Bali 9: The Untold Story (5 page)

She wanted to die. She needed to stop feeling like this. So, with no half measures, Renae Lawrence took a big handful of tablets and set off to a piece of deserted bushland up the road.

S
ix months later, Renae Lawrence wanted to shut out life again. This time she was in an Indonesian police cell on suspicion of drug smuggling, crammed in her hot, stinky prison with no way out. And pills weren’t so easy to access. So Renae plotted another way to end it all: she pulled the small ring off the top of a soft-drink can and then, wielding it as a blunt weapon, she set about slashing her wrists. Once. And again.

Like the time in high school when she wanted to dull the pain, and the time she tried to block out the world after her relationship breakdown, Renae couldn’t fathom the way ahead. She didn’t know what to do or how to do it. The pain was unbearable; the agony seeped throughout her body. She knew her future was now proscribed by a tough Indonesian legal system that wanted to crush the flourishing drug trade. It
loathed traffickers and she now stood accused as one of them. She couldn’t go on.

Last time she had got away with it. Last time, in October 2004—according to information she provided early to police—she had tricked the sniffer dogs in Indonesia, sitting uncomfortably with heroin packed to her body for what seemed like a lifetime, and passed the vigilant Customs staff at Sydney’s international airport. Perhaps it hadn’t seemed that difficult, looking back now, but this time things had gone wrong. She and Martin Stephens had thought they’d made it, even shaking hands and congratulating themselves. But then things had turned. Someone had appeared. Everything had gone so fast, but time didn’t seem to move. And now there was no way out.

So Renae Lawrence, a million miles away from Wallsend, tore the ring off the top of a soft-drink can and set about ending it all. It was her third—but would not be her last—desperate cry for help but, as in previous times, someone came to her aid. She had been saved each time, someone hearing her silent appeals for assistance.

This time it was a jail doctor able to prescribe a drug that promised to lift her mood. The black storm cloud which had hovered so ominously lifted, at least for a few weeks, then it came racing towards her again. The sadness descended with it. The desolation came back just as strongly. She was surrounded by black. Lost. Wounded. She had been set up and needed to tell the world. She was a victim.

Renae’s life began to spiral out of control—really out of control—about the time her relationship broke down. She felt as though she didn’t belong anywhere, and so she started the search to fit in again. She renewed contact with her father for the first time in many years. It was tentative at first, with both treading warily, but all the harsh words, accusations and counter-accusations seemed to vanish quickly. At least, on the surface. Renae told one of her friends that she felt her father was still unwilling to accept her lifestyle; that she found him harsh and uncompromising. But to Bob and Jenny she seemed to be pleased to be back on speaking terms.

They couldn’t help seeing the change in her, however. She had disappeared from their lives close to a decade ago, when she was eighteen. She was now nearing thirty and so much had happened in between. She’d gone from being a child to an adult; from a thin adolescent to a stocky woman. Her clothes were different and so was her hair.

There was so much water under the bridge, on both sides. And neither Bob or Jenny—nor Renae, it seemed—wanted to travel too far down that road. Renae had stayed in contact with her mother and stepfather throughout the years and now Bob was just happy to have her back. Happiness was still eluding Renae though. She felt aimless, the only constant in her life her beloved border collie, Buffy. But even Buffy was unable to live with her after Renae was forced to bunker down with a friend.

At every turn there seemed to be a challenge for the young woman who had struggled through her childhood and adolescence. Now, with the masterful benefit of hindsight, friends and family can see that this period was a turning point in Renae’s life—the hills higher than they seemed at the time, the journey more difficult than she made out. She continued to see both sides of her family and stayed in contact with her ex-lover’s children, whom she continued to share an easy relationship with, even taking them out on occasion. She still worked hard too, turning up on time for her casual job at the Sydney Cricket Ground whenever she was rostered and going about it like a model employee. But no one really knew what happened during the in-between times, who she was mixing with and what she was doing. No one appeared to know what was happening inside Renae’s head. No one. And so she was left to herself, although everyone who loves her now wishes that they had looked for signs—her occasional disappearances for a few days, for example. Or the clues that appeared not long before she left Australia for the last time. On one occasion she was with her father, who remembers a call she took on her mobile telephone. She sounded frightened and apprehensive, determined for him to not hear. She was trying to find excuses why she could not travel to Sydney that afternoon. Someone had been trying to force her, Bob Lawrence says. But no one suspected that she was in any real trouble.

She was, though. She was living a life destined to get her into trouble. Mixing with the wrong crowd,
spending bigger chunks of time in Sydney with people her family had never met, and going about her week without any thought of what tomorrow might bring. She was in a fast-paced search to belong again—and once more it was an all-or-nothing proposition. She had to find a new place. The past was gone and she needed a future.
Now
.

Old friends lost track of Renae’s movements during the months leading up to Christmas 2004, but didn’t think too much about it. That was the good thing about friendship: it could be left a while and always rekindled. Renae didn’t think too much of the consequences of not staying in touch, either. She was worried about today, not tomorrow. She would turn up for work and do her job, always punctual and hard-working, because that was the way she had been taught to act. But outside that she pretty much switched off, just focusing on trying to fit in.

Some of Renae’s co-workers became her social circle, as she started to live life too fast. And Matthew Norman, her co-worker at the SCG, seemed to be doing the same—according, at least, to charges the pair were due to face in Australia soon after their arrest in Bali.

Police claim it was only an hour or two before dawn one morning in March 2005—a week before the pair left for Indonesia—that Lawrence tucked herself behind the wheel of a car she did not own and, with Norman as her passenger, sped up the Pacific Highway she knew so well. She drove the highway several times a week, from Wallsend down to Sydney and back up
again, and, like hundreds of commuters who did the same, she knew the stretch of road like the back of her hand. On this morning, she was feeling the need for speed and rebellion. Going too fast, according to police she ignored all police directions to stop. It wasn’t the only perilous journey that Lawrence and Norman would take together.

Being told his daughter had been arrested in Bali on suspicion of carrying drugs through Bali’s international airport almost stopped Bob Lawrence’s heart. His daughter. Renae. In another country. Carrying drugs. The words mish-mashed around and around in his head. None of it made any sense, and the more he thought about it, the more he considered it not possible. Of course they had the wrong girl—Renae had never even been on a plane. Never been outside her home state of New South Wales, let alone in a foreign country. And she was broke, stony-broke. Bob knew that because her car had packed it in only weeks earlier and he had worried when she fell into a depression afterwards. She could not believe that something else was now going wrong in her life. First the relationship she depended on, and now the car she depended on. Her ticket to freedom, her transport to Sydney—she needed the car to get to work at the Sydney Cricket Ground. She was spending more and more time in Sydney and the car had safely transported her there time and time again. So she couldn’t just go without it.

Renae called Bob, wondering what she could do. She understood cars, and knew her father did too, and they both knew it would cost dearly to put her vehicle back on the road. Certainly, there wouldn’t be much change out of $800, if they were lucky. Renae didn’t have a clue where she’d get that sort of money, and told her father exactly that.

Bob knew he could fix the car, but he didn’t want Renae totally off the hook either. He believed in taking responsibility—all children should. She had to stand on her own two feet and take care of her own bills. He thought they might be able to fix it together, a bit like old times when the pair of them would muck about in the back yard pulling a car apart and putting it back together over and over. So he did a deal with his only daughter, who had recently come back into his life. He would help out, he told her—even give her a loan—and he would fix the car. Renae was genuinely grateful; her smile was his reward. Their relationship was being rebuilt, from the ground up, and in recent weeks she had felt able to pick up the phone and talk to her father. She promised she would pay him back, and they settled on the sum of $150. Renae said she’d need a couple of weeks to get that amount together; Bob understood that. And that’s where they left it.

A couple of weeks passed, and Bob did not hear from his only daughter. He put in a call, and her phone went unanswered. So he left a message, asking her to call him back when she got a chance. And he waited for the
phone to ring. It didn’t, and Bob and Jenny wondered why. Things had been going so well. After they’d initially re-established contact, there had been a brief period when both of them could be a bit standoffish, but that had all passed now. Renae was dropping around, giving them a call, and asking for his advice.

A bit more time passed, and still Bob didn’t hear back from his daughter. He wasn’t chasing the money she owed him—he just wanted to make sure she was fine, that things were okay, and it didn’t fit that she’d re-established contact and now disappeared again.

Then he received the phone call that would irrevocably change his life, the life of his daughter and everyone else in her family for ever. ‘I didn’t even know she was out of the country,’ he says. ‘I was devastated. I couldn’t believe it.’

Back in her new Indonesian home, a jail she shares with bombers, pimps and prostitutes, Renae Lawrence desperately misses her family: her mother and father; her step-parents and stepbrother. She tells anyone who visits to pass on her messages of love. She writes them cards and sends letters. She wants to fit back in to her old life; she wants to belong back in Wallsend. But she can’t, this time, and to survive she wears the armoury of a victim, even taking to the women’s holding cell wall with a crayon pleading her case. ‘Bali Four. 8.3 kg of heroin 2005. Innocent Victims’ the message reads. That’s matched by her other accusations: that the so-called Bali Four (Lawrence, Stephens, Rush and Czugaj) were
pawns in a system. Duped by others. Tricked by Andrew Chan. Conned into the trip. Fooled.

Renae’s attempts to take her own life are the sad and genuine cries of a young woman who needs to be heard; a young woman who struggled from early on to belong, to fit in, to find a place where she was the centre, despite both her parents loving her dearly. And when the sadness and fear descend on her, she hits out. Mainly at herself, rarely at others. That was what she was doing when she took her father’s pills in high school. And again when her relationship faltered. That was what she was doing when she took to her wrists with the top of a soft-drink can, and that was what she was doing in the lead-up to her trial when she fractured her wrist, slamming her fist into the whitewashed concrete wall of her jail cell. She was crying out for help, for someone to take notice.

Taken to hospital, a fat and news-hungry media contingent in close pursuit, Renae gained more control: the attention of medical staff and the flash of cameras were handled with ease. They had chased the black storm cloud away.

Renae is smarter than she sometimes comes across. She is quick-witted and upfront—and very funny. Pleading for a feed from McDonald’s recently, she told a visitor to the jail that she had contemplated skipping down to the local franchise herself, but feared it might not be met with approval. Her distaste for rice has her talking about McDonald’s with anyone who will listen, and
she even told waiting media her plan to ask the driver ferrying her to jail to go via the restaurant’s drive-through window.

Her fairly new and close alliance with co-worker and co-accused Martin Stephens has given Renae a sense of belonging, at least for the time being. She feels less lost with Martin around. He has become her friend and protector, even giving up his meal to make her happy. They spend long and lonely hours together, Stephens not fully winning the battle to coax her into praying to God.

Together they’ve stood firmly, claiming they were tiny pawns in a big international drug-smuggling operation from the moment their secret words were captured on surveillance tape and played the world over. It’s a mantra they’ve repeated at every opportunity since, along with some of their fellow travellers: they had no choice; they were forced to load themselves up with heroin—in Renae’s case not once, but twice—and try to make it back through Sydney Airport on the promise of a wad of cash. Cash or no cash, they say, their families would pay with their lives if they reneged.

Trapped in a jail cell, contemplating a frightening death at the hands of an Indonesian law which does not treat drug traffickers with benevolence, Lawrence and Stephens are sticking together. She thinks she does not belong here, she knows she doesn’t fit in. Neither does her new best friend, Martin. Nor the Brisbane boys she first met in the interrogation room after her arrest. Scott Rush and Michael Czugaj were part of the same
evil plan of others. As was Matthew Norman, Renae’s Sydney co-worker, who, only a couple of weeks earlier, was with her as she was screaming up the Pacific Highway, police in pursuit, and to those on the outside, not a care in the world.