Bali Nine drug courier Scott Rush falls in love with London banker Nikki Butler
BALI Nine drug courier Scott Rush has fallen in love and proposed to a London banker: “I think we can have a happy ending. Will you marry me?”
BALI Nine drug courier Scott Rush has fallen in love, is getting married to a London banker and has begun turning his life around behind bars in Bali.
And behind his stunning transformation from drug addict to model prisoner is mum of two Nikki Butler, whom he met briefly before his arrest in 2005.
Scott Rush’s marriage proposal this month was unconventional. He got down on one knee, separated by the bars of the jail visiting area. “Nikki, I love you and you love me. I think we can have a happy ending. Will you marry me?”
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The pair shared their extraordinary love story last month when News Corp Australia visited Rush in his Bali jail at Karangesem, where he was happy and excited about his new life and his clear-eyed appearance was in stark contrast to earlier visits.
Ms Butler spoke from her home in London, where she works in the legal team of a large investment bank.
The 28-year-old Rush has long battled the temptation of drugs behind bars but says he trying hard to clean up his act and wants to be an anti-drugs campaigner. And he has the added impetus that Ms Butler, 38, has given him an ultimatum.
“He has got a rule, I am not marrying him if he is doing any drugs,” Ms Butler said.
It is an open secret that drugs of all kinds are widely available in Indonesian jails. Just last week police busted a drugs ring supplying marijuana to Kerobokan prison as authorities crack down.
The love story began in Bali when the pair met the week before Rush’s arrest, when Ms Butler was on holiday and they spent the day together.
She returned to London and didn’t hear of Rush again until January 2013, when she saw a story on UK television about a British grandmother sentenced to death in Bali for drug trafficking.
The Bali Nine was mentioned in the story and she recognised Rush’s picture.
She got in touch with him and early this year, visited him for the first time, going back again in April and June.
“It just feels like the right thing. I don’t want to be with anybody else,” Ms Butler says of her decision to devote herself to a man behind bars. She is now in the process of getting divorced and has two small children and readily admits those close to her question her decisions.
She says people have asked her: “You are a London banker, what would you want to hang out with a heroin trafficker for?”
“I love him … I know the person Scott is and he is a really, really beautiful person.
“I don’t really see him as a criminal. It’s not like he was a murderer or rapist. He did something really stupid when he was (young) and he has paid for it. I don’t think he is a criminal to be honest. I think he has been punished ten times over. He is not a serial killer,” Ms Butler said.
Rush was just 19 when he was arrested, one of four couriers caught at Bali airport with 8.2kg of heroin strapped to their bodies and ready to board a flight from Bali to Sydney. He was sentenced originally to life and then, in a shock decision, it was increased to the death penalty on appeal. On further appeal, three years ago, this was reduced to life in jail.
Rush is excited about a chance at turning his life around.
“I feel like I have an awesome connection with her. I was meant to meet her. I never expected this to happen,” Rush told News Corp Australia.
“I was just excited to have somebody that I was in love with and had such a connection with and I wanted to have a future so badly that I gave up early death,” Rush says of his decision to begin cleaning up his act.
“I don’t just want to be a name on Wikipedia.”
And whilst the couple is yet to determine what will happen in the immediate future they are hoping that Rush will be successful in a bid to have his life sentence reduced to a determinant sentence of 15 or 20 years. This would then make him eligible for yearly sentence remissions which would shave time from his sentence and see him freed much earlier.
For the time being Ms Butler intends living in London and visiting as often as possible.
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