After life spent treading the boards Aussie actor Karm Gilespie ends on death row in China

Before he was sentenced to death in China, Karm Gilespie was a serial entrepreneur fantasising about buying an Aston Martin.

Former actor Karm Gillespie — in a theatre production of Banjo — has been sentenced to death in China.

Before he was imprisoned in China for almost seven years and then sentenced to death, Karm Gilespie was a serial entrepreneur fantasising about buying a new Aston Martin with bespoke “KARM” plates.

Before that, he was an actor, appearing in the Australian police drama Blue Heelers in the mid-90s and, for eight years after its “world premier” at the 1998 Adelaide Fringe Festival, touring the one-man show he wrote and performed at schools around the country about the bush poet Banjo Paterson.

And even earlier, back when he still used the name given to him by his parents, “Craig”, he was a 13-year-old living on a farm near Skipton, in western Victoria, sending letters across the Pacific to his American penpal Jill Parris.

Now Gilespie is a death-row inmate, his sentence for drug smuggling announced by the opaque Chinese judiciary at the weekend, days after a closed session of the Guangzhou Intermediate People’s Court on June 10.

The full judgment has not been released by the Chinese court, which was closed over the weekend. The statement announcing the 55-year-old was to be executed was one sentence long.

Friends like Parris, his penpal of 32 years — and other associates around Australia and the world — are adjusting to the new reality.

“Craig always said he was going to write a movie about us,” Parris tells The Australian over the phone from her home in Stockton, California.

What Gilespie has always wanted was a life ­beyond rural Victoria, where before being injured in a car accident during high school he had dreamed of being a professional Aussie rules player.

“He was always reaching for the moon,” says Parris.

A source in the Australian government said before the Chinese legal decision was publicised there had been almost no agitation about Mr Gilespie’s case by family or friends over the more than 6½ years he had been missing.

“There’s no one out there batting for him,” the source said.

That changed over the weekend as friends and associates — who amazingly, almost all seem to have had no idea where Mr Gilespie had been since he disappeared in late 2013 — learned of his fate.

Singapore-based entrepreneur and business coach Roger J. Hamilton said, after a few years searching, he had resigned himself to the idea that Mr Gilespie had disappeared “because he wanted to start a new life”.

Mr Hamilton, the founder of business coaching tool Wealth Dynamics, which Mr Gilespie studied, said his former student had been unfairly sentenced.

“A friend wrote to me today about what happened: ‘He was over there meeting investors for a deal. They asked him to carry presents back to their partners in Australia which included handbags. The drugs were in the handbags. It was a set up’,” Mr Hamilton wrote on Facebook, relaying the unverified account.

Back in 2009, Mr Gilespie said a “master practitioner” course at Wealth Dynamics in Bali in October 2008 had a transformational effect on his life, introducing him to a key business partner.

Mr Gilespie was then described as the head of Ample Wealth Group, one of a number of companies he established since 2008 as he was reinventing himself after his acting career and the end of his second marriage.

“I guess I was a little bit like JFK in 1961,” he says in the video, with the confidence of a self-help disciple. “[Kennedy] didn’t know the how. He knew the what,” the enthusiastic entrepreneur says, comparing the mission to land a man on the moon launched by America’s 35th President — a key moment in the US’s Cold War with the USSR — to his idea for a Melbourne-based property business.

What has been described as America’s “new Cold War” with Xi Jinping’s authoritarian China shadows the Victorian’s sentencing. America’s allies, including Canada, the UK and Australia, have found their bilateral relations strained with the world’s rising superpower.

A death sentence for drug trafficking is not uncommon in China, which human rights group Amnesty International believes is the world’s leading executioner, with thousands estimated to be killed each year.

But the timing — almost seven years after he was detained — is curious.

Mr Gilespie was arrested in December 2013, at the beginning of the Abbott government.

It is likely that back then bilateral politics played in his favour.

Months after his arrest, Prime Minister Tony Abbott visited Beijing. By November 2014, President Xi Jinping was in Canberra, addressing the federal parliament, six months before the two countries signed a free-trade agreement to much fanfare.

More than 6½ years later, as Mr Gilespie’s death sentence was announced, the relationship is strained.

But, as with every one of the more than 62 Australians who are believed to be in detention in China, every case is also a personal story.

Mr Gilespie’s includes two failed marriages, and two sons with his second wife, who are believed to make up most of the small group that was informed about his arrest for allegedly having 7.5kg of the drug ice in his luggage at Guangzhou Baiyun Airport. Months before he was arrested, Mr Gilespie told his friends over Facebook that he was in a new ­relationship.

He was gushing about his new partner when he phoned Ms Parris, in California, before boarding a flight to Thailand.

That phone call in 2013, the last in their 32-year friendship, worried his former penpal.

“He went on and on about how fabulous she was. How smart she was. How wise she was. I was a little taken back, because it was so fast,” she tells The Australian.

She said he had always been enthusiastic and was always chasing success.

A search of the Australian company register reveals a trail of companies opened after his epiphany in Bali in 2008 and have since been deregistered.

Ms Parris says, in their final conversation, he told her he was going into business with his new romantic partner.

While much remains a mystery about his last seven years, there is nothing vague about the wishes of Mr Gilespie’s friends who have just learned about his ordeal.

“I want him to come back to Australia, so bad. He deserves to come home,” says Ms Parris.