Bali’s Kerobokan Prison is home to Australians Schapelle Corby and the Bali Nine. KATHRYN BONELLA reveals in a new book the daily hardships faced by Corby and Bali Nine inmates Scott Rush and Renae Lawrence
SCOTT RUSH
“I got a letter the other day, it was just a little Post-it note, and this girl said to me, `I would rather get killed than be in jail in this place’. Well, sometimes that makes sense to me.
“Sometimes I think I would rather get shot than have to spend my life in here. Because if I do get life, it’s long life, life without remissions, which is here until you’re dead.
“Sometimes I think I would rather get the death penalty. That’s what makes it easier for me to cope with the death penalty hanging over my head.
“It’s just something to prepare myself for, I guess, mentally. I don’t want to go fully crazy before I get executed. I wouldn’t want to go out like that.”
BEING sentenced to many years in Hotel K, with only a faint light glinting at the end of a long, dark tunnel, is grim.
But for inmates living under the shadow of death, spending their empty days in Hotel K, trying to have some kind of life before they get a bullet through the heart, is soul destroying.
Scott was sharing a cell in the so-called death tower — the one smiling assassin Amrozi was in before he was transferred to Nusakambangan Island and shot dead — with Nigerian man, Emmanuel.
Now that fate loomed for Scott and Emmanuel, and two others in the Bali Nine, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, though all were appealing against their sentences.
The four rooms in the death tower were filled with all eight men from the Bali Nine syndicate.
Sometimes Scott rarely left his cell, preferring to blow up hippos with aliens on his PlayStation. But other times he tried to live in the moment.
During those times, he would play tennis all day, stopping only when the sun got too hot.
He would take a break in his cell, watch DVDs or cable TV and read self-help books.
Scott’s parents came to Bali when they could, friends visited regularly and a Balinese friend came once a month to deliver him cash sent from his family.
Scott was 19 when he checked into Hotel K — the second-youngest of the Bali Nine.
Life as he knew it finished the night that he took a taxi to Bali’s Ngurah Rai Airport to board a flight to Australia.
He had over one kilogram of heroin taped to his legs.
Three other Australians, posing as tourists on their way home, were also carrying heroin. A fifth person, Andrew, then 20, was sitting comfortably on the plane when police grabbed him.
He didn’t have any drugs on him but was one of two ringleaders.
Another four, in their teens and early 20s, were arrested in a hotel room in Kuta.
The Australian Federal Police had waited for them to leave Australia, then tipped off the Indonesian police, passing on their names, passport details, mobile phone numbers and even black-and-white photos of them, knowingly exposing them to death by firing squad.
“The AFP did throw us to the wolves and there’s a lot of pressure on them for it and I don’t think they can make up [for] their mistakes. I suppose there’s nothing they can do to rewind the past,” said Scott.
In a Bali courtroom, all nine Australians were convicted.
Initially, seven were given life, and the two ringleaders, Andrew and Myuran, the death penalty. Scott was the only courier suddenly and inexplicably to be handed a death sentence after appealing.
“Don’t ask me why. Just sort of happened like that. It’s crazy. They haven’t given me reasons why. We all had over 500g, and the law is, if you go over 500g you’re eligible for the death penalty. But they kind of just gave it to me,” Scott said.
Scott bitterly regretted his teenage mistake.
He’d shot up heroin a couple of times, chain-smoked, had seen a psychiatrist and taken anti-depressants.
But the death sentence was always lurking. An earlier cellmate had told him he sometimes called out, “Mum, Mum”, in his sleep.
Sometimes, he heard the ringing gunshots of his execution.
HIS mother, Christine, had given him their family Bible, and Scott had turned to God for strength.
Many nights, he got down on his hands and knees in his cell and asked for forgiveness.
He started seeing a Catholic priest at Hotel K’s chapel, but stopped when the people running it started telling him, “If you die, you will be going home [to God]”. He didn’t like it.
“They weren’t the ones facing death by firing squad,” he said.
“Dying was not going home. Who were they to tell me that?”
Scott’s parents initially spent five months in Bali, looking after him and trying to find someone they could trust to take money to him from an account they had set up.
His parents spent about $340 a month to keep Scott in relative comfort in Hotel K.
Another Australian was spending $1000 a month on food and payments to guards.
On Scott’s 21st birthday Lee and Christine flew to Bali with their other two sons, Dean and Cameron, and threw a two-hour party for him in one of the small offices.
It was only three months since his sentence had been upped to death, when his mum had told waiting reporters that her son was scared, absolutely petrified, about his fate.
But they were all making the most of his birthday, with about 12 people celebrating and a chocolate cake.
As he took a breath to blow out the 21 candles, someone joked, “We know what the wish is, Scott, so just blow.”
When handed a framed portrait of his late grandfather, he kissed the image.
For those hours he enjoyed being with his loved ones.
“Actually, I feel pretty good.
“It’s good to have my family and friends here.
“It’s amazing to be able to celebrate it and I just feel great today,” Scott told reporters.
Snatching moments of happiness was vital, as the daily grind was so difficult.
But if Scott and Emmanuel ever needed reminding things could get worse, they had only to look out their door.
Their cell was luxurious compared with tikus, the solitary confinement cell, across the grassy path.
“So far since I’ve been here, two guys have died in solitary from tuberculosis and AIDS.
“One guy got put in there because he tried to escape from hospital where he was held, that wasn’t that long ago and [the] guy before that just kept getting skinnier and skinnier — some days he didn’t know who he was. I think they knew he was going to die sooner or later.
“That’s a terrible way to die, I reckon, being put in a little cell like that,” Scott said.
The spreading of diseases didn’t just come from the bodies pulled out of cell tikus.
Some prisoners in cell tikus without a toilet would throw a plastic bag of s–t through the vent and on to the grass outside Scott and Emmanuel’s cell.
Some days, Scott paid the guards 500,000 rupiah ($65) to get out for a visit.
Most people paid that fee to be let out permanently.
“That’s what it feels like; time goes really, really slowly, especially when you see other people doing what they want to do . . . envy is a bad feeling.”
Hall of dark secrets
SCHAPELLE CORBY
IT was a dark secret among the inmates that the deaths around the jail, set up to look like suicides, rarely were.
Suspicious deaths were common in Hotel K.
At 7.30am one day, guard Agung Mas had unlocked the women’s cells and was doing the day’s first roll call.
She mentioned to (inmate) Nita she’d felt there was something strange about the main hall when she’d walked past it earlier and was going to take a closer look.
Unusually, she left Block W’s steel door open, so Nita trailed behind her and Schapelle, who’d overheard the conversation, also tagged along in her pyjamas.
This was a rare chance to walk in the prison grounds and out of the claustrophobic Block W on a fresh, quiet morning. Anything slightly different was a relief.
But there was no chance to enjoy it. Through the hall window, they saw a prisoner hanging in a noose in the centre of the room.
One end of a sarong was tied around his neck, and the rest of it was twisted up and tied to a rafter poking through the broken ceiling.
His feet were dangling centimetres off the floor.
The female guard, Schapelle and Nita all knew the prisoner.
It was Agus, who’d been a Hotel K inmate for a couple of years.
He’d arrived fit and well-built, but inside jail had deteriorated into a skinny heroin addict.
He’d been a gregarious drink-seller in the blue room, often telling new inmates to be careful of drugs in Hotel K, because he was now an addict, but had never once touched any drug before checking in.
Now, hanging in the hall, he looked normal, almost as if he were sleeping.
His skin was still its usual colour.
The only hint of something sinister was his tightly clenched fists and the fact that his block was still locked.
The question of how he got out of his locked block during the night would never be asked, let alone answered.
Schapelle and Nita stayed calm, numb to the kind of chilling sights to which they’d become far too accustomed inside jail. Very quickly, they were surrounded by a crowd of men as news of Agus’s death spread through the blocks.
All the inmates knew this was a murder.
The rest of the blue room drink-seller boys were shaken and upset.
Not only was it a stark warning to pay their drug debts, but they had lost their good friend Agus.
This was the real, dark heart of Hotel K, no matter what PR stunts it turned on for photographers and reporters.
“Life goes on and, after a few months, a killing inside the hall happened again,” Nita, a Hotel K inmate, said.
One male prisoner was hanged with a sarong and plastic string.
According to the official report, he killed himself by overdosing on drugs.
Police came and investigated the case, and took the body for an autopsy.
According to news from the security, somebody killed and hanged him in the hall.
“The condition and situation of the jail is very dangerous,” Nita said.
The playboy of Block W
RENAE LAWRENCE
WANDA entered Block W a hurt and fragile woman. At night she wept for her children.
During the days she often didn’t eat.
She spent her first Ramadan with no visits. She had no family and no friends in Bali.
But the women comforted her, cheered her up with food, massages and affection.
She was easily seduced into the nurturing bosom of the lesbians, the physical connection easing the pain in her heart.
Wanda was petite and beautiful. She was fought over by the lesbians.
Renae Lawrence, the only woman in the Australian Bali Nine drug syndicate, a lesbian before checking into Hotel K, made a play for Wanda.
She visited her cell, gave her food and tried to make her laugh. Renae’s girlfriend, Eda, was bitterly jealous.
She refused to speak to Wanda. One day, Renae’s flirting tipped Eda over the edge. She snapped after Renae offered Wanda a slice of cheesecake.
Eda and Renae started laying into each other in their cell. Locked in for the night, all the women were forced to listen to the screaming and the violence until it suddenly went quiet.
Eda had collapsed. A doctor was called, but she was okay.
Eda soon checked out of Hotel K. The other lesbians called Renae Lawrence the playboy of the women’s block.
She was big, muscular and masculine, had money and was western. Women threw themselves at her.
Renae could comfortably accommodate the girls, having paid guards to have a soft double bed in her cell.
Renae soon fell in love with a cellmate, Ira.
Despite having 15 years left to serve, once Ira was free, Renae hoped to marry her in a Hindu wedding ceremony inside Hotel K.
“Our love has given me hope. In the Hindu religion, same-sex weddings are controversial. But some believe marriage is a union of spirits, not male and female.”
Extracted from Hotel Kerobokan: The shocking inside story of Bali’s most notorious jail by Kathryn Bonella. Published by Macmillan Australia, rrp $34.99. Available from October 28, 2009. Buy Hotel Kerobokan by Kathryn Bonella for the Sunday Herald Sun reader price of $27.95 + $6 p/h. ph: 1300 306 107 or post a cheque to Book Offers: P.O Box 14730 Melbourne Vic 8001