Scattered (23 page)

There was David Lawrence Morrison, who at four years of age had found his mother dead at home. Later in his childhood, he was regularly beaten by his father. Morrison used drugs from an early age and by sixteen was a break and enter merchant. Between 1997 and 2003 he stole more than $470 000 worth of goods from shops, individuals and houses. In the latter part of this period, as his burgling intensified, he was wearing the ice forcefield. He was sent to jail for a minimum of three years.

There was Adrian John Van Boxtel, a Melbourne man who became hooked on ice while undergoing an acrimonious split with his de facto partner, Simone Snowden. Van Boxtel was in some ways a typical embittered ex-husband: he was at war with Simone and her family over access to his infant children. But he was an embittered ex-husband on ice, which is an entirely different creature. On 27 April 2002, Van Boxtel took ice, which a court later agreed had a significant effect on his behaviour. He went to a friend's house and stole a sawn-off shotgun along with some other possessions. At Snowden's house, he shot her car. He then threatened an acquaintance for ‘causing trouble with' Simone, even though this man had never met her. Under the influence of ice, Van Boxtel went on a rampage of offending, including threatening to kill, false imprisonment, aggravated burglary and intentionally causing injury. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail.

There was Justin John De Gruchy, a 34-year-old drug dealer who had delusions of grandeur about being the ‘saviour' of St Kilda prostitutes. De Gruchy would drive from his rented unit in Tullamarine to St Kilda, take heroin-addicted prostitutes home and promise to wean them off the opiate. His cure? Give them ice. In June 2003, De Gruchy had two of his protegees with him. One was a 38-year-old named Christine Hammond, and the other was a fifteen-year-old girl. They picked up another prostitute, took her to Tullamarine, and tortured and humiliated her for several days, smoking ice throughout. They put a chain around her neck, sexually assaulted her with a rolling pin, and forced her to eat dog food and perform oral sex on a man who had come in to buy drugs. The fifteen-year-old girl kicked and punched the victim. De Gruchy, the ringmaster, was sentenced to a minimum of seven years after he pleaded guilty to six charges.

It was only thanks to blind luck that these offenders didn't kill someone. The common characteristic of their crimes was the perpetrator's complete lack of control over the consequences. Once crystal meth had taken hold, there was no such thing as calculating the effect of an assault. Ice erases the ability to calculate. In 2003, all across Australia there were lives being damaged forever, thanks to someone crossing a line while on ice. And there were also lives being ended. Matthew Gagalowicz lost his temper with his drug dealer, and killed him. Dudley Aslett lost control of his gun and shot dead a pharmacist he only wanted to rob. Damien Peters murdered and dismembered two of his lovers. In December 2003 two western Sydney ice users, John Hohaia and Mostafa Abdulkader, murdered their friend Alexander Szirt. Hohaia and Abdulkader had been on a binge for several hours when they called up Szirt, late at night, apparently to ask him to pick up some beer and snacks for them. Somewhere along the line, they decided that Szirt was ‘not like' them. In the kitchen of Hohaia's mother's house, Hohaia made some remarks about Szirt, to which Szirt replied with the two-finger salute. Hohaia proceeded to choke him, growling, ‘Don't ever disrespect me in my house.'

He didn't kill Szirt then. That came a few hours later. Hohaia and Abdulkader worked themselves up into a lather of hatred for Szirt, and between 1.30 and 3 am on 3 December, they bashed him ferociously, punching and kicking him even as he lay unconscious on the ground outside the house. He was dead by sunrise. Why? As Justice David Kirby said in the NSW Supreme Court, where he sentenced the killers to two decades behind bars, ‘[Hohaia] said that Mr Szirt was not like them. He was right. Mr Szirt was not “like them”. He had a job. He had prospects. He was paying off his car. He came from a loving family. It appears, at least on the part of Mr Hohaia, that there was envy in respect of the advantages Alexander Szirt enjoyed.'

These were all deaths that arose from violent acts with specific contexts: arguments and robberies. The killers all had motivations that obeyed some kind of logic, however twisted. Ice was merely the accelerant that took simple conflicts to a higher level.

Trent Jennings was a different case, and an infinitely sad one for all concerned. Jennings's crime showed a new side of crystal meth: when paranoia intensified into a cataclysmic kind of fear, and the terrified user, an otherwise peaceful individual, lashes out with terrible unintended consequences.

The night before New Year's Eve 2003, Trent Jennings made a plan. At eighteen years of age, Jennings was a young gay man whose entry into the world was brimming with possibility. He'd only recently moved east from Perth, just that September. He was living in an apartment in Narwee, in the south-western suburbs of Sydney, but worked as a waiter in an inner-city hotel. He was taking his first steps on the trail from suburbia to a lifestyle that was cosmopolitan, rich with adventure, and salted with risk. Jennings, like many an eighteen-year-old, was an experimenter, a risk-taker.

On 30 December 2003, he was seeking out the thrill of the unknown. He'd done this before. He had his own little patterns and routines. He sat on the internet for a few hours, cruising for new friends. In a chat room he found Giuseppe Vitale, a 32-year-old man with whom he struck up an immediate rapport. They edged towards arranging a meeting. They agreed that they each liked being tied up while having fellatio performed on them. They agreed that they liked the buzz of doing it outside, in public places. They exchanged a series of messages negotiating an agreement on what they'd do.

Throughout the night, Jennings took ecstasy and ice. This was a part of his build-up to sexual encounters. He'd been a party ecstasy taker for a few years by then, and while his introduction to ice had been more recent, he'd taken to it like a duck to water. He enjoyed its libido-enhancing effects.

At 9.15 pm, Vitale emailed Jennings a photo of himself. They then swapped phone numbers, and at 9.35 pm spoke briefly by phone. Vitale agreed to come and meet Jennings outside his unit. Once the meeting had been established, Jennings took three or four ecstasy tablets and injected an eightball of crystal meth. It was a disastrously toxic dose. Possibly he had forgotten how much he had already taken. Whatever the cause, the high dose did far more than heighten Jennings's sexual arousal.

The pair spoke again, by phone, at 10.20 pm as Vitale approached Narwee. When Vitale pulled up, Jennings came out of the apartment and got into the car, directing Vitale to a park about 200 metres away. Jennings, who knew the park well, had a backpack slung over his shoulder. Inside the backpack were condoms and lubricant, a length of rope he'd bought at Wool-worths, and a small bottle of amyl nitrate. He also had a serrated 11-centimetre kitchen knife, which he always carried with him on these nocturnal encounters, just in case. He'd never had cause to use it, but he knew that he was sailing close to the wind. The danger was half the attraction.

It was now close to 11 pm, and nobody else was around. Making small talk, the pair entered the bushy reserve and after a few minutes came to a dry creek bed which was crossed by a bridge about one metre wide with metal railings on each side.

As agreed, they stopped at the bridge and Jennings took out his rope. He stood with his back to the railing while Vitale tied his ankles and wrists together, then secured them both to the metal. With Jennings thus immobilised, Vitale performed oral sex on him.

It was now about an hour since he had taken the full load of ecstasy and ice, and Jennings felt their effects overwhelming him. Instead of just feeling horny, he was overloaded. He heard footsteps in the bushes. He looked across and saw a man and a wolf. The wolf told him to be careful, as Vitale was out to get him. Freaking out, Jennings asked Vitale to stop. Vitale carried on.

For a few minutes, Jennings breathed deeply and tried to banish the vision of the man and the wolf in the bushes. He'd had these hallucinations before, since he'd been taking ice. Often it was a black man with a green outline, issuing warnings to him. Jennings would creep up to corners and peer around them, expecting the man to jump out.

Vitale untied Jennings, and they talked for a little while. Jennings calmed down, and they agreed to swap roles. Jennings tied Vitale's ankles together, then bound his hands behind his, Vitale's, back. They didn't say much. Jennings didn't tie Vitale to the railing, but stood him in the creek bed.

Jennings started performing oral sex on Vitale. Then, according to Jennings, Vitale departed from the script.

‘He was trying to get me, like, grabbing and spinning me and stuff like that,' Jennings later told police. ‘He was trying to, like, grab me and, like, grabbing my arms and stuff like that.'

It seems that Vitale, whose bindings were only loose, was so sexually aroused that he wanted to have intercourse with Jennings. But the eighteen-year-old, flying on ice and ecstasy, panicked, thinking Vitale was attacking him. He heard the voice of the man and the wolf in the bushes again. They were screaming, ‘I'm going to get you! I'm going to rape you!' Dizzy and disoriented, Jennings broke away from Vitale. Vitale, who was unaffected by drugs, thought Jennings's resistance was all part of the sexual play. But Jennings was terrified, convinced that Vitale was not an aroused sexual partner but a homicidal maniac, his worst nightmare. Jennings found his backpack and pulled his knife out. As Vitale closed on him, Jennings swung the knife in a round-armed sweep. There was only one connection: the knife dug eight centimetres into the left-hand side of Vitale's neck, severing both the left external carotid artery and the left internal jugular vein.

Jennings threw the knife down, picked up his backpack and sprinted back to his unit, passing Vitale's car along the way. Still ‘freaking out', as he said, he went inside and logged back onto the internet.

Vitale, meanwhile, was fighting for his life. Blood was gushing out of the neck wound. Partially freeing himself from the ropes on his ankles and wrists, he staggered out of the reserve into a suburban street. He came to the front door of a house and yelled out for help. There was no one in the house, but neighbours heard him and called an ambulance. Within minutes, helpful neighbours, the police and ambulance officers were surrounding Vitale, who had collapsed and fallen unconscious. He died before he reached hospital.

Police had little trouble establishing that it was Trent Jennings who had inflicted the fatal wound upon Giuseppe Vitale. Jennings, it turned out, had stolen a car to drive from Perth to Sydney back in September, and when he was arrested for that in January 2004 he told the story of what had happened between himself and Vitale a few weeks earlier.

At this point, the story was a tragic example of what an ‘overdose' of ice can do. It isn't like heroin, where the user will pass out and is no threat to anyone other than himself. With ice, taking too much can lead to symptoms that replicate full-blown paranoid schizophrenia. If a mentally ill person kills someone during an episode of psychotic paranoia, then the mental illness can be a defence against a murder charge.

In court in August 2005, the Trent Jennings case took a significant twist. Before his trial, Jennings was facing a charge of murder. Through his solicitor, he said he would plead not guilty to murder, but would plead guilty to manslaughter if that was the charge. But the Crown declined to downgrade the indictment. Prosecutors wanted to put Jennings away for murder.

If he'd been charged with manslaughter, Jennings's intoxication could not have been used as a defence. The NSW criminal code has a strange position on this. Intoxication is only a defence in ‘crimes of intent'. As manslaughter means that the perpetrator does not intend to kill the victim, it is not a ‘crime of intent'. So if the Crown had charged Jennings with manslaughter, he would have taken a guilty plea and served a number of years in jail.

Professor Mark Findlay, the director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, notes that the ‘
Crimes Act
doesn't discriminate between the sources of intoxication. Many people criticise that because there are such different intoxicants, with such different effects, and they believe the law should take that into account.'

Findlay explains that the High Court authority behind this theory is the case of
R v O'Connor
:

‘If you couldn't have the required mental state for intent, you could claim intoxication as a defence. But that's politically unpalatable, because it might mean you could get as drunk as you like and have a defence against a criminal charge.

‘So in NSW, the crime requires specific intent. Intoxication can only be a defence if it is self-induced and to such an extent that it denies specific intent.

‘But if you're charged with manslaughter you can't use [the defence of intoxication], because manslaughter is not a crime of intent. We have the strange situation where if I commit a serious offence I can claim intoxication and get off, but if I'm charged with the lesser offence, I can't claim intoxication. It's a ludicrous situation, in that it's the charge laid against you that determines whether you can use intoxication as a defence.'

With Trent Jennings, the Crown went for the higher-risk charge of murder. In doing so, it opened up the possibility that Jennings could say he was mentally impaired by his intoxication, and thus escape conviction completely.

In his trial, three forensic psychiatrists who had examined him, one for the Crown and two for the defence, agreed that the story he told them about his hallucinations was genuine. Furthermore, Jennings continued to suffer from these hallucinations after he was in jail and was no longer taking ice and ecstasy. The episodes abated when he took anti-psychotic medication. Therefore, the psychiatrists believed that he did suffer from an underlying mental condition.