Authors: Schapelle Corby
Vasu was so outraged that he illegally acquired a sample of the marijuana to try to get it independently tested. I was a bit pissed off when I found out, as being accused of stealing evidence was the last thing I needed, and any test results would not have been accepted in court anyway. Of course, he didn’t find anyone of any authority in Australia prepared to carry out tests on a stolen sample, even though he’d been prepared to risk flying into Australia with it – or so he told a couple of journalists.
Despite Lily’s requests, we were never shown any CCTV vision from cameras directly above the customs counter at Denpasar airport, which could have proven that I willingly opened my bag.
Mum received a phone call at home from the AFP, asking her about the mobile phone I’d given to the Bali police on that first night. It was registered in the name of Rosleigh Rose. They must have thought they’d cottoned on to something – maybe she was my drug supplier?
‘Rosleigh Rose?’ they asked Mum when she picked up the phone.
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you give Schapelle Corby a phone?’
‘Well, because I’m her mum. I’m allowed to give her a bloody phone!’
After a surprisingly long wait, I’d had blood and urine tests – which came out clear, of course – and I got a certificate from the Australian Police stating that I did not have a criminal record.
So, with no positive test results, no signed confession and no known association with drugs, the Bali police did not have any quick hit of secondary evidence on me. And as they had no interest in putting any effort into a real investigation, they had another shot at setting me up instead.
In early November, almost four weeks after I was arrested, a friend, her two little kids, Mum, Merc and Lily were visiting me in the upstairs office at Polda. When three of them left the room to talk to the head of police, leaving my friend and the kids with me, something sinister happened that gave me nightmares for weeks.
‘Mummy, what’s this?’ The little boy was holding up a small plastic bag filled with white powder and some pills.
My friend leapt up, furiously hitting it out of the boy’s hands and flinging it underneath a table. It was scary and very weird.
We sat there for a moment in shock, not knowing what the hell to do. I thought,
Oh no, they’re trying to set us up for something else.
As the bag sat on the floor where it had been flung, I noticed the policeman sitting at his computer across from us quietly taking it all in, occasionally smirking and giving us sly looks.
We were trembling in fright, shocked and unsure what to do. It suddenly struck me that Mum had been sitting on the chair where the bag had been found, so they could have been trying to set her up, to make it look like she was bringing her drug-addict daughter some supplies.
When Merc walked back in, we probably looked like ghosts. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked us both.
In frantic whispers, we told her what had just happened, and she went back out to get Lily. Soon, they were both on their hands and knees searching for the packet of drugs as the room started to fill up with policemen. Bingo, Lily found it. She stood up. Then, holding up the incriminating little bag, she let them have it, yelling furiously in Indonesian, though the words of her tirade were lost on the rest of us.
The room erupted. The police were arguing among themselves, pointing at the bag, pointing at each other.
After a minute or two, the policeman who had been sitting behind his computer arrogantly pushed his chair back and stood up slowly, saying, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah!’ He took the bag from Lily, mumbling that it had fallen from ‘the evidence cupboard’, which was on the other side of the room from where it was found. He then simply popped it up into the cupboard and sat back down – none of the police bothered asking us any questions. Their little stunt hadn’t worked, but it had scared the hell out of us.
We all became a little bit paranoid after that, as it showed that these people really did want to send me to jail and would clearly do whatever it took. Merc and Wayan were even warned by a policeman who was a friend of Wayan’s family to be careful of drugs being planted in their car. They lived in fear of it for months, parking their vehicle well away from their house and rarely using it, but always searching it first when they did.
Merc and Wayan lived with hurtful rumours from day one – that they were drug dealers who were going to sell the marijuana through Wayan’s surf shop. To find drugs on them would have been perfect secondary evidence for the police. Merc, Wayan and his two younger sisters were the only people I knew in Bali, so I guess that’s why the rumours started. But Bali is a small island, and the police knew who dealt drugs and who didn’t; and they definitely knew my sister and her sweet-natured, quiet husband were not drug dealers. Neither of them was ever questioned, not once. Wayan didn’t even have a surf shop, and they had not lived in Bali for six years. To anyone who knows my sister and her husband, the idea of them being drug dealers would be laughable if it wasn’t so disgusting and hurtful.
Absolutely nothing was going my way. And Merc and I started having doubts about Lily and Vasu, too. They were fighting hard for evidence, but we’d realised by now that Lily wasn’t on the consulate list of recommended lawyers, she’d never fought a drug case in court or been lead counsel in court. As for Vasu, he wasn’t actually a lawyer at all. He and Lily had been very good friends for years, even wearing matching rings, but he had never worked on a legal case with her before this. But we’d already paid them an advance of US$6,000, which we’d scrambled to pull together from everyone’s spending money, so we couldn’t afford to switch to a new legal team.
Apart from being disappointed that her credentials were hopeless, I was upset to find out that Lily had stalled the police on doing my blood and urine tests. Thinking it should have been done on or close to the day of my arrest, I asked her in the car when we were finally en route to Polda’s police hospital: ‘Why have they taken so long to do this, Lily?’
‘I waited to be sure your blood is clean.’
‘What are you talking about? Of
course
it is!’ I was furious with her. Of course I was clean, but even my own lawyer was doubting me.
Lily also started crying regularly, which worried me. She was meant to be my tough lawyer. The first time was about a week after I signed her up, when I sadly joked that I’d been picked up by the wrong airport bus. She also told me that she cried whenever she was out having a cup of coffee in a café, watching foreigners on holiday – young women my age out shopping, carefree, with friends, doing normal things. She’d imagine where I was and what was happening, and start to cry, thinking Schapelle should’ve been out in the mall just like them. She’d tell me this with a tear in her eye and I’d reply, ‘Well, you’d better work hard so I can!’ She cried so often that I regularly ended up comforting her and giving her a hug, but at the same time thinking to myself,
Just do your goddamn job
.
Vasu, on the other hand, was becoming increasingly rude and belligerent, often yelling at Merc and me. Many times when I hesitated to make a decision about something, or questioned him, he would say, ‘I’ll wash my hands of you, Schapelle, I’ll wash my hands.’ I promised myself that the next time he said this, I would hand him a bar of soap.
Vasu repeatedly asked Merc for dollars to organise someone to help test the marijuana for the Bali police. The day after she gave him the money, the decision not to test it was made by the police, but despite her requests the money was never returned to her.
Merc and I felt alone and frightened, not sure who to trust or turn to. I needed to get out of here and go home to my life. I needed my luck to change. I needed evidence. Without evidence to fight my case, my lawyers only had doubt to fire at the court. It was strong doubt, admittedly, because if you just scratched the surface, it was perfectly and logically obvious I did not do this.
First, I’d assumed that security at our airports was watertight, all bags were scanned, cameras kept an eye out twenty-four/seven, and brilliant, sophisticated technology lurked everywhere. So why would I even think of trying my luck at moving 4.2 kilograms of drugs past such security? Apart from the fact that I respect the law, I would never risk it. Who the hell would?
And if I
had
been stupid enough to risk it, surely I would have at least flown directly from Brisbane to Bali to minimise that risk?
Not only that, but I’d hardly have put the dope in see-through plastic bags sitting blatantly on top of my boogie board, with my name and address written clearly on the outside, without at least bothering to put a lock on the whole package. If I had taken this crazy, stupid risk, why wouldn’t I have put it deep inside my suitcase among my clothes, in an attempt to hide it? It would easily have fitted, as the bag would have been significantly smaller before the vacuum seal had been broken. It would have been a perfect fit in any bag.
Also, I would have known that the death penalty lurked at the other end of the flight. And all this risk for what? What the hell was my motive?
I don’t know the true value of the dope here or in Australia. No one does, as the THC was never tested. Some say it’s worth more in Bali, while others argue the opposite. But even if it was worth more in Bali, it would have been a marginal profit. So why would I risk death or life in jail? Why?
And where and how was I going to sell it? The only people I knew well on the island were certainly no drug dealers – the cops would’ve been banging on their door immediately if they were.
My lawyers and my mum were trying every avenue and beating down all doors in search of evidence. This evidence could indisputably prove my guilt or my innocence. I knew which one it would be. Why else did I fight so hard to find it? If I was guilty, the discovery of that evidence would have meant I was signing my own death warrant or kissing years of my life goodbye. Yet there I was, wanting to find that evidence more than anything else in the whole world.
The Bali police did not find anything to supplement the dope being found in my bag – not that they really looked. But no one could have found evidence to prove the marijuana in the bag was mine . . . because that evidence simply doesn’t exist. I have never had anything to do with drugs. I had clean blood tests, clean urine tests and a clean criminal record. The most trouble I’d ever been in was getting a ticket for going eight kilometres over the speed limit.
I lived in hope that my luck would change, that something stronger than doubt would be found. Maybe someone who knew the truth and just couldn’t sleep in bed at night would finally speak out.
‘I do not fear the future. I am an optimist. Whatever happens will be for the best.’ I read this quote in a magazine interview with Imran Khan while I sat in my cell at Polda. It resonated with me and I wrote it down because I had to believe it, too. There was no other way.
9
Hotel Kerobokan
C
HECKING IN TO
K
EROBOKAN
P
RISON WAS LIKE CHECKING
in to a very bad hotel – a hotel where the doorman might be a killer, the smiling hosts heroin addicts and the guests anything from illegal card players to bloodthirsty, mass-murdering terrorists.
But tragically, I was looking forward to it. That’s how low my life had sunk. Merc had even been pushing for it. My aching limbs were screaming to be stretched, and I badly needed fresh air and sunlight to revive my spirit. Thirty-six days cramped in Polda had tortured my body and soul to breaking point. Hotel Kerobokan had grass, palm trees and even a tennis court: that part would read OK in a cheap holiday brochure!
First impressions weren’t too bad. There was a shabby courtyard just inside the front door, with a few trees, bits of scruffy grass and a murky pond. Its backdrop was an ugly but colourfully painted cement wall. Beyond that, the grounds looked huge. It was no luxury resort but definitely a star up from a concrete box.
Checking in was quick, but the process was shattering. Being made a prisoner in a third-world maximum-security jail was scary and degrading. And for what? What? I was doing time for someone else’s crime. It was so unfair. I was starting to feel gut-wrenching anger. I should’ve been checking in to a hotel for tourists, not terrorists. I wanted my old life back. But I had no control. None at all.
I stood limp and compliant as a guard snapped my mug shot, took my fingerprints, height, weight, and for some strange reason measured my breasts. He then searched my bags. I watched keenly to make sure drugs weren’t planted. A second guard asked me a few questions, slipping in a few sleazy ones of his own. ‘You got boyfriend? You beautiful – you married?’
I just said, ‘Thank you’, and politely answered his questions.
It felt like a twisted version of being dropped off at a school camp when my beautiful mum, Merc and Wayan arrived to see me safely into jail. Mum held my hand. Her eyes were full of pain. Poor Merc looked sick. She was ghostly white and skinny. She’d now lost ten kilograms since my arrest. None of us could comprehend any of this. Didn’t this only happen in the movies?
The good news was that, like at any hotel, we’d been able to buy a room upgrade. I’d get a spot in the best cell: clean, with no drug addicts, no lesbians and just four other prisoners. It was a relief, as the Polda guards had loved freaking me out with stories of lesbians attacking new girls. The cash price for the upgrade was $100. As we quickly learnt, Hotel Kerobokan is a thriving little business. Nothing is free. The prisoners even have to pay for the septic tank to be emptied.