A grandmother has been jailed for six years after her online lover hid methamphetamine in a suitcase she carried to Japan.
Donna Nelson, 58, wanted a ‘respectable’ man after her husband left while she was pregnant with her fifth daughter. She thought she’d found that, on social media, in a fashion designer called ‘Kelly’.
For two years, they spoke from afar and allegedly video called before deciding to meet in Tokyo. Kelly, from Nigeria, booked the flights.
‘I felt very happy because he was treating me like the Queen’, Ms Nelson said. After all, he’d treated her to business class.
First she flew to Singapore from Perth, Australia, where the former Greens election candidate chaired an Aboriginal-run health service.
Then she continued to Japan. But first, there was a stopover.
Kelly wanted her to pick something up – a suitcase he’d sell at his Japanese shop. ‘The only place I can get that suitcase is in Laos’, Kelly told her in a message.
Initially, Ms Nelson had opposed this plan, but somewhere along the way, she changed her mind.
She had reservations – ‘I don’t want to get hurt again’, she told Kelly in a message. He replied: ‘I will never hurt you, sweetheart.’
Even when she got to Laos, she found there was no booking at the Crown Plaza hotel where she was supposed to stay.
She very nearly went home, until a message from Kelly said: ‘Please wait. The guy is at work. He will come with $1500 as soon as he finishes.’
So 15 minutes before check-out, Kelly’s ‘business manager’ delivered the suitcase from.
Ms Nelson moved her possessions into it, alongside clothing samples already in there, and boarded the flight to Japan.
Hidden inside a sophisticated pocket was 2kg of methamphetamine – worth an estimated £800,000 in Japan.
Ms Nelson didn’t declare the bag as belonging to someone when she arrived at Narita Airport, and when questioned, she claimed she was visiting for business, not love.
She claimed she didn’t know the drugs were in there, testifying in court: ‘At no point did I feel like Kelly was scamming me.’
But the missed red flags, and replies to questioning that made her seem ‘untrustworthy’ – which Ms Nelson’s lawyer blamed on poor English skills of customs officials – would cost her.
Prosecutor Ogata told the court during her drug trafficking trial: ‘If she had nothing to hide, why didn’t she just tell the truth, and why didn’t she tell customs that she was going to see her fiancé?’
One of her daughters, Kristal Hilaire, told the court Ms Nelson is ‘a good person’, saying: ‘She thought she was coming to Japan for her love story. She didn’t have any other intentions.’
The judges expressed sympathy for the way Ms Nelson was taken advantage of in a manner similar to other love scams seen in Japan.
But they concluded she played a peripheral but essential role in the trafficking.
Ms Nelson was found guilty, and has today been sentenced to six years in prison, minus the 430 days already spent in prison.
‘The court could presume the defendant had a doubt the suitcase had something illegal’, senior judge Masakazu Kamakura said.
‘The strangeness of the request was not resolved and the doubt something illegal could be inside the suitcase was not resolved.’
But Ms Nelson disagrees. Speaking after the trial, her lawyer Rie Nishida said: ‘The suitcase is empty, and she actually checked it.
‘So she cleared her doubt. Even if she had some doubt, she cleared her doubt.’
Ms Nelson intends to appeal the decision to a higher court – a process that could take a year.
Speaking outside court, Ms Nelson’s lawyer said: ‘I believe this was a very unreasonable decision… we will fight until then end, until she gets freedom.’
For nearly two years, Ms Nelson has spent 23 hours a day in her cell without contact with her family except through lawyers.
In a statement, her family said: ‘We are disappointed and devastated by the court’s verdict in our Mum’s case.
‘We maintain that our Mum was the victim of a romance scam. She is the victim of a crime and not a criminal. She has always been against drugs.
‘As she said in her trial, she was duped and did not know there were drugs in the bag her partner asked her to take into Japan.’
Japan, where criminal trials take place before a panel of three judges and six civilians, has a 99% conviction rate.
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