Schapelle Corby's homecoming saga: Horror masks, decoys and cryptic Instagrams

  • Updated
  • 30/05/2017

Australia's most infamous convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby has shared a video online showing herself with a satisfied smile after she tricked media who were trying to find her in Brisbane.

The video is apparently taken by Corby's sister Mercedes. She films a TV bulletin from her phone which purports to be Schapelle in a car leaving Brisbane Airport. 

"There's the convoy. Schapelle's being chased by helicopter, in that car," Mercedes narrates. 

She then turns the camera around to show Corby standing in what looks like a hotel room, watching the TV with her. Corby shrugs and smiles. 

"Guts," Mercedes says.

After about nine years behind bars and four years on parole in Bali - where she was caught with 4.3kg of marijuana in her boogie board bag - Corby was deported back to Brisbane at the weekend.

She has faced feverish media attention but has so far managed to escape the cameras. When more than 40 journalists and photographers booked flights on a Virgin Airlines plane, thinking it was Corby's ride home, she secretly switched to a business class seat on Malinda Air with her sister Mercedes.

Corby's whereabouts on home soil is now unknown. On Monday she shared a cryptic Instagram post, depicting her on what looks like a fantastical pink creature in an otherworldly setting.

The picture is captioned "FREEDOM".

"Didn't you know? She caught a flight yesterday to Cairns," her mother Rosleigh Rose told local media outside their Loganlea home.

Corby is now a social media icon, with nearly 170,000 Instagram followers which were racked up in a short period of time. 

Her homecoming has been a bizarre series of events, including a man in a Halloween-style mask surprising Weekend Sunrise reporters at Corby's family home, and Corby's escape from media at Brisbane Airport in a motorcade of black Mercedes vans.