Has this young mother just signed her own life sentence as well?

By ELISSA RATLIFF

Nikki Butler is a 38-year-old London banker and mother-of-two. And Scott Rush is her 28-year-old Australian boyfriend. He’s also a member of the Bali 9 and a convicted drug smuggler who is currently serving life in a Bali prison.

The couple live on opposite sides of the world, lead completely independent lives and are engaged to be married. Their wedding will almost certainly have to take place in Karangasem Prison in Bali.

And everyone who comes across this story wonders how they plan to make married life work.

Tonight, in an exclusive interview with Tara Brown on 60 minutes, the couple opened up about their relationship for the first time since their engagement in May. They spoke openly about their future together, Scott’s conviction and how they plan to make the relationship work through a Bali jail.

Before we get to the interview: let’s re-cap this bizarre love story so far…

In 2005 Scott Rush was found with 1.3kgs of heroin strapped to his body at the Ngurah Rai International Airport in Denpasar. He was sentenced to life in prison. He was 20-years-old. The afternoon before he was caught, he met the then 30-year-old Nikki Butler, a Londoner who was holidaying in Bali and the pair spent the afternoon together.

“There was a really good-looking guy standing at, like, a bar on the street,” Ms Butler said. “He was smiling at me, so I just wandered over, and that’s how I met Scott Rush. And the day sort of rolled on. We had lots more beers and we didn’t talk too much. But, yeah… We had a lot of fun that day.”

The next day, Rush became one of Australia’s most infamous drug smugglers.

Rush told 60 minutes: “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing… I’m not even a heroin smuggler. I’m an attempted heroin smuggler. And, uh… Yeah, I didn’t actually get to see any heroin until it was opened, after it was taken off me.”

Nikki Butler then returned to England, fell in love, got married and had two kids. Sadly, the marriage didn’t last and Butler divorced her first husband.

Nine years later, she saw an image of Scott Rush – the man she’d had a chance encounter with the night before he was arrested – on the TV news.

“I saw this sort of picture of Scott, like, being hauled across this… What looked like a courtyard sort of car park type area,” Ms Butler said. “With, like, this weird sign around his neck and, like, loads of policemen and guards either side of him. And I was like, “Is that him?”

At the start of 2013, following her realisation that Rush was part of the Bali 9, Butler called his Indonesian prison.

“That was when I spoke to him for the first time,” she said. “And the first thing he said to me was that, you know, “You’ve come along at just the right time because I was just about ready to die.”

Since February this year the couple have seen each other four times, and in May, through bars, Rush asked Butler to marry him.

“She makes me feel like I’ve never felt before,” Rush told Tara Brown. “It’s the happiest thing I’ve had in my life. It just seems that there’s a lot of skeptics out there who believe this is some kind of hoax…[like] she’s my cash cow, yeah. That’s just ridiculous.”

Despite their convincing display of affection for one another, the fact remains that Rush is a convicted drug smuggler and addict who has been sentenced to life in jail. His first conviction saw him sentenced to die and it was only following his second appeal that his sentence was converted to life behind bars; it is highly unlikely he will ever get out.

Butler, who lives on the other side of the world, has a successful career and a young family to think about. And yet? She loves him.

“I think he’s a very, very good person,” said Butler. “And he knows that if he ever, ever, as far as I was aware, took any form of…what I would class as a hard drug again that I would just go.”

“I’m not the type of person to really care what anyone thinks or says, but I do care about the Australian public, my own fellow citizens,” Rush said.

“I’m afraid they may not… Like, they don’t want me as part of their society after being such an infamous criminal”.

“But I need to show people that my life is turning around, that I have a beautiful fiancé who wants to marry me, and we’re planning to have a good life and I want to be a productive member of society.”

When asked how they plan on making their marriage work, both remain confident that Scott Rush will soon be free.

“I don’t think I’ve given myself a life sentence in any way, shape or form,” said Butler. “And he makes me happier than anybody else has… You don’t pick the man you fall in love with”.

What do you think of Rush and Butler’s relationship?