Speaker 1: The public has had a long held fascination with detectives.
Speaker 1: Detective sy aside of life the average person is never
Speaker 1: exposed to. I spent thirty four years as a cop.
Speaker 1: For twenty five of those years I was catching killers.
Speaker 1: That's what I did for a living. I was a
Speaker 1: homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead,
Speaker 1: I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated.
Speaker 1: The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories
Speaker 1: from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
Speaker 1: and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some
Speaker 1: of the content and language might be confronting. That's because
Speaker 1: no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged.
Speaker 1: Join me now as I take you into this world.
Speaker 1: Well we're back for part two of my chat. We've
Speaker 1: retired Detective Senior Sergeant Glenn Potter from WA Police.
Speaker 2: If you listen to part.
Speaker 1: One, you would have heard Glenn give us a fascinating
Speaker 1: insight into the investigation and capture of Australia's ma wanted
Speaker 1: escapee Brendan Abbot. In part two, we spoke about the
Speaker 1: investigation into the suspected murder of Wayne Drewitt, who's involved
Speaker 1: in an international diamond scam which took unbelievable twists and turns.
Speaker 1: He also told us about a lunatic arm robber who'd
Speaker 1: liked to play Russian Roulette with himself in a loaded
Speaker 1: firearm after he robbed Banks, and Glenn's involvement as a
Speaker 1: negotiater in Australia's longest running hostage situation. This is what
Speaker 1: I love about talking to real cops. They've got stories
Speaker 1: that you just can't make up. Glenn Potter, Welcome back
Speaker 1: to part two of Eye Catch Killers.
Speaker 3: Only, Part two only, Part two.
Speaker 1: Well, we got lost in the Brendan abb Abbot story.
Speaker 1: One thing I just want to jump straight into because
Speaker 1: you were telling me the other day when we're having
Speaker 1: a chat a armed robber that had a propensity for
Speaker 1: playing Russian Roulette and how that story ended. Can you
Speaker 1: just tell the listener what that was about and what happened.
Speaker 3: Well, it actually came out of your state, out of
Speaker 3: your stack.
Speaker 2: Blame you South.
Speaker 3: So I got a phone call. I just picked up
Speaker 3: the phone. I think it was one afternoon midweek, and
Speaker 3: there's a detective said, look, we've got a we've got
Speaker 3: a fellow here who's wanted. We suspect strongly has committed
Speaker 3: a murder of a fella and place the body in
Speaker 3: a barrel bod. He's been located, but we believe he's
Speaker 3: moved to w a and living under a false name,
Speaker 3: and gave us the false name. Details shouted like a
Speaker 3: great story. Let's get onto it, they said. They told
Speaker 3: me that he was a what we call a stick
Speaker 3: up merchant. He'd like to do armored cars. He would
Speaker 3: he would confront the cross pavement when they would bring
Speaker 3: the money into the bank. He'd stand there wearing a
Speaker 3: you know, hanging around in a singlet and shorts, bongs,
Speaker 3: carrying a plastic bag. In the plastic bag a shopping
Speaker 3: bag would be a gun. So he'd go up to him,
Speaker 3: say pull the gun out, give us your guns, give
Speaker 3: us your your money, and off he go, you know,
Speaker 3: like John SPITERI flip blopping down the road out of
Speaker 3: getting square.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Love that.
Speaker 3: Love that why I viewed the guy. I thought, oh
Speaker 3: this is interesting. So within I reckon a couple of hours,
Speaker 3: we identified where he was staying. We just rang every
Speaker 3: real estate agent we could think of, and one of
Speaker 3: them came out, yeah, we've got him as a client
Speaker 3: living within in a complex that I used to live in.
Speaker 3: And yeah, so there was a place called tram Beyond
Speaker 3: swe in Maylands, which is just a very close area
Speaker 3: of Perth and actually very close to where our then
Speaker 3: police academy was. So so we started to get the
Speaker 3: job together. We found out that he purchased a vehicle
Speaker 3: and so we set up surveillance and we ran surveillance
Speaker 3: for about oh god, I would have been three weeks
Speaker 3: on the sky and I never seen anyone so systematic
Speaker 3: and methodical about during reconnaissance on targets doing counter surveillance.
Speaker 3: It made out surveillance guys' jobs extremely hard. We had
Speaker 3: both surveillance vehicles, surveillance on foot, surveillance in the air.
Speaker 3: It was regarded as a high risk job. We'd also
Speaker 3: managed to put a tracker on the car and so
Speaker 3: this was going on every day for hours upon hours
Speaker 3: upon ours. They've just counter surveillance reconnaissance and we'd identified
Speaker 3: a number of targets he'd paid them. He'd even put
Speaker 3: a wig on it on stage and a hat and
Speaker 3: gone and sussed out a bank. So we'd identified a
Speaker 3: number of targets he'd moved it'd gone every day every
Speaker 3: day for three weeks. Then one day didn't appear. I thought,
Speaker 3: I he's having a rest day, So we just kept surveillance.
Speaker 3: On next day, still no appearance, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: the police vehicle turns up. Mark police vehicle, They go inside,
Speaker 3: they come out. Obviously more vehicles turn up. We thought,
Speaker 3: oh god, what's happened here, And then we saw major
Speaker 3: crime had turned up. So we presented ourselves and said, look,
Speaker 3: this is what we're working on. And when we went
Speaker 3: into the flat, there he is. He's sitting in front
Speaker 3: of a TV. The TV is just running on static.
Speaker 3: Now he's sitting there, his hands, he's got a gun
Speaker 3: in this hand, that hands on top like that on
Speaker 3: a lap, and there's a great big hole in his head.
Speaker 3: And everybody thought this was a murder made to look
Speaker 3: like a suicide because one hand was like that and
Speaker 3: the gun was underneath. But the pathologist told us very
Speaker 3: quickly that, you know, a traumatic injury like that, hands
Speaker 3: are going to go up like that and then they're
Speaker 3: going to come down. And there was nothing else to
Speaker 3: indicate that. You know, we had some arms in the place,
Speaker 3: so no one had got in there. The only suspects,
Speaker 3: apparently were us. It was guarded as a death in custody.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I could imagine that would.
Speaker 3: Play so so yeah, so and then we are digging
Speaker 3: around and well, so one of the aforments said that,
Speaker 3: you know, before he did a job, he played Russian
Speaker 3: Roulette and there was only one round in the chamber,
Speaker 3: so you know, yeah, he was definitely playing Russian Roulette.
Speaker 1: For those that don't understand what we're talking about. With
Speaker 1: Russian roulette, I think it's pretty pretty well known. But yeah,
Speaker 1: content warning, don't try this at home. But putting a
Speaker 1: one round in the revolver and spinning the revolver and
Speaker 1: putting the putting the gun to your head and so
Speaker 1: it sounds like he was a risk taker or whatever
Speaker 1: was going on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, obviously there's something going on there. This is either
Speaker 3: meant to happen or not. Am I going to be
Speaker 3: lucky on the job? He wasn't lucky, But it was
Speaker 3: definitely Russian Rolette. It was only one round in the chamber.
Speaker 1: These are the type of bizarre things you come across
Speaker 1: in the place. Isn't it like it's dangerous to make
Speaker 1: assumptions because there's so many times you see it, and
Speaker 1: factually it plays out that things take twists and turns.
Speaker 3: Well, in a half hour we spoke, and a couple
Speaker 3: of times we spoke before, just job after job just
Speaker 3: reappears in my memory. I mean that's thirty years ago,
Speaker 3: you know. And so these are happening all the time,
Speaker 3: These these weird, crazy type of jobs where people would
Speaker 3: think only would happen on TV. They happened to us
Speaker 3: every day, and we put them in the memory bank.
Speaker 3: We file them away and never think about them until
Speaker 3: something sparks and things, you know. And so I mean,
Speaker 3: just talking to you, I can just think of a
Speaker 3: job after job, and I'm sure you can do the same.
Speaker 3: We should do a podcast with you.
Speaker 1: Well, you talk about interpreting the crime soon. I remember
Speaker 1: it was a Friday afternoon, called to Woollongong for what
Speaker 1: had been called the murder izing on call homicide team
Speaker 1: go down there, go into the house as a naked man,
Speaker 1: blood splattered all around the walls, finger marks, drags, and
Speaker 1: he's got a cord wrapped around his neck that was
Speaker 1: an old plugging landline. He's still had a landline at
Speaker 1: his place for all intents and purposes. This is a
Speaker 1: murder investigation, and so we set it up as a
Speaker 1: murder investigation, crime scene and canvassing and everything that you
Speaker 1: need to do. And as that investigation played out following
Speaker 1: the post, more than he had a ruptured aorta and
Speaker 1: the blood was him. He was trying to phone Triple
Speaker 1: O to get urgent help. He was in that much pain.
Speaker 1: He was wrapping the cord around his neck, twisting around,
Speaker 1: just rolling around in pain. And the pattern blood marks
Speaker 1: of hands being dragged along the wall was him coughing
Speaker 1: up blood on his hands and falling down the wall.
Speaker 1: Now you look at that scene and it was a
Speaker 1: horror scene. First, sure that there's been a struggle here,
Speaker 1: there's a murder happened, and then when it's all dissected,
Speaker 1: when you look at it clinically on the facts that
Speaker 1: are presented, you see that it's not so. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think every cop carries these type of these type of stories.
Speaker 1: Another investigation that you were heavily involved in. And I
Speaker 1: had a bit of a look at the there's a
Speaker 1: couple of art or quite a bit written on it,
Speaker 1: the disappearance and suspected murder of Wayne Drew, and I
Speaker 1: was having a look at the coroner's findings that you
Speaker 1: sent down or sent over to me. Do you want
Speaker 1: to explain that investigation, your involvement and what happened, because
Speaker 1: again that was something that was slightly unusual, but quite
Speaker 1: an interesting case.
Speaker 3: This is a murder mystery. Yeah, even midsummer murders couldn't
Speaker 3: couldn't repeat this one. So I was running the East
Speaker 3: Metropolitan District Detectives, which is Midland and the eastern suburbs
Speaker 3: of w A. It was a big area. I had
Speaker 3: about seventy staff, not just detectives, but you know family violence, intelligence,
Speaker 3: forensic and so on. And I gone in one morning
Speaker 3: and the uniform guys came up from downstairs and said, look, Boss,
Speaker 3: we've been given this missing person has come over from
Speaker 3: mirror booker. Do you want to have a look at it.
Speaker 3: So I had a look at it. And the initial
Speaker 3: information was that this fella called Wayne Drewett, who was
Speaker 3: an ext serviceman, had vanished to two weeks before and
Speaker 3: there it's been a delay in reporting him because he
Speaker 3: was undertaking some diamond deal with an unknown person called
Speaker 3: the facilitator, and that now they wanted to report him.
Speaker 3: And there was all these people who had invested large
Speaker 3: amount of money and now we're looking like losing it
Speaker 3: and the alarm bells are ringing straight away, just you know.
Speaker 3: So we went to the first place we went to
Speaker 3: was actually one of the main investors and got talking
Speaker 3: to them and found out the essence of that They
Speaker 3: were willing to tell us about the deal, and a
Speaker 3: summary of the deal would be that Wayne Drewitt was
Speaker 3: a bit of an entrepreneur, a bit of a Walter Mitty.
Speaker 3: Nice guy, but always you know, I've got this going on,
Speaker 3: got this going on, and so on. He was in
Speaker 3: his late fifties, he'd retired from the army. He was
Speaker 3: a retired warrant officer. He was a clerical guy at
Speaker 3: the SAS and was well liked by a lot of people.
Speaker 3: So he approached all these investors with this deal, deal
Speaker 3: of a lifetime where diamonds would be imported into the
Speaker 3: country and there would be a five to six times
Speaker 3: profit on people's investment. He had to raise Ultimately, the
Speaker 3: figure kept going up, but ultimately had to raise a
Speaker 3: million dollars cash. Now, in the nineties, I sorry, the
Speaker 3: early two thousands, a million dollars was a lot of money.
Speaker 3: Yeah and so, and it was being done through a
Speaker 3: guy who was called the Facilitator. No one knew his identity.
Speaker 3: He wanted to keep his identity secret for whatever reasons,
Speaker 3: and that these diamonds would be brought in, they would
Speaker 3: be resold. He would take the million dollars and everybody
Speaker 3: would get, you know, five to six times their cash
Speaker 3: me out an offer too good to be true, and
Speaker 3: yet it was probably too good to be true, people
Speaker 3: still go for it. Well, look, there were about fifteen investors.
Speaker 3: Some had put in like one hundred and fifty thousand,
Speaker 3: ten thousand, forty thousand, and each of them was an
Speaker 3: individual character who had if you were doing a murder mystery,
Speaker 3: mystery an Agatha Christie would sit him around the lounge
Speaker 3: room and eventually one would cough to the murder. So
Speaker 3: we did a lot of digging, and what we found
Speaker 3: we had. The only contact we had with the facilitator
Speaker 3: was a mobile phone. So there were two mobile phones.
Speaker 3: They were Burner phones. One was in the name of
Speaker 3: Jay Love and the other one was in the name
Speaker 3: of Conti Drew. It had one and the facilitator of
Speaker 3: the other. And this is how the deal was supposed
Speaker 3: to be done and backtracking a bit, so Wayne and
Speaker 3: his wife. His wife was kept in the dark about it,
Speaker 3: and I think like most wives, when husbands had this
Speaker 3: great idea, they just roll their eyes and go, okay, well,
Speaker 3: you know, just don't lose the house over it. So
Speaker 3: he'd been booking into hotels at the time this deal
Speaker 3: was happening, and he'd got his wife from the hotel,
Speaker 3: and essentially that was to keep her away from the deal.
Speaker 3: So they were booked in the Rendezvous hotel and then
Speaker 3: he went back to his own house to do the deal.
Speaker 3: And then he said it would take a couple of days.
Speaker 3: He might be gone for twenty four hours, but don't
Speaker 3: worry everything, it'd be fine. And this is the same
Speaker 3: thing he had told the investors. So after forty eight
Speaker 3: hours he hadn't appeared. The wife had returned home and
Speaker 3: found that the house that way office was still locked,
Speaker 3: that there were dishes left on the sink, and Wayne
Speaker 3: was apparently very fastidious and would put everything away. That
Speaker 3: the turntable that he'd loved was still running, which was
Speaker 3: unusual and the only and he was known to just
Speaker 3: wear pajamas around home, that's all he wore, and that's
Speaker 3: the only items of clothing were missing, and his car
Speaker 3: was missing. And that went on for two weeks and
Speaker 3: no one cheap, and all the investors kept going back
Speaker 3: to and saying she wanted to go to the police.
Speaker 3: You're ruined the diamond deal. Don't go back to the police.
Speaker 3: Don't the deal's going to happen. They've got a vested interests,
Speaker 3: they've got all this money they foolishly tied up in it.
Speaker 3: They didn't want anything to happen. So the day we
Speaker 3: were told about this, we put it out on the
Speaker 3: media and we put out that his car was missing.
Speaker 3: The car was found that night just outside the surveillance
Speaker 3: area of the Perth Airport, parked on the side of
Speaker 3: the road. He made to look like he's gone, he's
Speaker 3: gone with the money, He's got his briefcase in his
Speaker 3: pajamas and off he's gone. We didn't obviously buy that,
Speaker 3: so we kept digging around. Once we got the report,
Speaker 3: we started interviewing people. We found out about these two phones.
Speaker 3: We still didn't know the identity of the facilitator. We
Speaker 3: did know from one of them that there was a
Speaker 3: large safe deposit box at the Banquest Tower in Perth
Speaker 3: in their under around area, which was when his last
Speaker 3: scene was stacked with money. Obviously, we went to have
Speaker 3: a look at that. There was no money in it.
Speaker 3: We also found that the person who shows that one
Speaker 3: had a key to it, so he's suddenly becoming prime suspect.
Speaker 3: He denied any involved in it, and we'd also found
Speaker 3: out that he'd also taken out another safe deposit box
Speaker 3: near it, understandably, so yeah, we were seriously looking at him.
Speaker 3: We were going through the phone records, and the phone
Speaker 3: records were just between the two mobile phones except for
Speaker 3: one nineteen second phone call to a house and I
Speaker 3: meant the larm bells ringing, someone's cocked up here, someone's
Speaker 3: broken the procedure and run the house by the accident,
Speaker 3: regretted it hung up, So we did a check on
Speaker 3: the house and we came up with a guide by
Speaker 3: the name of Nicholas Stewart who lived there. So we
Speaker 3: got warrants and we raided the house, and we came
Speaker 3: across a woman who claimed to be the wife of
Speaker 3: Nicholas Stewart. She was a Romanian national as he was.
Speaker 3: His real name was Nikolai Stowin, a Stoian, so we
Speaker 3: kept searching the house and I remember looking on the
Speaker 3: concrete the garad's floor. I thought, this doesn't look right.
Speaker 3: This looks freshly laid. There was no trap door or anything,
Speaker 3: but this looked freshly laid. So we got ground penetrating
Speaker 3: radar in their thinking, we're going to find a body
Speaker 3: under here, and sure enough there was a cavity under
Speaker 3: that or so out come the jack hammers, jacking away,
Speaker 3: think we're going to find a body. We break through
Speaker 3: and we find an underground bunker. And in this bunker
Speaker 3: were a stash of guns, silences, pistols, garrots, books on
Speaker 3: how to dispose of bodies, books on how to carry
Speaker 3: out hijackings of aircraft, all sorts of stuff. It was
Speaker 3: a treasure track.
Speaker 1: And was that just sealed in the sealed in if
Speaker 1: I needed it, that's where no one's going to find it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that was a good, good pickup.
Speaker 3: And the wife had told us that Nick had recently
Speaker 3: flown to Romania because his mother was sick. HM, so
Speaker 3: obviously we're trying to get in contact with the remaining authorities.
Speaker 3: Remaining authorities that kind of yeah, yeah, do you really
Speaker 3: want to know him? And so on, and didn't get anywhere,
Speaker 3: And then we did a lot of media on it,
Speaker 3: and we found a photograph of Nicholas Stewart in a
Speaker 3: in a Chacuzi toasting him with a glass, looking very
Speaker 3: happy and confident, and the media loved that. So we
Speaker 3: told him what we knew at the time, which was
Speaker 3: he was believed to be a Romanian national, that he'd
Speaker 3: had experience in special forces, possibly a member of the
Speaker 3: Foreign Legion, which we'd been told. So we juiced it
Speaker 3: up a bit to get the interest. Snippets came back.
Speaker 3: Various people came forward and said, oh, we know him
Speaker 3: through you know, he sold his car through a dealer.
Speaker 3: The car had been detailed twice. There was nothing in
Speaker 3: that that. He sold all his tools from a brick
Speaker 3: paving business. We learned more about next year, and he'd
Speaker 3: been in prison for shooting a neighbor who was pissing
Speaker 3: him off, so you know, he was a pretty bad guy.
Speaker 1: Well, and what you found in the place is, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't want to tell you how to do your job, Glenn,
Speaker 1: but a bit of an indicator he might be onto
Speaker 1: something there.
Speaker 3: It is, yes, And of course, if you've ever dealt Romanians,
Speaker 3: especially who operate in the criminal world. They are hard,
Speaker 3: you know. And it'd been a body card at something
Speaker 3: like some stage to the former ruler of Romania at Chichescu,
Speaker 3: so you know, and those people had done things for
Speaker 3: chi qestew that you wouldn't want to talk about. So
Speaker 3: then we get contact from the remaining authorities saying we
Speaker 3: want mister Stewart because he's done. Oh by the way,
Speaker 3: before we got to that, we'd also found that they
Speaker 3: bought of tickets to fly to Romania with the return
Speaker 3: ticket not long after the disappearance. And he'd also been
Speaker 3: trying to take large amounts of money out of the
Speaker 3: country and actually tried to fix send some money out
Speaker 3: of the country which got picked up like sixty thousand
Speaker 3: dollars in a cardboard box, so we had to go
Speaker 3: back and pick it up. So we knew the cash
Speaker 3: was flying around. So I get this call from the
Speaker 3: remaining authorities and they say we want him because about
Speaker 3: four years earlier, maybe five years early, he's a prime
Speaker 3: suspect for the murder of a guy who was getting
Speaker 3: cash together for a diamond deal. Oh that what a gift.
Speaker 3: But we're not going to extradite him because we don't extradite,
Speaker 3: but you can come here and try him for his
Speaker 3: crimes DPP. We're going to have that. They're not going
Speaker 3: to go to an Eastern European country. At the time
Speaker 3: that was trying to get entry into the EU to
Speaker 3: try him over there on their things, Extradition was becoming
Speaker 3: a problem. At the same time with all this going on,
Speaker 3: Major Crime was still telling us he's just a missing
Speaker 3: person who's taken off with the money. Because they had
Speaker 3: competing things. It was still that was still a possibility
Speaker 3: they were in cohoots. But you need more than a
Speaker 3: million dollars even then to not have cut all contact
Speaker 3: with your family, not use your credit cards. By the way,
Speaker 3: Wayne had a heart condition that he needed daily medicine.
Speaker 3: We went back in some stage we'd gotten into his
Speaker 3: office and we'd found that Wayne's office and we found
Speaker 3: the hard driver being ripped from his computer and all
Speaker 3: his medications were there. So that was another indicator. So
Speaker 3: we were kind of stumped, what are we going to
Speaker 3: do now we'd interview all the witnesses. We pretty well
Speaker 3: ruled out other people because we'd found out that Stuart
Speaker 3: had opened it safe deposit box immediately below the one
Speaker 3: that had the cash and had accessed it the day
Speaker 3: that drew it disappeared, so obviously cash had been put
Speaker 3: into the other one, then into a bag, and off
Speaker 3: he goes. So we're stymy and at a guess.
Speaker 1: I would imagine from above levels above yourself in the force,
Speaker 1: there wouldn't be a great deal of interest in it.
Speaker 2: This.
Speaker 1: These guys had stopped following up this case. We don't
Speaker 1: need it, we don't.
Speaker 3: Well, I here's a funny story. I then went. I
Speaker 3: was told I had to go and do a PowerPoint
Speaker 3: eight PowerPoint, but a PowerPoint presentation to the Deputy commissioner
Speaker 3: because all this, you know, this controversy and money being
Speaker 3: spent and so on. I realized I was on a
Speaker 3: no winner when he fell asleep halfway through the PowerPoint
Speaker 3: and just kept asking questions, well, why, why, why are
Speaker 3: you doing that? Why are we chasing this? I just
Speaker 3: thought I'm going a loser here. Give up while you can, Glenn.
Speaker 2: You say I might trigger stuff You've just triggered.
Speaker 1: I think so many times I've done those PowerPoint presentations.
Speaker 1: Please explain why we're doing this, and just yeah, you
Speaker 1: just get these negative questions the whole time.
Speaker 3: So it was awful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know what, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: I think most working police have been in that situation,
Speaker 1: trying to keep a job running that you know, needs
Speaker 1: to keep going.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's not going. So I decided I'd try
Speaker 3: another tat and through my me year contacts, so I
Speaker 3: contacted Stephen Rice, a producer. Out of sixty minutes, I
Speaker 3: told him the story. He said, this is great Wigan,
Speaker 3: And I said, if I could get some media interest
Speaker 3: over and get sixty minutes to do a story, then
Speaker 3: who knows. So from memory, I think a crew went
Speaker 3: over to Romania and then got quickly turned around and
Speaker 3: sent home. And then not long after that, I was
Speaker 3: actually at the National Finals radio in turn work and
Speaker 3: I was just doing some practice or whatever before the
Speaker 3: radio and I got a phone call and it was Thrue,
Speaker 3: an interpreter from the National of the book Arrest Criminal
Speaker 3: Investigation Division head, and essentially the phone call was, do
Speaker 3: not send media over here. We don't like the media.
Speaker 3: If they come over again, they won't be leaving. And
Speaker 3: by the way, don't you come either, okay if you
Speaker 3: say so. So that was that was a very.
Speaker 2: Bit of a warning coming down there.
Speaker 3: I passed that information on and then I eventually spoke
Speaker 3: to I think it was a UK de Assistant commissioner
Speaker 3: who was a liaison officer for the Romanian authorities in
Speaker 3: there building up their law enforcement for arrival into the EU,
Speaker 3: and I told him the story. He said, you have
Speaker 3: to understand that a million dollars, which is about seven
Speaker 3: hundred thousand US, a top level engineer in Romania at
Speaker 3: the moment earns about one hundred dollars a month. Okay,
Speaker 3: Romania with what you've got, what the money he's got,
Speaker 3: he could pay anyone and everything off. And he look,
Speaker 3: he said, at that time it was so corrupt. He said,
Speaker 3: don't go, just don't go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, makes sense.
Speaker 3: So the last thing I did was it kind of
Speaker 3: died there. I wrapped it all up, sent it off
Speaker 3: major crime, and then of course the coroner. Eventually the
Speaker 3: family kept pushing for a coroner's hearing because no one
Speaker 3: was going to the decree he was dead, which means the
Speaker 3: wife wasn't getting her benefits from the army and there
Speaker 3: was a terrible situation for the family and they didn't
Speaker 3: have any closure on it. So I got told I
Speaker 3: had to do as a coroner's report. By this day
Speaker 3: John running the mounted section. So off I go to
Speaker 3: the major crime sitting there, go through the boxes and
Speaker 3: boxes of stuff. Fortunately I had a couple of good
Speaker 3: detectives and they who'd worked with me previously, and we
Speaker 3: went through and we did the coroner's report that then
Speaker 3: got coroner's hearing. We went to the criner's hearing. The
Speaker 3: outcome was that was yes, this was a murder, that
Speaker 3: Stuart was the murderer because, and this is an important
Speaker 3: detail I may have skimmed over at the time that
Speaker 3: he left to fly out of the country. He went
Speaker 3: to an address in Kubla, which is really south of Perth,
Speaker 3: a long way from the airport, and dropped some gear off,
Speaker 3: then vanished for eight hours, then came back. That was
Speaker 3: the day after drew it to God missing. His excuse
Speaker 3: to the person who we eventually interviewed, is that his
Speaker 3: house in Ballajura, which is ten minutes from the airport,
Speaker 3: was too far away, and that Kubla, which was an
Speaker 3: hour away from the airport, was closer. I suspected Trio
Speaker 3: strongly that he's got the body in the boot of
Speaker 3: the car he's driven for eight four between maybe four
Speaker 3: hours somewhere and dump the body and once you get out,
Speaker 3: you go east, you get out in those areas and
Speaker 3: nothing you get out in the Goldfields charts of finding
Speaker 3: a body. Yeah, and bodies don't last long out there.
Speaker 3: And the rumor about pigs eating bodies is absolutely true.
Speaker 3: So that was that window we think the body was
Speaker 3: disposed of. So Coran said, yes, this is a homicide,
Speaker 3: Yes there is significant circumstantial evidence to implicate Nick Stewart,
Speaker 3: and that it should go to the DPP for them
Speaker 3: to consider indictment. Went to the DPP. They looked at
Speaker 3: it and said, there is no reasonable prospects of are
Speaker 3: you getting him out of the country because he's extradized there.
Speaker 3: If he comes back to Australia, we'll look at it them.
Speaker 1: It's frustrating, but I think the fact that you got
Speaker 1: it to the inquest, and I'm looking at the coroner's conclusions,
Speaker 1: the things that she said. For those reasons, I've concluded
Speaker 1: that mister Stewart contributed to the death of mister Druet.
Speaker 1: So at least it gives a family some the closure
Speaker 1: is not the right word, but some answers to what's
Speaker 1: gone on that's been presented. It's frustrating as it is,
Speaker 1: but yeah, the twists and turns. I've used that ground
Speaker 1: searching radar for cavities under concrete slabs and all that.
Speaker 1: We didn't find anything, and I've I've always wondered how
Speaker 1: well they worked. Did it come up when you were
Speaker 1: searching that showed the.
Speaker 3: Void down to the millimeter inside it?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Sorry, it does work, but this was a void as
Speaker 3: opposed to a body buried. So what the radar does
Speaker 3: is it gives you indications of density and so you know,
Speaker 3: the guys who do it know how to read whether
Speaker 3: there's a body married.
Speaker 1: At the time I used it, it was a tactical
Speaker 1: thing in the middle of the night, in the middle
Speaker 1: of the bush, creeping in and using it, and we
Speaker 1: didn't get the reads that we'd hope for. But that
Speaker 1: something you know, how you have things that just niggle
Speaker 1: in the back of your mind, wondering if there is
Speaker 1: that cavity in that place at place that we searched
Speaker 1: that we didn't pick up on negotiating, Yes, you told
Speaker 1: me snippets of it. I didn't get the full details.
Speaker 1: But with negotiating the one that was reference that there's
Speaker 1: probably Australia's longest hostage negotiation. Tell us through that I
Speaker 1: can't do justice even describing what how.
Speaker 2: It played out. Tell us what happened there and what
Speaker 2: your role in it was.
Speaker 3: Well, I was a negotiator and on call at the time.
Speaker 3: I was working in arm robbery and I'd gotten home
Speaker 3: that night and I got a phone call saying, oh,
Speaker 3: pager went on found out. They said, we've got the
Speaker 3: situation at the Shengin Park Rehabilitation Hospital. We've got a
Speaker 3: woman who's been held hostage by a guy for her
Speaker 3: ex boyfriend, and that it's she's a critical patient in
Speaker 3: that she's in a halo and somehow he's endangered alife.
Speaker 3: So my offside and I Andrew Martin.
Speaker 1: Sorry, Glenn, I just interrupt there because that when we're
Speaker 1: talking the halo, we're talking where the next.
Speaker 3: Secured bolted into the skull.
Speaker 1: Into the skull to support obviously something wrong with the
Speaker 1: spine or the neck.
Speaker 3: She'd had a car accident yep, and she'd have broken
Speaker 3: her neck and so they had to stabilize the neck.
Speaker 3: And it was such a mess that if the neck
Speaker 3: had been manipulated. It could kill her, right, So we
Speaker 3: had been given limited information. So in our normal ways
Speaker 3: of doing things, we attended the hospital. We got a
Speaker 3: brief from the coppers who were there at the time.
Speaker 3: The tactical response group turned up and so Andrew and
Speaker 3: I formed a strategy and what we were going to
Speaker 3: do is we're going to take the first ship to
Speaker 3: twelve hours, which ended up being fourteen hours to debrief
Speaker 3: the day shift had come in. We never expected to
Speaker 3: go very long. But what confronted us when we were
Speaker 3: in the room was something we yeah, you just you
Speaker 3: couldn't make up. So here we have a guy who
Speaker 3: shaped every hair and his body off. He was I
Speaker 3: think he was a Serbian fella in his mid to
Speaker 3: late twenties, had been a drug user, looked really fit, sinewy,
Speaker 3: but had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He'd been the
Speaker 3: ex boyfriend of the skirt and they had broken up,
Speaker 3: so he'd ha turned up at the hospital wanting to
Speaker 3: visit her. Security guards you know, looking at him and
Speaker 3: go what the She didn't want it to see him,
Speaker 3: but he'd gone in there, started talking to her and
Speaker 3: then took off his jumper tied it around through a
Speaker 3: halo and tightly around his waist. So he's standing at
Speaker 3: the top of the bed like that and it's tied
Speaker 3: round his waist and any movement of that could have
Speaker 3: killed her. So we get the brief from the surgeons
Speaker 3: and said, look, this is really bad. This could kill her.
Speaker 3: Her neck is that unstable. She was quite a wild
Speaker 3: cat and was verbally being very angry with him and
Speaker 3: screaming at him and telling him to get out and
Speaker 3: calling him names. He was going through a schizophrenic episode
Speaker 3: that was slowly building so open that we went into
Speaker 3: the room Andy Kite. So it's just a single room
Speaker 3: by themselves, and we're not far away from him, but
Speaker 3: I think we had one chair was sitting on and
Speaker 3: the other one would be standing and we'd take turns
Speaker 3: outside the door. We had the the what do we
Speaker 3: call the Emergency Action Team, the EA team, and they
Speaker 3: were outside and ready tummin and pouch if the opportunity
Speaker 3: came up. So my initial thinking, well, he's not going
Speaker 3: to last this long, you know, we're probably going to
Speaker 3: have to physically take him out, but we'll try talking
Speaker 3: to him. So we started the negotiations and these negotiations
Speaker 3: were intense, and through that first twelve hour shift, he'd
Speaker 3: taken all his clothes off. He was she was abusing him,
Speaker 3: she was abusing ours for not doing anything trying to
Speaker 3: negotiate what someone who's steadily increasing a schizophrenic episode. We'd
Speaker 3: managed to get him some water, but he didn't want food.
Speaker 3: We're probably by this stage ten hours into it, and
Speaker 3: that all.
Speaker 2: The time he's got the jumper tied to the halo.
Speaker 3: Type and he's standing next to her. So ten hours
Speaker 3: into it, we're starting to you know, we know we've
Speaker 3: got to keep talking. We've got him talking, but his
Speaker 3: behavior is becoming more bizarre. He's thinking he's Jesus. He
Speaker 3: started clicking feces as he'd wipe his eyes and flicked
Speaker 3: at us and this type of thing. So it was
Speaker 3: getting very unpleasant. The whole time, we're just trying to
Speaker 3: keep it calm, keep it calm, keep calm. By this stage,
Speaker 3: a whole group of supporter come in, psychiatrists, psychologists and
Speaker 3: so on. So there now on this when we're becoming
Speaker 3: a more organized team. We've got a negotiation coordinator who's
Speaker 3: dealing with the tactical coordinator who's dealing with us, and
Speaker 3: we're getting all this advice. So we then go into
Speaker 3: the next So, okay, next shift comes in, we come out.
Speaker 3: They go through the day, going through exactly the same.
Speaker 3: He's still standing there, still naked, We're still talking, he's
Speaker 3: not eating, she's getting angry then calming down and so on.
Speaker 3: So we couldn't believe it when we're told we're coming
Speaker 3: back in. So we come in back for the next shift.
Speaker 3: That was another night shift, and we went through the
Speaker 3: whole box and dice again for fourteen hours. Negotiation was
Speaker 3: getting us somewhere. We were talking to him, but we
Speaker 3: were getting a lot of interference from the psychiatrists who
Speaker 3: kept dragging us out, one of us out talking to us.
Speaker 3: And at the end of it, I think twelve hours,
Speaker 3: the psychiatrist called me out and said, you're completely fucking
Speaker 3: this up. This is bad. I mean, my morale just
Speaker 3: went and I did. I had what I'm doing, I
Speaker 3: think any specifics of what I was doing, but I
Speaker 3: was being too assertive or not an up assertive or
Speaker 3: whatever to find with yeah, you know, and I'm just
Speaker 3: thinking I'd like to see you in there. But anyway,
Speaker 3: they said, we're replacing you we're bringing a woman in
Speaker 3: on the team, and I said, no offense. He clearly
Speaker 3: has no respect for women whatsoever. I know your female negotiator.
Speaker 3: She is very, very good. But it's not going to work.
Speaker 3: It is not going to work, and it's going to
Speaker 3: go badly now. Absolutely, we're doing this way. You go home.
Speaker 3: We won't see you again. Just go back to what
Speaker 3: you're normally doing. You fucked this up. So I dragged
Speaker 3: myself out of there, got in the car, went home.
Speaker 3: I think I had a couple of beers. This was
Speaker 3: around about five in the morning. Well, I'm going to
Speaker 3: try and get some sleep. At about ten o'clock that morning,
Speaker 3: I get a phone call, get yourself back in here.
Speaker 3: It's not worked. It's really gone to ship. Yeah, berh.
Speaker 3: But I'm still feeling, like, you know, I'm feeling pretty
Speaker 3: bad about this. Andrew and I went back in there,
Speaker 3: but we spoke before we were again. I said, we
Speaker 3: can't go This can't go on much longer. We're getting
Speaker 3: forty hours or forty five hours we've been going whatever.
Speaker 3: It is crazy to him, I said, we've got out
Speaker 3: a plan. The plan is not going to be negotiation.
Speaker 3: Is we might get into something, but we're not going
Speaker 3: to get him. So our plan was but I would
Speaker 3: because I was had a reasonably good rapport with her,
Speaker 3: and I would play if we made a move, I
Speaker 3: would place myself over the top of her, unfold her
Speaker 3: body and keep the halo protected, while Andy would just
Speaker 3: going there and King hit him as hard as he
Speaker 3: could to drop him, giving time for the reaction team
Speaker 3: to go in there. We didn't tell anybody else's plan
Speaker 3: because we knew what the reaction was going to be
Speaker 3: and if we talked him out of it, great. So
Speaker 3: we're in there. We're going for about five or six hours.
Speaker 3: It's not going well. There really is throwing shit at
Speaker 3: it is throwing for you know, nothing at ETN. He's
Speaker 3: off the charts with his craziness. And then we got
Speaker 3: a moment of clarity. It just came out of the blue.
Speaker 3: It was really weird, and I have I haven't got
Speaker 3: any more, but there used to be recording right up
Speaker 3: to the moment. Thing is escalated to a point, and
Speaker 3: so I looked at Andy and he looked at me.
Speaker 3: They could see it was escalating outside and they're trying
Speaker 3: to call us out, and I'm going we're not coming out.
Speaker 3: We're not coming out. We are a critical spot, you know.
Speaker 3: And I got little heads coming around the corner of
Speaker 3: door saying look out of you. No, we're not coming out.
Speaker 3: And so there was nothing they could do about that.
Speaker 3: And then all of a sudden we saw the jumper
Speaker 3: loosen and I must have said something like that. Must
Speaker 3: be really uncomfortable, mate, really uncomfortable, you know, loosening off
Speaker 3: the bit and we can keep talking. Everything's going to
Speaker 3: be okay. But as you do, because negotiation is about
Speaker 3: creating relationships, about creating control, it's about listening. So we
Speaker 3: got into the stage where he had loosened off his
Speaker 3: jumper and it was starting to fall away, and I
Speaker 3: looked at Andy out of the corner of my eye.
Speaker 3: He looked at me, and I just said go and
Speaker 3: I threw myself on top of her, locked her down,
Speaker 3: and and he just came in and just hid ever ripper.
Speaker 3: It didn't drop him, but it stunted him. The TRG
Speaker 3: guys came charging in. There was six or eight of him.
Speaker 3: He fought like crazy, absolutely crazy. Took ages to subdue him.
Speaker 3: They eventually got him handcuffs. Of fifty three hours, it's
Speaker 3: had gone on. He'd been standing there for fifty three hours.
Speaker 3: She was obviously a mess. I was utterly exhausted and exhilarated.
Speaker 3: I remember I didn't smoke. I remember going outside afterwards
Speaker 3: with no debreath. I must have chuffed a couple of
Speaker 3: cigarettes down. I was looking searching has everyone got a beer?
Speaker 3: I just completely utterly drained and yet elated and feeling
Speaker 3: like I'd been vindicated.
Speaker 1: That's the pressure, isn't it Like when it comes off,
Speaker 1: you'll you might have even got a pad on the back.
Speaker 1: They might have said, well, you shouldn't have done that,
Speaker 1: but you ain't yet crucified. But if it went wrong there,
Speaker 1: you're going to make a judgment call. If it went wrongly,
Speaker 1: they would have had you, yeah, had your head for it.
Speaker 3: And there were people who and we were well aware
Speaker 3: of this, you know, But I mean, we've been in
Speaker 3: there so long, we'd been through it. I think both
Speaker 3: Andy and I were willing to make that. We thought
Speaker 3: it was a worthwhile risk. It was calculated, you know,
Speaker 3: we had positioned ourselves. We were fairly confident we were
Speaker 3: going to be successful. It was not a happy psychiatrist.
Speaker 3: At the end of it, we were commended there was
Speaker 3: a group commendation for everybody involved. It was just one
Speaker 3: many individuals. The newspaper ran a front page on it,
Speaker 3: and I remember reading and said these guys should get
Speaker 3: a raise. I thought, yeah, never happened. Never happened. There
Speaker 3: was no raise. But you know, just the fact that
Speaker 3: we got the job done well.
Speaker 2: That yeah, that is that is policing.
Speaker 1: It, that's core, and that that's a sharp end when
Speaker 1: you're in negotiating the situation like that. But sometimes you've
Speaker 1: got to make judgment calls, and very often you're doing
Speaker 1: it without a safety net. You know, if it goes bad,
Speaker 1: and you know, we've all had times if you're a
Speaker 1: working cop, you're going to make a judgment call on
Speaker 1: the spot that you know is going to get dissected months,
Speaker 1: maybe years down the track by legal people getting paid
Speaker 1: a shitload of money to question why did you do this?
Speaker 3: At the time, why did you do that? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's right. I mean I'm sure you would have heard
Speaker 3: the same thing. If you're not getting in the shit
Speaker 3: every now, man, you're not doing your job.
Speaker 1: Hey guys, it's Gary Jubilan here. Want to get more
Speaker 1: out of I catch killers? Then you should head over
Speaker 1: to our new video feed on Spotify, where you can
Speaker 1: watch every episode of I Catch Killers. Just search for
Speaker 1: I Catch Killers video in your Spotify app and start
Speaker 1: watching today. Yeah, I think policing is a robust sport.
Speaker 1: And yeah, well it's not a sport, it's for real
Speaker 1: and you've got to take those risks, calculated risks day,
Speaker 1: within the rules. But yeah, and I have an issue
Speaker 1: with leadership in the police that don't support people that like,
Speaker 1: in that situation, you were doing your best. It worked out,
Speaker 1: but if it went bad, there would be a lot
Speaker 1: of bosses I would imagine that would abandon you completely
Speaker 1: and leave you on your own. I always said that
Speaker 1: when I was in a supervisory role, if you make
Speaker 1: a mistake when you're trying to do something, I will
Speaker 1: support you. If you make a mistake out of laziness
Speaker 1: or something worse, I'm not going to support you, but
Speaker 1: I'll give you one hundred percent support because every cop
Speaker 1: that learns their trade, you make mistakes all the way along.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter how long you've been in there. So
Speaker 1: I think we struggle in this country, not just New
Speaker 1: South Wales, but across the country getting people in policing
Speaker 1: It's a very rewarding position, but it can be also
Speaker 1: unforgiving if you haven't got the support of the organization.
Speaker 2: And I think that comes down to leadership. That's my view.
Speaker 3: What's your thoughts, Oh, look exactly. I mean leadership has
Speaker 3: always been a problem in policing. I mean I made
Speaker 3: a choice not to go any further than senior sergeant.
Speaker 3: I like too much being on the front line, and
Speaker 3: while I was physically able to do it, that's where
Speaker 3: I wanted to be. I joined the police not to
Speaker 3: It was never about the money. It was never about
Speaker 3: being a morally person who wanted to go and save
Speaker 3: the community. It was always about it was exciting, and
Speaker 3: I just wanted to stick to the excitement of it
Speaker 3: and stay on the front line. But I saw people
Speaker 3: go up the ladder whose motivation was not about leadership
Speaker 3: or leading people. It was about their progression, often overstating
Speaker 3: their ability at that level to make decisions that were defensible,
Speaker 3: and when things go wrong, they just it all came down.
Speaker 3: And I mean, I know that you and I have
Speaker 3: had our tough times in the job, and that you
Speaker 3: look at those and you learn by them. Many I'm
Speaker 3: not you're doing but I think, and you know from
Speaker 3: your history, I think that the two types of detectives
Speaker 3: there is the fastidious dot the eye cross the tea
Speaker 3: very slow but methodical, and then is the dynamic, let's
Speaker 3: have a good crack, let's have it. You know. Yeah
Speaker 3: we're not we're not breaking the rules, but certainly we're
Speaker 3: pushing them to the limits to be able to get
Speaker 3: the job done and get it done effectively and efficiently.
Speaker 3: And I think those two detectives are very good for jobs.
Speaker 3: The one in between is all they're only interested in,
Speaker 3: and this is a police officer around is their rise
Speaker 3: up to the powers and who they can step on
Speaker 3: when they can get there.
Speaker 1: I haven't heard it broken up that way, and I agree,
Speaker 1: even with the two extremes, you quite often it's good
Speaker 1: to have those type of detectives on the same and
Speaker 1: you get that good balance.
Speaker 2: I say, with.
Speaker 1: Policing, you you're a public servant first and foremost you're
Speaker 1: there to serve the public. And what I like about leadership,
Speaker 1: and I've worked under some great leaders, so it's other
Speaker 1: than the board spray. I've been inspired by some really,
Speaker 1: really good leaders. But the ones I didn't have respect
Speaker 1: for is the ones that what can I take from
Speaker 1: this organization? How can I get promoted, How can I
Speaker 1: keep myself without getting in the trouble? How do I
Speaker 1: not have the pressure of the situation you just described,
Speaker 1: or when I'm going to court or at a murder scene.
Speaker 1: They avoid all that, but they want to take all
Speaker 1: the cream from the top and just keep rising. And
Speaker 1: they're the ones that I think cause problems for the
Speaker 1: working police, the junior police underneath them.
Speaker 3: I agree, And I think those are the ones who,
Speaker 3: when they rise up these ladders, seem to think they
Speaker 3: know everything about everything, purely by the fact that they've
Speaker 3: risen up when their knowledge is so limited, and see
Speaker 3: anyone who has expertise in a field as a risk
Speaker 3: to them, and don't take that device and actually work
Speaker 3: against it. It's very common pleashing. I'm sure every organization
Speaker 3: had these problems. Leadership in pleasing is difficult because we
Speaker 3: don't train people for leadership. You either learn it on
Speaker 3: the job or you don't learn it, and yet you
Speaker 3: can still rise. And I think sometimes the military have
Speaker 3: it over as they have a college that teachers, you know,
Speaker 3: and they don't get it right. But their leaders are
Speaker 3: at least trained in leadership. We don't do that. We
Speaker 3: don't do it very well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it is something that's the failing in police,
Speaker 1: but the using the analogy between the military and policing, Yes,
Speaker 1: we could spend some more time on developing developing good
Speaker 1: leaders and not just rewarding people that have decided to
Speaker 1: take the leadership line. Like operational police officers need to
Speaker 1: be supported so they confer for their careers. If they
Speaker 1: want to say, you've stopped at senior sergeant, I stopped
Speaker 1: the chief inspector. But I think in the difference of
Speaker 1: the states, the senior sergeant is probably the equivalent of
Speaker 1: the inspector in New South Wales. So I know what
Speaker 1: you're talking about. If I went any furtherized, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be hands on. I wouldn't be able to get involved
Speaker 1: in the operations like I wanted to. We're running out
Speaker 1: of the time because you've got such great stories. But
Speaker 1: you know, for a cowboy, as you call yourself, tell
Speaker 1: us about the worst injury you've had in the police. Now,
Speaker 1: you've worked in tactical You've been in some tough situations
Speaker 1: and heavy arrests and all that. Okay, cowboy, what's the
Speaker 1: worst injury you've had in the police. And I shouldn't
Speaker 1: be laughing because it was a bad injury.
Speaker 3: It was a bad injury, but it had some funny sides.
Speaker 3: I was running the matter section. We were preparing for Choggham,
Speaker 3: which is the Comwell Pedge government meeting here. That was
Speaker 3: about two thousand and eleven, so they were expecting a
Speaker 3: lot of public order. There were issues going on and
Speaker 3: a lot of protests, so we had to maintain a
Speaker 3: high level of public order and we at the time
Speaker 3: had a very very public order orientated boutter section and
Speaker 3: I think it was the second biggest in the country
Speaker 3: at the time. We were in numbering about the riders horces.
Speaker 3: We were certainly in competition with New South Wales Police
Speaker 3: who were the biggest, and I had a lot to
Speaker 3: do with New South Wales Mounted. So we were training
Speaker 3: for the showgrounds and we're doing public corders. So when
Speaker 3: you get a line of horses going doing public orders,
Speaker 3: so you go line of coppers in front of you,
Speaker 3: line with their shields or batons or whatever, and then
Speaker 3: there's a line of horses behind. When you want to
Speaker 3: move the crowd with speed and acertiveness, they do what's
Speaker 3: called break for mounted. So when they break for mounted,
Speaker 3: the two lines of crops split and go out wide.
Speaker 3: The mounted section comes through and passes them either probably
Speaker 3: at a cantas, so with some speed they stop, say
Speaker 3: ten meters further ahead. The coppers run around in a
Speaker 3: big circle and line up behind the horses. I was
Speaker 3: on a younger horse that was having problems, and when
Speaker 3: you do that sometimes you got to remove them from
Speaker 3: things like the line to reduce the stress. So I
Speaker 3: had moved this force behind the line, so I was
Speaker 3: probably about five to ten meters behind the line, taking
Speaker 3: it away from that initial stress. Because missiles and training
Speaker 3: were being thrown at us and this type of thing.
Speaker 3: It was a mistake on my part. So I'm on
Speaker 3: this horse. It's a little bit edgy, but I'm working.
Speaker 3: It's a big horse, trying to calm it down. And
Speaker 3: then with the brake with Mountain Had, I wanted to
Speaker 3: move the horse up a little slower, you know, just
Speaker 3: calmly behind, just to keep the horse going. What I
Speaker 3: didn't account for was all these foot cops, about thirty
Speaker 3: of them, running around back towards me with shields and everything.
Speaker 3: This horse just saw this and thought, yeah, it's going
Speaker 3: to die. So and I was spurring at time because
Speaker 3: it froze, and I gave a bit of spurs, but
Speaker 3: to go forward didn't go forward, so I gave it
Speaker 3: a little bit. And then this line came running and
Speaker 3: the horse reared up and then bolted and just run
Speaker 3: blindly a full gallop into the back of the line
Speaker 3: of the horses and hit the back of the horses
Speaker 3: like hitting a brick wall. That caused me to hit
Speaker 3: the front of the saddle because on the front of
Speaker 3: our saddles we had it what's called a swell, which
Speaker 3: is a hard piece of wood where the stuff's attached
Speaker 3: to it. That the pain from that was just couldn't
Speaker 3: believe it. It was just like, oh my god. And then
Speaker 3: the horse started pushing in between two horses and was
Speaker 3: tearing my legs apart. And the last thing I remember
Speaker 3: before I blacked out and thought I'm going to die here,
Speaker 3: and this is just that I had one leg up
Speaker 3: in the air, another legs in the stirrup, and I'm
Speaker 3: going down the side and I was unconscious before I
Speaker 3: hit the ground, and apparently I was dragged for some
Speaker 3: distance before my foot came out of the stirrup and
Speaker 3: then the horse just took off and the horse was
Speaker 3: chased out of the showground. Threw clam on CBD until
Speaker 3: they initially got it. It just had completely freaked. I
Speaker 3: came to on the ground. I couldn't move. The ambulance
Speaker 3: turned up. I couldn't remember where I was, who I was,
Speaker 3: what I was doing initially, and they put me on
Speaker 3: the stretch of the ambulance. Officers then put me on
Speaker 3: the board to put me on the stretcher and they
Speaker 3: dropped me.
Speaker 2: I shouldn't be laughing. I'm not laughing at you online all.
Speaker 3: My mature taking photographs and thinking this is hilarious. Coppers
Speaker 3: are cruel ads, which is great. So anyway, they eventually
Speaker 3: get me into the hospital. They're cutting all the gear off.
Speaker 3: They put me in a machine and found out what
Speaker 3: they had called a open book fracture to the pelvis,
Speaker 3: and what that is. It's usually a motorcycle injury where
Speaker 3: motorcycles hit something. They hit the front of the the handlebars.
Speaker 3: It splits the pelvis into two, opens it up, and
Speaker 3: normally you die from it because the force tears the
Speaker 3: several arteries. But because this was a slow and painful
Speaker 3: it had slowly the arteries had stretched, and then when
Speaker 3: they hit the ground they'd come back together. That resulted
Speaker 3: in a plate being inserted and eight weeks in hospital
Speaker 3: and quite a few months of rehabilitation wheelchair walking, swimming.
Speaker 3: But that happened in May. By October I was back
Speaker 3: in the out at work just because I just wanted
Speaker 3: to do this. This is this is my baby.
Speaker 2: I knew you cowboys were tough.
Speaker 3: I knew it. My first radio was Boddington Radio after that,
Speaker 3: and that was in the first week of November, and
Speaker 3: I realized that I'd probably pushed it too far because
Speaker 3: that really hurt. So I took a bit longer getting
Speaker 3: back into I think, you know, look, it wasn't my
Speaker 3: only injury. I've been injured before. If you ride horses
Speaker 3: as much as I do, which is every day nearly
Speaker 3: you train young horses, they're going to get you some time.
Speaker 3: I've had broken ank or broken leg, broken bracted neck,
Speaker 3: but I didn't know about But I used to climb
Speaker 3: before that, and I had a climbing accident and fractured.
Speaker 2: A vertebro rock climbing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so yeah, you live live life.
Speaker 2: On the edge. Look I don't like calculate.
Speaker 3: Or uncalculated, but you know, look at and I retired
Speaker 3: at sixty, the reason being is that I didn't fit
Speaker 3: to the organization anymore. I still love the job, loved
Speaker 3: every minute of it, but I decided I wanted my
Speaker 3: days to be my days and do what I want.
Speaker 3: And I was working in the film industry. I'd already
Speaker 3: done a feature film bringing horses to film, which was
Speaker 3: a really great experience. I was being used as a
Speaker 3: technical advisor on various feature films, one called Hounds of Love.
Speaker 1: Yeah, name some of them, because I saw on your
Speaker 1: resume there's quite a few.
Speaker 3: Well. Hounds of Love is loosely bade is on a
Speaker 3: serial killer of the eighties in Perth. Very loosely stars
Speaker 3: Stephen Curry and Susie Porter, who both got awards out
Speaker 3: of it. I can never see Stephen Curry again as
Speaker 3: Dale from the Castle because such a sinister character in
Speaker 3: this film. I've seen it. I think it's a masterpiece.
Speaker 3: I never want to see it again, but if you
Speaker 3: see it once, it is an absolute masterpiece. I'm written
Speaker 3: and directed by a young director at the time called
Speaker 3: Ben Young, who became the director and also my part
Speaker 3: of our team of three of us for getting the
Speaker 3: series run and the postcard banded off the ground. So
Speaker 3: that was a real step into technical advising. I've done
Speaker 3: some since, whether it's on policing, script advising, or actually
Speaker 3: being the oldest tactical operator. Fortunately we have Balaclava's in
Speaker 3: the series doing all that fun.
Speaker 1: But look, I've worked a bit in the media since
Speaker 1: I've left The Cops too, and I like the creative side.
Speaker 1: Like in the Police, if you're I won't say I'm
Speaker 1: a creative type, but if you like to think outside
Speaker 1: the square a little bit, you get rained in because
Speaker 1: it's a lot of concrete thinking. And in the film
Speaker 1: and television industry of the media, you meet these creative
Speaker 1: types and some are right out there, but others I
Speaker 1: get quite inspired from the Yeah, look, it's also the
Speaker 1: energy that they bring they do.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think it's Look, it's a cutthroat business
Speaker 3: at the corporate level, but on set with a crew,
Speaker 3: working with people, it's such a collegial it's so familiar,
Speaker 3: you know, the hierarchy and everything is just familiar to me,
Speaker 3: and so I find it very easy to work in.
Speaker 3: I have some of the same problems I've had. I
Speaker 3: might have conflict with someone who who is making decisions
Speaker 3: that I don't quite agree with, But I take the view,
Speaker 3: no one's going to die during this. There's no risk
Speaker 3: to life and death. Let's just move on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the pressure is not there, but I do understand
Speaker 1: when you're with a team, if you're away filming with soundman,
Speaker 1: the team, producer, whatever, you've got that feeling, like when
Speaker 1: you're investigating crimes as a team.
Speaker 3: You're just buck into that collegial teamwork.
Speaker 1: And also, and we're talking the other day, when we're
Speaker 1: just having a chat, I like speaking to cops that
Speaker 1: look back at their career and yeah, it has its
Speaker 1: highs and layers, but you look back and enjoy every
Speaker 1: day that you were there and you're fortunate enough to
Speaker 1: work in that area.
Speaker 3: And as we sit here, I think there's so many
Speaker 3: other stories that are told, and I know you're in
Speaker 3: the same thing. You know, I'll leave those for other
Speaker 3: people to tell because I don't want to take all
Speaker 3: the limelight. Okay, but you know, look at that there
Speaker 3: are other things that happened through our careers that are
Speaker 3: both good and bad that we I think The biggest
Speaker 3: thing for croppers, and I hope it's still happening, is
Speaker 3: learning resilience. You know. I remember a sign or a
Speaker 3: picture on the wall when I was going through the
Speaker 3: academy in the seventies, and I always stuck with me.
Speaker 3: Learned to create a thick hide because you're going to
Speaker 3: need it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I never took policing personally. You know, if
Speaker 3: crooks did what they did, I did what I did
Speaker 3: and if they beat me, oh well, let's move on
Speaker 3: to the next one. If they didn't beat me, as
Speaker 3: long as it was never personal, I found it okay.
Speaker 3: And I get him back to brennand Abbott. It was
Speaker 3: never personal. You know, I see him as just a criminal.
Speaker 3: At his time of offending, there was a degree of
Speaker 3: respect because you knew you were up against a real
Speaker 3: adversary who was going to really challenge you, and he
Speaker 3: was always one step ahead because he was the one
Speaker 3: who's making the moves. We were reacting to him, so
Speaker 3: we had to become more strategic and set the stage
Speaker 3: for him to react in a way that we expected
Speaker 3: him to. So you know, that's always made me somewhat
Speaker 3: respectful of it.
Speaker 1: Well, Glenn thank you very much for taking the time.
Speaker 1: I really really appreciate that. Love the stories, love having
Speaker 1: a chat with you, and keep up the good work.
Speaker 2: And thank you for the services to the community.
Speaker 1: When you were in the cops, because I know we
Speaker 1: all make sacrifices, and I'm sure you were making some
Speaker 1: big sacrifices over the years.
Speaker 3: Cheers Mate. On nineteen nine