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mother died of cancer in 1987, when Peters was eighteen.
    Around that time, Peters began using cannabis, but his drug of choice soon became amphetamines. While amphetamines will normally elevate the user’s mood, inducing euphoria and high activity, the ADD-affected Peters found they calmed him down and enabled him to concentrate. Little did he know it, but he 23 was self-medicating along the same regime that doctors had once prescribed for ADD-affected children in the United States.
    Soon he was using speed regularly as he bounced from job to job. He lived at home until 1996, but grew more and more withdrawn and secretive. He and his father had a final falling-out when Peters was 27; he left the suburbs and moved to inner Sydney, where he added heroin and prescription pills to his regular drug diet of speed and cannabis.
    Like many young gay men moving in from the suburbs with the hope of finding some sort of like-minded community, not to mention excitement, the shy, callow and slightly built Peters found himself intimidated by the inner-city scene. Other men were smarter, stronger, more handsome. To make up for what he saw as his physical deficits, he worked out in gymnasiums and took body-building drugs on top of his recreational input.
    He couldn’t hold down a job. Either he would lose his temper with a boss and blow his chance, or his difficulties with concentration led to some failure or harassment. He still needed money, though, and during the 1990s he built up a record of stealing, break-and-enter and assault convictions, followed by court-ordered stints in rehab.
    In 1998 he was sent by a court to the Langton Clinic, a halfway house for recovering drug abusers in South Sydney. There he met an older man, Tereaupii Akai, known as Andre. Akai offered protection and love for Peters, as well as somewhere to live. They moved into Akai’s housing department flat in Surry Hills.
    When they first slept together Andre Akai assured Peters that he had no sexually transmitted infections. Soon after, however, Damien Peters contracted both gonorrhoea and HIV He was, of course, devastated; HIV was tantamount to a death sentence. As Akai had been his only recent sexual partner, he was able to get Akai to confess that he did, in fact, have AIDS.
    Damien Peters was shattered. He would stay with his lover, and nurse him, but he would never forgive him.
    In 1998, Darren Jason Blackburn received his first criminal conviction for behaving wildly while drunk on a train in Melbourne. It would be the start of a series of offences over the next three years: theft, possession of stolen property, obtaining property by deception, theft again, drunken behaviour again.
    Petty crime was part of his birthright. Born in 1972 on New Zealand’s North Island, Blackburn grew up in a family destabilised by his father’s heavy drinking, dope smoking and violence. Blackburn’s father left the household when Darren was six, but the old man’s shadow fell darkly over his four children, even when he was serving time in jail—which he often was.
    Darren loved his father and was upset, from a young age, by the schoolyard teasing about being the son of a prisoner. His three siblings fared little better, if for different reasons. One, a sister, was severely intellectually disabled, but got married and had children whom she could not look after. Darren’s mother, who’d brought up four children single-handedly, now also had to look after her grandchildren. A brother developed a drug addiction early in life and followed his father into jail for committing violent crimes. Another brother, with whom Darren was closest in his early years, died of cancer the same year that the father walked out on the family.
    Unsurprisingly, Darren Blackburn showed little interest in school. He wagged repeatedly and paid no attention to his classes when he did attend. His school moved him up each year, but he ended his secondary education without