rules that every ice user’s brain chemistry follows. Ice users are all on essentially the same trip. The differences between one user and another are in their individual circumstances. In some very rare cases, those circumstances lead to murder. There is no single golden key, but ice, in this case as in so many others, was an essential ingredient. It was not as crucial, as a cause of the murder, as the terrible instability of B’s and C’s childhoods, or the morbid codependency of their friendship. But it was more crucial than, say, the wire used as the murder weapon. The role of ice has become clear in this pattern of crimes committed over the years 2000 to 2006; it was, with all due respect to Judge Reynolds, precisely the word he chose. It was the catalyst.
Not every story about an ice-related crime ends in ruined lives. A great many of the ice users who committed the crimes that are detailed in these pages were career criminals, and it can be argued that although crystal methamphetamine accelerated the timing and escalated the violence of the crimes, the perpetrators were in large part an embodiment of criminality merely seeking its opportunity. There are also cases, however, of ordinary individuals with no criminal records whose only contact with the justice system came after an isolated incident involving ice. And there are cases where it ended well: where recovery, once ice was removed from the equation, was not only possible but likely. Daniel Paul Lidonnici was one of those cases.
In October 2005, Lidonnici was a 21-year-old who liked a good time and had done a few drugs over the years. An only child, he had enjoyed a relatively happy childhood in Melbourne and studied marketing at TAFE after finishing year twelve. He dropped out of the course after six months and worked in various office jobs while studying accountancy and business. He had a steady girlfriend, Hayley di Cecco, and worked with her at her father’s flower stall on Wednesday evenings and in the kitchen at Seaford RSL on Sundays.
On weekends, Lidonnici did drugs—pot, speed, ecstasy, special K and eventually ice—as well as binge drinking. He didn’t touch hard drugs during the week. It was a nightclub, partying thing, kept within the weekend waster’s boundaries.
Over the second-last weekend of October 2005, Lidonnici, di Cecco and some friends were up for two days, going to dance clubs and taking ecstasy, ketamine, cannabis and ice. On Sunday afternoon, Lidonnici drove di Cecco to St Kilda to collect her bag from a friend’s flat. On the way, they picked up a friend, Ayla Ramsay. The three were going to go to another recovery session in Heidelberg.
Inside the St Kilda flat, however, Lidonnici started acting strangely. He made some irrational comments and stared blankly at the walls. His girlfriend told him to snap out of it. Lidonnici reacted angrily, closing the flat’s door and locking them all inside.
The girls tried to calm him down, but his replies made no sense. Ayla Ramsay grabbed his car keys and offered to trade them for the keys to the flat. Di Cecco, concerned, said, ‘I’ve never seen you like this before.’ She tried to phone Lidonnici’s friend Nathan to get him to calm her boyfriend down. Lidonnici lunged at her and wrestled her to the floor. To Nathan on the phone, he said there were people in the flat trying to get him. After the call, Lidonnici dialled emergency 000 and some other friends saying someone was trying to kill him.
Lidonnici, terrified and terrifying at the same time, took a carving knife from the kitchen and held it to his own throat. Di Cecco got it off him while he was calling the police, but he went after her and grabbed another knife, pointing it at her and telling her that if she moved he’d stab her.
‘What’s the address of this flat?’ he said urgently.
‘I don’t know,’ di Cecco wept.
‘Tell me or I’ll kill you!’
When the police arrived (at Lidonnici’s request), he yelled out: ‘If you come in, I’ll kill her.’
The police broke in and hauled di Cecco out. Lidonnici was holding her around the legs, stabbing her with the knife. Lidonnici let go and the police cornered him. He threatened to kill himself. The police tried to disarm him with a shot from a Taser. Lidonnici, impervious to the charge of the gun, rammed the knife into his own chest. The police came at him but he fended them off with another knife. Eventually they subdued him with several Taser shots.
The remarkable thing about Lidonnici’s psychotic event was how isolated it was. He and di Cecco were in hospital for more than a week (Lidonnici’s wounds were life-threatening and he lost his gall bladder as a result); when they were discharged, they got back together. Lidonnici had only sketchy memories of the afternoon, but said he thought di Cecco and Ramsay were conspiring with other people to kill him. He didn’t believe the police were really police; instead, in his mind, they were players in the conspiracy.
A psychiatrist, Dr Nicholas Owens, reported that Lidonnici’s actions were caused by acute amphetamine intoxication ‘which resulted in your experiencing acute paranoid delusions of a persecutory nature (namely that you were going to be harmed by someone attempting to get into the flat), together with confusion and misidentification about the police and the phone calls you were making’.
Lidonnici’s disturbed state only lasted as long as he was drug-affected.
He pleaded guilty to a number of charges. At his sentencing hearing, the court was told that di Cecco was living with him at his parents’ house and envisaged a long-term future with him. He had no previous criminal record or anger-management problems. He was shocked and remorseful about what he had done, and stopped taking drugs or going to nightclubs.
Justice Hollingworth of the Victorian Supreme Court said:
I accept that your behaviour at the flat was totally out of character for you and would not have occurred but for your drug consumption. Nevertheless, your significant drug consumption over that weekend was entirely voluntary and was part of regular weekend drug usage at the time . . .
No long-term harm has been caused by your actions and the principal victim is fully supportive of you. You are remorseful, have co-operated with the police and pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity. I am satisfied that there is little risk of you repeating your stupid and dangerous youthful drug-taking. In my opinion, the interests of the community will not be served by your being sent to an adult prison, even for a short time . . .
I think you deserve to be given a chance. I will not send you to jail. Do not let the court or yourself down, Mr Lidonnici.
Daniel Lidonnici was sentenced to community service and fined for drug possession. His ice-using days were, he believed, firmly behind him.
By the mid-2000s, courts around the country were developing a new sensitivity to the properties of ice and its relationship with crime. In December 2006 NSW District Court Judge Michael
Finnane sentenced a man named Matt Loria to home detention rather than jail after Loria’s ‘mental processes were disordered’ when he threatened to rob a Bondi pokie den with a toy pistol. Loria, a surf instructor and father, and a friend had stayed up throughout the previous night using ice to watch cricket on television from England. ‘I can’t believe I did that,’ Loria said of the attempted robbery. ‘That was just so stupid I don’t know what I was thinking.’
Courts were showing a greater understanding in isolated cases, but were still grappling with the question of whether drug use amounting to a mental illness could be used as a defence against a criminal charge.
One case that tested this was that of Andrew Kastrappis, a 43-year-old Adelaide man who was charged with criminal trespass and indecent assault after an incident on the night of 17 June 2005.
Kastrappis lived on his own in a unit block in Pooraka, a working-class suburb north of Adelaide. His mother had died when he was twelve, but through adulthood he enjoyed a supportive relationship with his father and stepmother, and from his mid-thirties he had a girlfriend.
Kastrappis had left school after year ten and worked in a paint factory for twenty years, from 1980 till 2000, when he s
uffered a back injury and left work to live on a disability pension.
He used cannabis and speed from his early twenties, and had a few drug and driving-related offences on his record, but nothing remotely close to assault or trespass until 2005. That was the year he started smoking ice.
As we have seen in so many other cases, the introduction of ice to a drug user’s regime precipitated an act that was entirely out of character.
On the night of 16 June 2005, Kastrappis forced open the back door of a neighbouring unit. The resident, Ms Matthews, was asleep, but woke with a jolt when she felt something brushing her lips. She sat up to see Kastrappis, naked beneath a coat, waving his penis close to her face.
‘You have to sleep with me,’ Kastrappis said urgently. When Ms Matthews refused, he grabbed her by the pyjama pants and, pulling them down, said: ‘If you don’t, I know 200 guys who are going to come over here and they’ll give you trouble.’
Ms Matthews fought him off—Kastrappis was acting as if he was more scared than she was—and asked him what he was talking about.
‘Your boyfriend’s here, isn’t he?’ Kastrappis said.
There were so many sexual assaults by men high on ice in recent years, it’s hard to know where to place Kastrappis. He wasn’t a violent and manipulative rapist in the vein of Mohammed Kerbatieh. He was not an opportunistic lifetime criminal, like Dudley Aslett, Shane Martin or Michael Scott Wald, a 21-year-old Victorian who robbed, bashed and raped a seventeen-year-old boy one night in 2006 purely because he crossed paths with him on the street in Frankston. Ice did not, for Kastrappis, unleash a burst of sadism such as affected Lindsay Michael Hearn, a 30-year-old non-violent petty criminal from the Central Coast of NSW who impersonated a police officer and forced an autistic man to pull over on the F3 freeway in mid-2006, then kidnapped, robbed and raped him in a sexual crime that a judge said had ‘a degree of depravity and callousness . . . the likes of which I’ve not encountered before’. Nor was Kastrappis a vindictive sociopath like Canan Eken, the 28-year-old Sydney man who was jailed for fourteen years after ordering his flatmates to rape a young woman at his flat in Rosebery in 2004, as punishment for her not having sex with him. Eken, a schizophrenic, tried what sceptics were by the time of his sentencing in 2006 calling ‘the ice excuse’, testifying that he became violent after smoking a gram a day for six months. District Court Judge Anthony Puckeridge would not have it: ‘By deliberately choosing to abuse illegal substances the prisoner should be treated as choosing the consequences of his behaviour,’ he said.
There were so many sexual crimes triggered by crystal meth. But Andrew Kastrappis was different. He was unhinged and scared, and his sexual assault on Ms Matthews seemed less a result of a clear-headed plan than another facet of his general confusion. Rebuffed by her, redirecting his paranoia, he searched the unit for Ms Matthews’s boyfriend (who wasn’t there). Still apparently fearful, Kastrappis left the unit a short time later. Ms Matthews went to her boyfriend’s home and phoned the police, who arrested Kastrappis the next morning. He hadn’t left his unit.
In the South Australian Supreme Court the next year, two psychologists and the judge agreed with the defence’s submission that Kastrappis was not guilty on the ground of mental incompetence. The finer points of the psychiatric reports differed—one diagnosed the incident as a first onset of bipolar disorder, another saw it as paranoid schizophrenia triggered by the ice and cannabis use, and another diagnosed a drug-induced psychosis—but the overall agreement was that Kastrappis was, for legal purposes, mentally ill at the time he entered Ms Matthews’s flat. He was hearing voices telling him to go in, and was genuinely scared of the ‘trouble’ that unknown men were going to cause. He was placed under a supervision order with a number of tight conditions, but wasn’t considered to be a threat to the community; indeed, he stopped using ice and cannabis after the incident and, under a low dose of anti-psychotic medication, his mental health issues were held by the court to be ‘resolved’.
In March 2006, the United Nations’ International Narcotics Board declared methamphetamine to be ‘a major drug pandemic’. At the same time, there was evidence in Australia that the drug was less used, and less of a threat, than it had been in five years. Is the current lull in methamphetamine use a dip in an inexorable increase, or the first sign of a cyclical abatement? It is too soon to know the truth, but one thing is sure: crystal methamphetamine has changed not only individual lives; it has changed Australian society. It has altered the public’s disposition towards illicit drugs, and it has revolutionised the way a number of professions do their work. Hospitals, doctors’ surgeries, rehab centres, ambulances and other paramedics, pharmacies, police and customs services, schools, prisons, sporting bodies, governments, the media and the criminal courts all conduct their business differently as a result of this drug.
So much change has happened in a remarkably short time. There will always be criticisms of institutions’ slow reaction, but considering that this drug, in this form, only appeared in Australia a decade ago, the changes that have occurred are a testament to the suppleness and adaptability of our institutions.
Police in different states have dedicated clandestine laboratory squads now, with millions of dollars assigned to the specific task of locating and dismantling methamphetamine-making facilities and purpose-built trucks for reducing the harm to officers.
Police stations instruct officers in self-defence and restraint guidelines to deal specifically with suspects suffering ice-induced psychoses. In New South Wales and Victoria, programs have been developed allowing ice users to lecture police about the drug and attendant mental illnesses, to avoid attacks and shootings such as those which wounded Constable Elizabeth Roth and led to the death of ice user Gregory Rama Biggs.
Customs have new detection procedures targeted specifically at finding ice, and the Australian Federal Police allocates a large chunk of its resources to tracking ice importers in Australia and forging ties with Asian police in shutting down ice manufacturers and exporters there. Ice has been responsible for a greatly improved relationship between law enforcement officials across the region. Unlike counter-terrorism, combating crystal meth across borders has been politically and culturally uncontroversial.
The federal government has permeated every television-watching household with its ‘Tough On Drugs’ advertisements showing a man throwing a bin at a window in a hospital ward, a son knocking over his mother, and a young girl scratching ulcers into her arms. Millions of tax dollars have been spent on illustrating for every parent and child the most extreme effects of crystal meth.
Higher courts have had to adjust the common law to take into account the horrific crimes catalysed by ice. The very notion of mental illness, in a criminal context, is undergoing a reassessment across Australia.
Local courts are changing their processes to deal with an explosion of defendants showing signs of mental illness. Self-control, even in courts, can be relied on less than ever. This is not simply a matter of more guards; programs are in place around the country to divert defendants away from prison and into treatment, with clinical nurse consultants assessing defendants’ mental health needs now a fixture in the court system.
Hospitals have Psychiatric Emergency Care Centre rooms or other dedicated facilities to separate acute ice users from other patients and to treat the needs that are specific to users of the drug. Doctors’ surgeries have been reconfigured with security as a paramount concern. No longer is the threat a junkie breaking in and raiding the medicine cabinet; it is an ice user attacking the doctor, or someone else, and tearing the place down.
Rehab and detox centres, as well as having tailored therapeutic programs for ice users, now have family rooms to protect the children and spouses of recovering users.
Project STOP has changed the way pharmacists do their business, as have legislative changes to cut down on pseudo-ephedrine sales. A by-product of this has affected all Australians suffering a cold or flu: they can no longer
buy apparently harmless medicines over the counter, and for many this has incurred a degree of suffering.
Treatment options still lag—there is no accepted or widely used pharmacological treatment for methamphetamine addiction. Methadone is entrenched in the treatment regime for heroin addicts, but there is still no methadone-equivalent for ice users. Behavioural therapy is still the most common approach to ice users, but there are currently about 15 000 treatment episodes a year taking place in Australia, fewer than half of the National Drug Strategy’s target of treating 70 per cent of dependent users. While most heroin addicts know of the methadone option, even if they don’t take it up, the lack of a recognised pharmacological treatment for methamphetamine addiction is seen as an influential factor in keeping heavy users away from treatment. A decade since Alex Wodak thought of prescribed dexamphetamine as a way of countering withdrawal, there is no proven pharmacotherapy for meth users. Most health professionals involved with ice say that the consequences of this will be felt in the long term: the debilitating depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses resulting from crystal methamphetamine use are a long way from being known.
Nicole Lee has surveyed treatment outcomes for the past eight years at the Melbourne clinic Turning Point. She says that the ‘natural history’ for meth users is to go from first use to regular use within a year, to suffer from mental health problems, or dependence, or a criminal act within another year, but for a staggering five years to then go by before the user seeks treatment.
