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Several weeks later, agitated and pale, again high on methamphetamine, he returned to the hospital to say he had run out of the glucometer strips he needed to monitor his blood sugar. He had swollen glands and a cold that wouldn't go away. He was given the strips but refused the offer of diabetes education.

That same week, on 11 August 2002, the police brought him into Canberra Hospital after his parents had called, saying he had destroyed furniture in the family home in a fit of anger. Gagalowicz told a mental health team that he had been hearing voices, was unable to sleep, suffered from paranoid delusions, and his temper was on a short fuse. He was detained for three days and put on sedatives and anti-psychotic medication, but stopped taking both shortly after his release.

Three years later, Justice Michael Adams of the NSW Supreme Court would say of Gagalowicz:

The [illicit] drugs provided a way by which he could feel both better about himself and secure and hopeful about the future. Of course, such drug-induced feelings are a delusion, a delusion which becomes distressingly obvious as soon as the effect of the drug wears off. He did not commence drug-taking as a mature person, nor even as a young person approaching maturity. He was a child, a child who became addicted to a substance that enabled him, for a short time, to think that his life was or could be worthwhile. His ability to cope with the stresses in his life and his response to those stresses must be viewed in that context. To treat him as a recreational drug user would be not merely quite inaccurate but grossly unjust as well.

Nevertheless, it is also important to recognise that Gagalowicz
viewed himself
as a recreational drug user, even though it's obvious to anyone from the outside that he was not. In Gagalowicz's own mind, he was just a young man—with his troubles, for sure—out having fun with his drug buddies.

Drug buddies were never far away, even though their identities would change. After his hospitalisation in August 2002, Gagalowicz went to a rehab facility near Wollongong called Kedesh House for an eight-week course. For $160 a week the residential program provided ‘a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy-based treatment programme for substance abusers. Other treatment modules include relapse prevention, social skills, self-identity, health education and self-help groups.'

In his self-help group, Gagalowicz became friendly with a 21-year-old amphetamine user, David Farrington, and his 17-year-old girlfriend who we will call Alicia Lewis. Gagalowicz also had a teenage girlfriend of his own.

After seven of the proposed eight weeks, Gagalowicz broke a curfew and left the program. Every indication is that he was off drugs. He had neglected his cleaning chores and was put under restrictions; one day he thought, ‘Fuck it, I want to go to the shops.' He was ejected from the course for breaking the rules.

After leaving Kedesh he stayed with his parents on the south coast of New South Wales for a short time before moving, with his girlfriend, Farrington and Lewis, into a Department of Housing cottage in Farrell Road, Bulli, in January 2003. When they moved in together to start a new adventure, the two couples were drug-free.

Bulli is a working-class coastal village with a mix of mining families, surfers, and commuters to Wollongong and Sydney. Also living nearby was a 41-year-old man named Rick Smith, the father of a four-month-old daughter. Rick Smith was a known drug dealer.

In the summer heat, the good intentions of Gagalowicz, Farrington and their girlfriends lasted little more than a week before they were buying a number of different substances from Smith, including cannabis and heroin—but Smith's main attraction was that he could get them crystal methamphetamine. They pooled their Centrelink payments. Smith came every day or two to sell them ice, which they would sit around and inject.

The case of Matthew Gagalowicz would blow out of the water any idea that ice and ordinary speed are more or less the same thing. While it is true that his teenage years had hardly been a walk in the park, he had taken amphetamines throughout those years and had done no worse than break some furniture, shout at his parents, and harm himself. Living in the Bulli house with his friends, injecting ice most days, Matthew Gagalowicz went off the deep end.

Life in the house was, at least in the minds of the four occupants, a nonstop party. They listened to music and played cards with the tweaker's obsessive concentration on inconsequential tasks and patterns, and ate infrequently. When they ran out of ice and were coming down, they used heroin to soften the crash. Gagalowicz lost track of his insulin injections and his blood sugar levels rose and fell like a yoyo. He experienced episodes of terrified paranoia, heard voices, and suffered visual distortions. Alicia Lewis would frequently hallucinate, seeing cockroaches running across the floor of the house.

So chaotic were events in the Farrell Road house that the date of Rick Smith's death has never been ascertained. But sometime between 13 and 18 February 2003, Gagalowicz phoned Smith to ask him to bring some ice. The household had run out.

Unknown to Smith, they had also run out of money. But they were coming down hard, suffering the extreme depression, paranoia and psychotic effects of a meth crash. They were desperate.

When Smith arrived at the house in early afternoon, Gagalowicz, alone in the kitchen, said he had no money and wanted to buy some ice on credit. Smith—who was also high on crystal meth at the time—flew off the handle, refusing credit and saying Gagalowicz had wasted his time calling him over. Gagalowicz, feeling sick and with ‘the blood pounding in my head', argued some more with Smith, then picked up a metal baseball bat, telling Smith to leave the drugs and go. Smith lunged at the bat to grab it, but Gagalowicz stepped clear, swung it and collected the drug dealer in the head. Gagalowicz would later say he only remembered hitting Smith twice—it felt, he said, like a dream.

For David Farrington, it was more like a nightmare. When Smith arrived, Farrington and Lewis had been sleeping in their bedroom at the back of the house. Farrington would tell a court he heard ‘sort of a high-pitched scream and then I just heard some more thudding, I'm not sure how long it went on for'.

After five or ten minutes, Gagalowicz came into the bedroom with a look on his face Farrington said he had never seen before.

‘I've killed Rick,' Gagalowicz said, ‘and if you tell anyone I'm going to fuck you up.'

At this point, Farrington's and Gagalowicz's stories diverged. Farrington said he remained, scared, in his bedroom, and could hear a ‘sawing noise' coming from the bathroom. Gagalowicz's version, which a court found to be more convincing, was that, leaving Alicia Lewis asleep in the bedroom, the two young men went out into the kitchen to look at Smith's body. Farrington asked where the drugs were. The clear plastic bag lay on the floor near the body. Gagalowicz and Farrington—their priorities undisturbed by what had just happened—took the ice into the living room and injected it. Then, energetic and motivated, they came back to the kitchen, picked up Smith's body and carried it to the bathroom.

They discussed what to do with the body. Their first idea was to borrow a neighbour's car and dump Smith somewhere, but first they had to cut him up. They got knives and gloves, but when Farrington made the first cut he said he felt sick and left the dismemberment to Gagalowicz.

When he'd finished, leaving the body parts in the bathtub, Gagalowicz bumped into Alicia Lewis, who had woken up, and told her what had happened. She reacted with numb shock, not prepared to believe him. He told her and Farrington to get out of the house.

Taking Gagalowicz's mobile phone, they walked to the beach while he started to clean up the kitchen and bathroom and put Smith's remains into a suitcase. He kept injecting ice to keep himself on track.

By then dusk was falling. Gagalowicz's girlfriend, who had been sleeping off a binge all day, woke up and went to the bathroom but found a sign on the door telling her to keep out. She found Gagalowicz in another room.

‘Why can't I go into the bathroom?' she asked sleepily.

Gagalowicz told her to sit down while he gave her a shot of crystal meth. When he'd done it, he said: ‘I've killed Rick.'

‘What?' she said, thinking she wasn't hearing clearly.

‘I've killed Rick. Whatever you do, don't go in the bathroom.'

He told her to go down to the beach to find Farrington and Lewis. She complied, pliable in her shock. The three talked with a mixture of panic and disbelief about what they were going to do. Then, after about 45 minutes, Gagalowicz called them on the mobile phone and they returned to Farrell Road.

At the house, they found kitty litter scattered across the still-bloody kitchen floor. Gagalowicz, all manic activity, told them not to tell a soul what had happened. He said he would take full responsibility for the consequences, and told his girlfriend (who, due to her age, could not be named in court proceedings) to get an alibi—‘Find someone who'll say you were with them today.'

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'.