Remember me
He was the teenager with the movie-star looks who spiralled out of control behind bars after being sentenced to die by an Indonesian firing squad.
Once condemned in a third-world prison, his minor drug habit quickly escalated into full-blown addiction, given the easy access to drugs in jail.
Over the years, Scott Rush became the basket case of the Bali Nine, lonely and terrified as he was caught up in a chaotic mental state known as 'death row phenomenon', leading him to use heroin and even self-harm behind bars.
Inside Bali's Kerobokan jail, the former private schoolboy underwent a Muslim circumcision performed by an unauthorised visitor, enrolled in a methadone program, and became engaged twice to women from opposite sides of the globe.
One of them, English lawyer Nikki Butler, said she was smitten with Rush, whom she described as 'the hottest guy ever... slightly psychotic and a bit naughty.' Still, she admitted 'his loneliness is killing him' and 'I don’t know if I can save Scott - I just want to keep him alive.'
Both engagements ended and Rush, who suffered from crippling depression while incarcerated, stated that he expected to be freed from Indonesian prisons only by being 'carried out in a box'.
On Friday, Rush turned 40 at his parents' home in south-western Brisbane. Daily Mail has learned he is 'going okay' as he takes tentative steps towards life as a free man in Australian suburbia.
Last week, he was seen leaving the house with a dog, driving the family car to a tobacconist two suburbs away, and stepping outside to smoke in the spring sunshine.
The Bali Nine's Scott Rush, who turned 40 on Friday, smokes a cigarette as a free man living in the Brisbane suburbs, following his release from an Indonesian prison last December
Left: A bewildered Rush, then aged 19, is publicly stripped down by local police as they remove the 1.3kg of drugs strapped to his body after being caught at Bali airport in April 2005. Right: Rush reacts to his life sentence at Denpasar court on February 13, 2006
Daily Mail has learned that Rush is 'going okay' as he restarts his life in Australian suburbia
Rush is led from a cell to his first court appearance in October 2005 on heroin-trafficking charges, which eventuated in a life sentence, followed by five years on death row
Of all the Bali Nine members recently returned from decades behind bars, Rush looked the most haunted as the prison-transfer papers were signed by Indonesian and Australian officials.
But as we spotted him out and about in patterned boardshorts, thongs, a brown T-shirt and a cap, with an earring in his left ear, it was clear his demeanour has relaxed in the nine months since being granted freedom.
Daily Mail reported last month that fellow Bali Nine mule Matthew Norman - a year younger than Rush and only 18 at the time his arrest - is now married with a stepdaughter and living in a $5million mansion on the Victorian coast.
Rush personally had 1.3kg of heroin strapped to his body when he was apprehended at Bali airport on April 17, 2005.
Weeks earlier, he had accepted an offer of a free holiday, a mobile phone and thousands in cash to participate in smuggling 8.3kg of heroin back to Australia.
Rush and the eight other members of the Bali Nine drug syndicate were arrested that day. The two ringleaders Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran would be executed by firing squad a decade later, recruiter Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen died from cancer in 2018, and mule Renae Lawrence was released the same year.
The remaining five mules, all serving life without parole, were finally repatriated last December following a prisoner swap agreement with Indonesia - grown men with receding hair, paunches and wrinkles returning penniless to live with mum and dad.
Within two weeks of his return, Rush had to contend with the legacy of the troubled youth he left behind for the '11-day Bali trip' from which his parents feared he would never return.
Rush drove a family car from his parents' home to the suburb of Oxley where he entered a tobacconist and emerged for smoke
Rush, with his dog on an outing in south-western Brisbane last week, will turn 40 on Friday and celebrate his first birthday as a free man in two decades
Balinese authorities surround a helpless Rush in the hours after the Bali Nine's arrest on April 17, 2005, in what would be the beginning of a tortuous prison ordeal for the Brisbane teen
The papers approving the transfer from Indonesia to Australia of (L-R) Martin Stephens, Michael Czugaj, Scott Rush, Matthew Norman and Si Yi Chen were signed last December
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Rush grew up in the Brisbane suburb of Chelmer and attended the private Catholic boys' school St Laurence's College where he was expelled in Year 10 for drug possession.
He had begun smoking cannabis aged 15, used prescription drugs and tried ecstasy.
In December 2004, five months before his fateful flight to Bali, Rush pleaded guilty at Inala Magistrates Court to 16 offences, including drug possession, fraud, theft and drink-driving.
In March 2005, Rush and his friend Michael Czugaj met a young man named Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen in a hotel in Brisbane's hectic nightlife precinct Fortitude Valley and agreed to do what was portrayed as an easy money, low-risk drug run.
Rush and Czugaj flew to the Bali capital of Denpasar on April 8 - but not before Scott's father, Lee Rush, sensed something was wrong and attempted to stop him from boarding by contacting the AFP through barrister Bob Myers.
Mr Rush’s actions were later misrepresented as a tip-off that alerted Indonesian authorities to the Bali plot - a myth that persists despite being untrue. The AFP already knew of the drug syndicate's plans, and its decision to alert Indonesia was made independently of Mr Rush's efforts to intervene.
With Czugaj and Rush staying at the Hotel Aneka and visiting other establishments along Kuta Beach, they were sitting ducks in a major Balinese police operation.
As they met up with ringleaders Chan and Sukumaran, the cops watched and filmed. Rush wouldn't be the only one to later say that Chan made threats against his family.
He told Australian Story in 2006: 'We were forced to follow whatever they told us to do. I had no opportunity to be away and escape from the threat as I love my family and my mother and my father.'
In court testimony at trial, supported by that of Czugaj, Rush said Chan's words made it clear: 'You do as I say, don't mess around with me. I've got a gun with me and I could kill you. If I wanted to, I could kill you right now.'
Last days of freedom: Rush swimming in the hotel pool (left) and with a monkey on his shoulder in a Bali street (right) during an 11-day 'holiday' before the ill-fated drug run. The whole time, he was unknowingly under surveillance by police ready to swoop on the heroin syndicate
Reality sinks in for Rush, whose bottomless stare from a room inside Bali police headquarters reflects the deep trouble the 19-year-old had found himself in
Neither Brisbane teen had met Renae Lawrence or Martin Stephens until their arrest at Denpasar airport, all strapped up with heroin encased in body stockings, while Andrew Chan sat drug-free on a plane ready to depart.
Back home in Chelmer, Lee Rush, already despairing after his son had made it to Bali, received a call from Australian Government authorities.
'Scott had been detained in Indonesia for attempting to export heroin. I was speechless, sickened to the gut,' Mr Rush would recall.
Images of the men before their arrest show happy Australian youths. Rush was photographed relaxing in his hotel pool, with a monkey in a Kuta street, carefree and smiling, unaware he was under surveillance.
Post-arrest, he had a bottomless stare - from the indignity of being stripped down and filmed in his underwear while the drugs were removed, to the hopelessness of perpetual custody.
In February 2006, a Denpasar court sentenced Rush to life. Eight months later, the Bali High Court upgraded this to the death penalty.
He spent five years on death row in Bali. It wasn't until 2011 that a judicial review commuted his sentence back to life.
Rush was 25, staring down the barrel of life in prison, but told he should feel grateful to have death by firing squad taken off the table.
Rush drove two suburbs away from his parents' home to purchase tobacco
An old Myspace photo shows six of the Bali Nine inside Kerobokan jail. From left: Matthew Norman, Andrew Chan, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, Scott Rush, Si Yi Chen and Michael Czugaj
He struggled with incarceration and the temptation of Kerobokan's steadily flowing drug market. Rush was once filmed by a visiting TV crew, clearly drug-affected at the prison.
A psychiatrist would later categorise Rush's behaviour as 'confused' and 'thought-disordered'.
'He is an anxious, lonely and terrified young man. He is trying to find understanding in a world that no longer makes sense,' the psychiatrist told Nine newspapers.
While still on death row, Rush caused an uproar at Kerobokan prison.
After an alleged botched attempt to convert to Islam, Rush was going by the name Scott Suleiman and spending time with a small group of Muslim prisoners.
Then on May 7, 2010, Rush was circumcised under local anaesthetic in the jail's musholla, or Islamic prayer room, by a man who had sneaked in and covertly performed the operation.
Angry at the security breach, prison medical officer Agus Hartawan nevertheless confirmed that Rush's 'wound is healing properly and he is doing fine'.
Rush has since maintained he is a Christian and that he underwent the circumcision 'for health reasons', despite the prison being equipped for such surgery.
Locked up in Indonesia, Rush suffered 'death row syndrome' which made him feel anxious, terrified and alone
THE PRISON ROMANCES
Two weeks after learning he was getting off death row, Scott Rush was reported to be in love with an American woman who had been seeing him daily, often visiting the prison with Lee Rush.
It was said Rush wanted to marry Karen Hermiz, but prison security refused to allow the marriage after the pair were caught getting intimate, which was against jail regulations.
Prison security chief Ari Yudo refused to allow such a ceremony after an incident involving the two when Ms Hermiz entered the jail as part of a charity group conducting workshops and educational courses.
After the couple were caught in the act, the security chief banned Ms Hermiz from visiting.
'I will not allow him [to marry] as long as he has childish and bad behaviour,' Yudo said.
The romance fizzled out.
Rush and his British former fiancée, lawyer Nikki Butler, are seen together in a prison visitors area. Butler described Rush as 'hot' and 'slightly psychotic'
Scott had boyish good looks and charm at the time of his arrest. Taken on April 21, 2005, the image on the left is one of the earliest photos of Rush post-drug bust, while he was still being held at police headquarters and before his transfer to Kerobokan
In 2014, Rush underwent a transformation from drug addict to law-abiding jail inmate under the influence of mother-of-two Nikki Butler, a London solicitor and banker he had coincidentally met in Bali days before his arrest.
In the week prior to being locked up on drug-trafficking charges in 2005, Rush and Ms Butler had enjoyed a boozy afternoon together on the beach, having met that morning.
Ms Butler renewed their friendship on visits to Bali from the UK, by which time Rush had transferred, at his request, to Karangasem prison in the island's relatively remote south-east in an effort to stay clean.
In June that year, separated by bars, Rush got down on one knee in the visitors area and declared his love, saying: 'Nikki, I love you and you love me. I think we can have a happy ending. Will you marry me?'
Then aged 28 and 38 respectively, Scott and Nikki, had 'an awesome connection', he said, 'I was meant to meet her. I never expected this to happen.'
For her part, Ms Butler said that when she was asked, 'You are a London banker, so what would you want to hang out with a heroin trafficker for?', she answered: 'I love him… I know the person Scott is and he is a really, really beautiful person.'
Wearing a sign calling him a 'suspect', Scott Rush shows Balinese police how the drug plot was carried out during a humiliating crime reenactment during his trial
Police strip search Rush, eventually getting down to his underwear and the pressure bandages strapping the heroin to his young body
Rush struggled with incarceration and the temptation of prison's steadily flowing drug market. Rush was filmed by a visiting TV crew, clearly drug-affected at Kerobokan
Rush was reading books on philosophy and history, and was enthusiastic about his future. He was interested in electrical engineering and spoke of his hopes, pre-arrest, of joining the Royal Australian Air Force.
'I feel really lucky,' he said at the time, 'excited to have somebody that I was in love with and had such a connection and I wanted to have a future so badly that I gave up early death. I don't just want to be a name on Wikipedia.'
The pair planned to marry in prison with hopes of Rush getting a reprieve within three years.
But in late 2014, it became clear that the Indonesian government would go ahead with its plans to execute drug dealers on death row, including the Bali Nine ringleaders. It was a powerful sign there would be no mercy for the lifers either.
In 2015, armoured 'Barracuda' vehicles transported Chan and Sukumaran from Kerobokan. The men flew to Java's port town Cilicap, from where they were transferred by ferry to Nusakambangan, or 'Death Island'.
At about midnight on April 29, 2015, Chan, Sukumaran and six other drug offenders were taken to a field on Nusakambangan and shot dead.
The executions reportedly deeply affected the remaining Bali Nine members, in particular those like Rush who had also faced death.
In the years since, he became close to local Balinese living near Karangasem jail who became his 'foster family' and who he says cared for him.
THE TIP-OFF MYTH
Much of the debate over the years since the Bali Nine arrests in Indonesia has centred on why the AFP chose to alert their Indonesian counterparts about the drug plot instead of waiting to arrest the conspirators when they hit home soil.
Rush's father Lee had alerted police about what his son was up to, not realising the AFP would place the nine Australians into the hands of Indonesia.
Had they been tried and sentenced in Australia upon their return with the drugs, all the Bali Nine would have served their sentences and by now been long out of jail.
Both Scott Rush's father Lee and the AFP have been lambasted for what has been seen by some as monumental stuff-up, particularly around the time of Chan and Sukumaran's executions.
Several attempts to clear the matter up have been made since, but it took a statement by the Rush family's lawyer Terry Fisher after Scott's return to clarify it.
Fisher said that Lee Rush 'had reported to the Federal Police that he was suspicious of something going to happen, and the police said they would speak to [Scott] to advise him that he was under surveillance, to stop him getting involved in this.
Scott talks to his father Lee and mother Christine through the bars at Bali police headquarters in April 2005, just days after he was arrested. In the weeks after the arrests, several of the Bali Nine's distraught parents rushed over to see their children
Christine and Lee Rush in December last year at the family home where they tied a yellow ribbon on the letterbox as they prepared for their son's homecoming
'What happened was they [the AFP] didn't do that. And before he left for Indonesia, the AFP tipped off Indonesian authorities to the Australians being there, knowing full well it was a death-penalty sentence.'
As Lee Rush would recall: 'I was informed at 1.30 in the morning that Scott would be spoken to and asked not to board the flight to Bali.
'It wasn't until about mid-morning that I received a call from [lawyer Bob Myers] and with a distressed tone in his voice he said, "Mate, we could not stop him, they have let him go through and he's on his way to Bali."'
Mr Rush stressed that 'under no circumstances do I condone the trafficking of drugs – I particularly dislike drugs of any nature, always have', while expressing his despair and frustration at the Feds.
'I feel very let down by our Australian Federal Police. We tried to lawfully stop our son leaving the country - it wasn't done, he said.
Rush and Renae Lawrence's lawyers took court action against the AFP, alleging illegal conduct in handing over information to Indonesian police, which led to the arrests. They argued that, according to a bilateral treaty, this authority rested solely with the Attorney-General.
The Australian Government maintained that treaty only applies after a suspect is charged. The application was dismissed by the Federal Court in 2006.
HOME TO MORE COURT DRAMA
On December 15 last year, Rush, Matthew Norman, Michael Czugaj, Si Yi Chen and Martin Stevens returned to Australia as free men.
The botched Bali drug plot was just one of more than three failed overseas heroin deals masterminded by Chan and Sukumaran in 2005 for a Sydney-based Chinese drug-smuggling syndicate which had links to Myanmar.
The men, who lured Rush and other mules into it, had paid with their lives at execution in 2015 at a time when then-Indonesian president Joko Widodo was determined to show the world his anti-drugs zealotry.
But in 2024, Widodo lost power to the milder Prabowo Subianto and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese began negotiations in earnest.
At the APEC Summit last November, he secured President Subianto's agreement to a transfer on humanitarian grounds.
At the signing of the clemency releases last December, a tense and unhealthy looking Scott Rush could be seen watching on with the other ashen Bali Nine men.
Michael Czugaj and Rush in the early days of their incarceration before Scott began to feel the terrible weight of his imprisonment
Kerobokan prison in Bali - where Rush spent most of his sentence, and drugs were rife
Two weeks after his return to Australia, Rush appeared at Brisbane Magistrates Court on charges dating from the month before his 2005 Bali arrest, when he was in the grips of drug addiction.
Wearing a borrowed suit and accompanied by his now-aged parents, he pleaded guilty to receiving tainted property and seven counts of enter dwelling at several Brisbane properties where he stole cash, a hearing aid, a Nintendo Game Boy, Nokia mobile phones and jewellery.
He also pleaded guilty to unlawful use of a Toyota Sedan, and twice defrauding Cash Converters in late 2004, as well as receiving stolen property and failing to appear in court in April 2005.
Solicitor Terry Fisher told the court that Rush was committed to integrating himself back into society and 'to make himself a worthwhile contributor to society'.
'He was 19 years of age when he went to Bali, he was apprehended at the Bali Airport with 1.3 kilograms as a drug courier,' he said.
'He was not the main perpetrator. He did face the death penalty. Two of the members of the Bali Nine were shot by a firing squad, the two main ringleaders.
Christine and Lee Rush comfort their son in the early days following his arrest
Mr Fisher said his client had undergone intensive counselling in Indonesian jail and had taken self-improvement courses.
'Clearly, over a period of 20 years, you have plenty of time to do that. He has insight and remorse into his previous conduct, and what he's committed to now is to being reintegrated into Australian society,' Mr Fisher said.
Magistrate Patricia Kirkman-Scroope noted Rush's significant drug habit at the time and extensive rehabilitation in Indonesia. She convicted but did not further punish Scott on the 13 offences.
Rush's parents, Christine and Lee, who attended court to support their son, said he would continue to live with them.
Part of the diplomatic coup hatched by Albanese to free the remaining Bali Five was struck on the grounds that the men continued their rehabilitation efforts on home soil.
Mr Fisher told Daily Mail this week he believed Scott Rush was 'doing well', but had no further details about any job prospects or study.
When the Mail called Scott's father Lee Rush, he declined to comment on his son's progress or any 40th birthday celebrations.