Scattered (19 page)

He drove the stolen red Commodore back up to the roof, switched into the stolen maroon Commodore, and drove off to Long Jetty, where he dumped the car on Anzac Road.

Flush with the money from the NAB robbery, Aslett probably decided that he'd pushed his luck as far as it would go on the Central Coast. He bought a second-hand car and drove back down to Sydney. He was worried about Emad Youssef, who he'd heard had died. Aslett must have known the police would be on his trail, so he didn't stay at his sister's house in Cabramatta. Instead, he went to a friend's home at Busby, near Liverpool, and hid out for another night.

Meanwhile, Bonham was arrested at the caravan park in Lismore. He admitted having broken into the As' home in Newington, but denied having raped SA with the man they called Uncle.

‘What's their uncle's name?' the police asked Bonham.

‘Dudley.'

‘What's his surname?'

‘I don't know, might be the same as my mates.'

‘Okay. What does Dudley look like?'

‘He's Aboriginal, bald hair, sort of like . . . I think he had a goatee or somethin', I dunno, sort of.'

‘How old is Dudley?'

‘He's about 30, 30-something, maybe 28, 20, I dunno.'

‘Have you ever seen Dudley before?'

‘I seen him once.'

‘Where was that?'

‘At a mate's house, at Steven's house.'

‘What did Steven call him?'

‘Uncle.'

Bonham said that Dudley and Steven Aslett had had sex with SA, but he and the seventeen-year-old hadn't. He named Dudley as the ringleader, but a year later, in court, he recanted on his Lismore confession and refused to give evidence against anyone else, including Uncle Dud.

It's unclear if Bonham told the police during the Lismore interview where Dudley Aslett had gone, but within two days they had tracked him down to the house in Busby. At 10.50 pm on 22 August, members of the Tactical Operations Unit surrounded the house. Aslett saw them, and tried to escape through the backyard. He was spotted by two senior constables, who called out to him to stop. Ignoring them, he leapt the back fence and threw away a bag that contained the Smith & Wesson revolver. The two policemen quickly caught him and placed him under arrest, bringing to an end a singularly shocking spree, the ice-fuelled culmination of a lifetime of crime.

Four days later, while police interviewed him at Silverwater jail, Aslett broke down, crying and saying, ‘I can't sleep, I'm thinking about the man I killed.' In a later interview he revealed that a friend had shown him how Emad Youssef left his pharmacy every day. Aslett had watched and planned, cold-bloodedly. On the fatal day, he smoked ice and heroin before committing what he thought would be a simple robbery. He said he'd only used the gun to scare Youssef, and hadn't meant to fire it at him. When he'd run away, he said, he thought he'd only wounded Youssef in the shoulder.

What is there to say about Dudley Aslett? He expressed some remorse over the death of Emad Youssef and the rape of the two young women, though this went no deeper than saying he ‘felt bad' and had ‘bad dreams' about what he'd done. In court his counsel detailed his drug use, his prior criminal history, and his truly appalling young life spent mostly in one form of detention or another. But while these factors were taken into account by successive trial and appeal judges, none gained Aslett any mercy or were seen to mitigate his crimes. In the NSW Supreme Court, Justice James Wood gave a succinct summary of Aslett's life and crimes:

It is rare that one can say, with any confidence, that a Prisoner presents a very serious ongoing danger to the community, or that his rehabilitation prospects are negligible. The present however is a case where I am satisfied beyond any reasonable doubt . . .

The Prisoner has shown himself to have no regard for person or property, he has ignored the lessons which his prior sentences should have conveyed, and he has effectively placed himself outside all normal standards of behaviour or constraints of civilised living. The manner in which he posed with a fistful of bank notes and with a pistol on his hip in [a] photograph which was tendered, says much as to the way in which he regards himself.

The psychological profile similarly holds out very little hope of him ever being rehabilitated, or of controlling his aggressive and dangerous impulses. He came from a supportive family. While it was a big family which had its own problems, with the exception of the alleged sexual abuse by a stepbrother, of which no evidence came from the Prisoner or his mother, there is nothing to suggest that his early years were particularly dysfunctional.

His subsequent periods of custody either in boys' homes, in detention centres or in adult prisons have, no doubt, hardened him to the point where, if he is not already institutionalised, he is very close to it. Again, his history of almost continuous detention away from his family, and the inevitable exposure to delinquent peer behaviour, almost certainly go a long way to explaining where he is today, and why he has chosen to continue offending.

On Aslett's drug use at the time of the crimes, Justice Wood said: ‘[T]hey included “ice”; and . . . may also have included cannabis, heroin and cocaine.

‘The abuse of drugs by the Prisoner helps to explain his behaviour but it does not excuse it.'

Justice Wood applied the legal principles established in the case of
R v Henry
in 1999, which included:

(a) the need to acquire funds to support a drug habit, even a severe habit, is not an excuse to commit an armed robbery or any similar offence, and of itself is not a matter of mitigation;

(b) however the fact that an offence is motivated by such a need may be taken into account as a factor relevant to the objective criminality of the offence in so far as it may throw light on matters such as:

(i) the impulsivity of the offence and the extent of any planning for it;

(ii) the existence or non existence of any alternative reason that may have operated in aggravation of the offence, e.g. that it was motivated to fund some other serious criminal venture or to support a campaign of terrorism;

(iii) the state of mind or capacity of the offender to exercise judgment, e.g. if he or she was in the grips of an extreme state of withdrawal of the kind that may have led to a frank disorder of thought processes or to the act being other than a willed act;

(c) It may also be relevant as a subjective circumstance, in so far as the origin or extent of the addiction, and any attempts to overcome it, might:

(i) impact upon the prospects of recidivism/rehabilitation, in which respect it may on occasions prove to be a two-edged sword;

(ii) suggest that the addiction was not a matter of personal choice but was attributable to some other event for which the offender was not primarily responsible, for example where it arose as the result of the medical prescription of potentially addictive drugs following injury, illness, or surgery; or where it occurred at a very young age, or in a person whose mental or intellectual capacity was impaired, so that their ability to exercise appropriate judgment or choice was incomplete;

(iii) justify special consideration in the case of offenders judged to be at the ‘cross roads'.

Justice Wood said that giving Aslett any benefit of these mitigating circumstances would be an act of ‘irresponsibility'. He sentenced Aslett to life imprisonment for the murder and the sexual assaults, and a variety of long sentences for the other sixteen counts. In effect, he would have been eligible for parole on 21 August 2036, when he would be a 65-year-old man. On appeal, the Court of Criminal Appeal increased this term so that Aslett has no hope of parole until 2044, when he will be 73.

Without mitigating or excusing Aslett in any way, it is still possible to ask the question: Would Aslett have committed his crimes without the influence of ice? Legally and morally, it's irresponsible to ‘blame' the drug. Aslett deserved his long sentences. But in a study of crystal methamphetamine, it is instructive to remember that Aslett had previously been a smalltime crook with a staple cycle of break and enter, car theft and heroin use. He had been no more violent than threatening police or victims in the course of his usual robberies. He had no record of sexual violence. His accomplices had no prior criminal records. But Dudley Aslett had found ice, or ice had found him. Within weeks, he led robberies that turned into rape and murder.

There were many examples, in 2003 and 2004, of violent crimes occurring within weeks of the offender starting to use ice. Aslett was far from alone. At the time his August spree was taking place, in another part of Sydney a seventeen-year-old cannabis smoker and petty criminal—codenamed ‘SB' in the courts—smoked ice for the first time. SB quickly became a daily user, and within four weeks he and a friend went to the Orchard Tavern in Chatswood, on Sydney's north shore, and robbed the place, bailing up five staff members and ten customers with a gun. After his imprisonment and off crystal meth, SB's behaviour was exemplary. SB was no angel, but he was a violent robber only during the month he was smoking ice every day.

Shane Martin, 26, was an ice user of a few months' duration when in January 2004 he broke into a drug dealer's house intending to steal some cannabis he knew was kept there. But, high on ice and the thrill of capturing the dealer and his wife and daughter, Martin grew sexually aroused and raped the two women in front of the man. Martin pleaded guilty and was given 25 years in jail to think about his moment of madness.

It's extremely likely that, given his lifetime compulsion to steal, Dudley Aslett would have committed more robberies whatever happened. Robbery was his profession. Yet these small-time criminalities spiralled out of control when he and his little gang were overaroused, both sexually and in the violence they were prepared to enact. Without the stimulant of crystal meth, would they have been amped-up into a state of such libidinous excitement that they raped two young women? Without the jumbled mental state and excitability brought on by ice, would Aslett have fired the gun at Emad Youssef? Without the paranoia, would he even have thought it necessary to steal the gun in the first place?

Responsibility rests with the perpetrators of the crime. But it is fair to say that a pattern was emerging among criminals who used ice. The drug threw fuel onto highly combustible personalities. It didn't change the intent or the clear-headedness of the perpetrators, but it did affect the degree of their actions. Under the influence of ice, simple violence became complicated. Small confrontations escalated. If Aslett hadn't been unhinged by crystal meth, he wouldn't have suddenly led a straight and law-abiding life, but Emad Youssef might still be alive and the two young women might be able to live free of those wounds they will bear for the rest of their lives.

The relationship between methamphetamine—particularly in its crystalline form—and violence is at the same time blindingly obvious and unproven. On the one hand, anyone who has experienced or seen an episode of the popularly termed ‘ice psychosis' will know that violent behaviour can follow ice use as naturally as a hangover follows a drinking bout. Any reasonably perceptive person who has even taken ice will sense the potential that lies inside such a nervy, excitable state. And the Dudley Asletts, Mohammed Kerbatiehs and Dimitrios Kyriakidises of the world give a fair indication of what happens when this chemical unlatches the impulse-control mechanism inside certain vulnerable brains.

And yet, both scientifically and legally, proof is a much trickier matter. If ice triggers violent actions in some users, why not in others? If ice turned Aslett into a rapist one day, why not the day before, or the day after? Can ice be isolated as a violence-causing substance when most violent users are also taking other drugs and alcohol as well? If ice led automatically to violence, why can't we trace a clear correlation between known ice use and acts of violent crime? And how much of ice-related violence is actually the turf-war criminality of rival drug gangs, such as the unfortunate shooting death of a man in Merrylands in December 2003, when passing gunmen were aiming at his ice-dealing son but shot the father by mistake?

Anecdotally, the causal link between ice and violence has long been acknowledged. In 2006, Robert Mittiga, the program director of South Australia's Gambling and Addiction Treatment Service, put it neatly when he said meth users hurt far more people than themselves: ‘What concerns me is the consequences—violent crimes, serious domestic violence, road rage and violent brawls. These people are not normally aggressive but they can become total animals.' A Melbourne youth worker, Les Twentyman, said at the same time, after eleven knife attacks in a week, that an estimate that 60 per cent of street crime was ice-related would be ‘very conservative'.

Yet the population-based measures of the ice–violence nexus have always been suggestive at best. One concerted effort to study the matter beyond the the realm of anecdote is the Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) project, established in 1999 and modelled on the United States-originated International Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program (I-ADAM). Under DUMA, people who have been arrested and taken into police custody are asked to give urine samples for drug testing. DUMA claims that 70 per cent of arrestees agree to the anonymous tests, from which the project compiles drug analysis.

DUMA tests all participating arrestees, whether they are in custody for violent or non-violent crimes (and, as they are arrestees rather than convicted criminals, it must be allowed that many of them have done nothing at all). But the studies do break down arrestees by the type of crime over which they have been charged, and in relation to methamphetamine, DUMA has found over the decade that ice is commonly but far from automatically connected with crimes of violence.

Over its eight-year lifespan, DUMA has been able to track drug use in one consistent cohort of male detainees in four sites around the country. The taking of any drug before an arrest is remarkably stable, between 70 and 78 per cent. Cannabis, the most frequently appearing drug, is also consistent in the 50–60 percentile. Methamphetamine was in the urine of 10 per cent of arrestees in 1999, rising to a peak of 31 per cent in 2001. From there it stabilised in the mid-twenties until 2005. In the 2006 survey, the most recent at the time of writing, DUMA found that the number of arrestees for violent crimes who tested positive to methamphetamine had fallen from 22 per cent to 18 per cent.