Scattered (11 page)

They walked to the station, and Kerbatieh bragged about being a trained kickboxer, and an ecstasy and cocaine dealer.

‘You want a fake ID? Driver's licence? I always get them for underage girls, no worries,' he said.

At the station, they smoked cigarettes and waited for the phantom girl, then walked back towards the Fawkner pool hall. Kerbatieh persuaded S to take a shortcut through a hole in a fence at the back of a building. He had prepared the ground, where a mattress was lying under cover. He sat S on the mattress and asked if he could kiss her. She refused. Eventually he appeared to give up, saying he would call his brother to come and drive her home.

A car arrived with two men in it, taking S and Kerbatieh to the Drums Hotel in Coburg. As soon as she could, S said she had to go home. Freezing cold, she didn't want Kerbatieh to walk with her, but he insisted. Seeing how cold she was, he said he would borrow a jacket for her from his friend's house nearby.

S waited outside while Kerbatieh went into a house in Bell Street, Coburg, which he said was his friend's. In fact it was his own. When he didn't re-emerge, she followed him inside. Saying he was looking for a coat, he led her into a bedroom, where he pretended to try several times to call a friend who would drive her home.

Kerbatieh was charming and gentlemanly throughout. In spite of her better instincts, S had allowed him to make her feel safe. At 31, he was sixteen years her senior and powerfully built. In the house he offered her what he said was ecstasy; she refused again. Then, after taking what were more likely tranquillisers or barbiturates, Kerbatieh fell asleep. S didn't know he'd been taking ice, but now that his high had worn off, he only wanted to pass out. S was happy that he had.

S slept too, but when she woke him at daybreak Kerbatieh's mood was altogether changed. He was dishevelled, snarling and aggressive. He said he didn't know how she'd come to be with him, and accused her of stealing $20 000 from a suitcase in his room. He said he was calling a friend over to help him find the $20 000; he handcuffed S in the bedroom, tying her feet with black cotton strips.

As she cried, he slapped her and told her to be quiet. He kept slapping and swearing at her as she resisted his efforts to take off her belt. He removed the cotton bindings and took off her clothes, saying he wanted her to feel ashamed. After stripping and re-cuffing her, he asked if she'd ever ‘sucked a dick before'. S said no. Kerbatieh pulled down his pants, but was unable to get an erection. He blamed the drugs he was taking, and stormed out of the bedroom.

He soon came back, having worked up an erection for himself. He also brought a carving knife and fork from the kitchen. He forced his penis into S's mouth with the knife at her throat. Then he penetrated her vagina with his tongue, the handle of the carving fork, and finally his penis, demanding that she say, ‘I want you to fuck me like a slut, fuck my tight vagina, oh, I love your big dick.' He said he was ejaculating inside her, but she needn't worry because he ‘couldn't have children'.

He repeated more sexual assaults throughout the morning, finally saying: ‘I don't know if I can trust you. Maybe I should just kill you instead.'

He let her get dressed, however, and leave his house, warning her again not to go to the police. He said he couldn't afford to get into trouble, as he had previously been jailed for killing three men.

He let S go, and at first she was too frightened of Kerbatieh to tell any authorities. She did tell some friends, however, and two months later S was ready to give a statement to the Victorian police.

This was not soon enough to save Kerbatieh's third victim, a sixteen-year-old codenamed ‘E'. By this point Kerbatieh was locked in a death spiral of ice use, taking the drug several times a day, staying up for as long as he could, crashing into deep sleep, waking again with a paranoia and depression that could only be relieved by taking more crystal meth. He had to live with his terrible past—not merely what he had done in recent days, but the way he had treated Runda, his wife, and their child back in Queensland. Then there was the time he had spent in jail. He had every reason to want to block out his history, to avoid coming face to face with himself.

It was obvious to anyone but himself that Kerbatieh was delusional by this time. He believed his encounters with S and C had involved consensual sex, and he was fully swept up in the stories he had told them about being a professional kickboxer and wealthy drug dealer.

A fortnight after his assaults on S, Kerbatieh approached E as she was walking to a tram stop in Sydney Road, Coburg. It was 7.45 am and she was on her way to school, wearing her uniform and carrying her school bag. Kerbatieh struck up a conversation, asking where Hawthorn Street was. This was the street where S lived.

As they talked, Kerbatieh's mobile phone rang. He had an animated (though quite possibly faked) conversation, ending with him saying, ‘How am I meant to pick up $15 000—with my bare hands?'

E was wary of the 31-year-old at first, and asked if she had seen him before. Kerbatieh made up a story about boxing with a friend of her brother.

‘What's your brother look like?' Kerbatieh asked.

When E described her brother, Kerbatieh said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know him.'

E, believing he was an adult acquaintance of her brother, saw no harm in showing Kerbatieh the way to Hawthorn Street, a few blocks away. He had another conversation about the $15 000, after which he told the schoolgirl that he would give her $200 if she helped him and his sister collect the money from Bell Street. E declined, but continued walking with him towards Bell Street. Kerbatieh was following his usual modus operandi.

He boasted to E that he was a well-known drug dealer and lit a joint, offering her a puff, which she refused. They had been walking for more than fifteen minutes when Kerbatieh said he knew a shortcut down a lane to the back fence of the house where he had to pick up the money. As with S, he was only luring E to his own house.

When they arrived at the back of his property, E declined his offer to go inside with him. After a while he came out with a stick, brandishing it at her, and pulled her through the hole in the fence. E resisted him, saying he had to let her go to school, but he forced her into the back part of the house, a bedroom with an unmade bed. E tried to leave, but Kerbatieh grappled her down and put his hand over her mouth. E was so scared she wet her pants, but she kept fighting him. She managed to get out of the house and back up the lane towards Bell Street. She was so panicked that when she dropped her bag along the way, she kept running without looking back.

On Bell Street she found a woman and told her that a man had tried to rape her. They went to the local police station where E made her complaint. Police executed a search warrant on Kerbatieh's house and found several items, including the black cotton strips with which, they would later learn, Kerbatieh had tied up his second victim, S.

At his trial in early 2003, Kerbatieh accepted that he had been with the three girls, but in the case of S he argued the sex had been consensual, and with C and E he said that he had rejected them after they had ‘cockteased' him. He was a disruptive and wily defendant, often sacking his lawyers and even calling for his trial to be aborted when the jury heard of his untruthful boasts that he had killed three men, which he said would prejudice them against him.

The issue of Kerbatieh's crystal methamphetamine use came up after he was examined by a psychologist, Warren Simmonds. Kerbatieh had been taking ice solidly for six months leading up to the rapes. He had no prior record of sexual assault. He said that the ice had changed him, heightening his sexual urges and lowering his ability to control them. He wanted his ice use to be treated as a mitigation of what he had done, and as evidence that, once he was off the drug, he had a good chance of rehabilitation. Judges in the trial and appeal courts rejected this. Legally, although his crystal methamphetamine use might have had this effect on him, he had been taking it for long enough to be aware of its effects and was able, in Judge Jim Duggan's words, to ‘take it or leave it'. Kerbatieh knew that ice made him horny, and he wasn't so addicted that he had no power to choose whether or not to take it.

Kerbatieh's ice intoxication, while undoubtedly a true precursor to his crimes, was not severe enough to get him off the legal hook. He was found guilty of eighteen separate charges and sentenced to 22 years in jail.

By 2001, Rebecca McKetin and the researchers at NDARC believed that old-fashioned amphetamine sulphate had been more or less totally replaced in Australia by methamphetamine, whether in powder, paste or crystalline form. Users, health workers and police reported that what was still called speed was, in fact, methamphetamine. There was still some confusion, among users at least, as to what ‘ice' was. Some thought ice was speed mixed with heroin; others that it was a completely different drug. What generated these misperceptions was partly dealer marketing-talk, but also a registering of the different effects of the more potent form. ‘Chemically,' NDARC's 2001 Drug Trends report said,

amphetamine and methamphetamine are closely related. Both exert their effects indirectly by stimulating the release of peripheral and central monoamines (principally dopamine, noradrenaline, adrenaline and serotonin), and both have psychomotor, cardiovascular, anorexogenic and hyperthermic properties . . . Compared to amphetamine, methamphetamine has proportionally greater central stimulatory effects than peripheral circulatory actions . . . and is a more potent form with stronger subjective effects.

The subjective effects of methamphetamine are, as we have seen, both consistent and variable. Principally, a person uses meth because it induces feelings of extreme wellbeing, power and self-confidence. But that extremity can tip over into the kind of reckless sense of invulnerability and grandiosity exhibited by Mohammed Kerbatieh. As use continues, methamphetamine can also induce the flipside of all that wellbeing, in the form of paranoia, insomnia, anxiety and depression. And when the negatives reach the extreme end of the spectrum, the paranoia can tip over into acts of senseless violence.

What is going on inside the brain to produce such a cornucopia of emotions and responses? From Charlie Parker dipping asthma inhaler strips in his coffee to American and Japanese Second World War pilots, from Jack Kerouac and 1990s party kids all the way to Mohammed Kerbatieh losing any contact with reality and assaulting three girls, what was the common chemical event happening in the human brain?

When they enter the body, methamphetamine molecules head, via the bloodstream, to the central nervous system, kidney and liver. In the brain, they easily cross the blood-brain barrier and enter tiny ‘storage terminals' in the nerves.

Nerve cells, or neurons, are asymmetrical. At one end is the axon, and the storage terminals are located in the end of each axon. One nerve cell's axon is adjacent to the next cell's dendrite—the part of the nerve cell that receives messages. When one nerve cell communicates with the next, it sends out neurotransmitters to cross the gap, or synapse, between the axon and the neighbouring dendrite. These neurotransmitters are held in the storage terminals.

Among the different types of neurotransmitters are the so-called ‘feel-good' neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. Methamphetamine molecules are very similar in shape to dopamine molecules. What the methamphetamine molecules do, crucially, is force the neurotransmitters out of their storage terminals and across the synapses in large numbers. The normal role of these neurotransmitters is to respond to different kinds of signals. Sometimes those signals are pleasant, and the spread of neurotransmitters is, literally, what makes us feel good. At other times, neurotransmitters are released as a defence against pain; again, their role is to make us feel better. When something good happens, axons release neurotransmitters like dopamine across a synapse; when they lodge in the nearest dendrite, they pass on a message that says ‘be happy'.

But nature only intends for them to work in moderation. Methamphetamine, particularly in large doses, sets loose great multitudes of neurotransmitters—hence the observation of many users that meth is ‘a thousand times better than sex'. The pleasure effect, measured by the amount of dopamine and serotonin released, can literally be a thousand times greater than what would naturally occur during sex.

This would not be so bad for the brain if it was the only effect, and if, afterwards, the production of neurotransmitters could resume as per normal. But in the aftermath of neurotransmitter release, the methamphetamine is involved in other chemical reactions that damage the body's capacity to make new neurotransmitters.

Normally, once they have carried their message across a synapse, neurotransmitters either die or are taken back by the axon they originated from. This process is called the ‘reuptake' of the neurotransmitter. But methamphetamine inhibits the reuptake process. Dopamine and serotonin, instead of being replenished, are oxidised and damaged by the methamphetamine. They are left in the system for an unusually long time, thus extending the high, but they are unable to return to the axon. The payoff is that the half-life of methamphetamine can be ten to twenty hours, rather than the much shorter half-life of cocaine, for instance.

The downside is that once the released dopamine is gone, it is gone. Subjectively, this is the cause of the ‘crash'—the user feels awful because the brain is not producing or releasing neurotransmitters in sufficient numbers. It's also one of the things that makes methamphetamine addictive. When it wears off, it leaves you feeling so terrible that the only solution is to take more. Unfortunately, the greater the dose, the more the damage, and the more the damage, the greater the dose needs to be to create the same effect. This squirrel-wheel inside the user's chemistry is what we know as ‘tolerance' to the drug. It's also responsible for the particular pains of methamphetamine withdrawal. Whereas a withdrawing heroin user might experience symptoms similar to a bad flu, a withdrawing meth user can suffer from a depression lasting months. The risk of relapse is correspondingly higher, as the withdrawal symptoms last much longer.