The public has had a long held fascination with detectives. Detective see aside of life the average persons never exposed to I spent thirty four years as a cop. For twenty five of those years I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw and honest,
just like the people I talked to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world. Today I had a great chat with a former Western Australian Police officer, Detective Senior Sergeant Glenn Potter. Glenn led the investigation into one of Australia's most wanted criminals, Brendan Abbott, who is also known as a Postcard Bandit. Abbott was
a notorious arm robber who escaped from prison twice. He was on the run for years and was believed to have robbed between forty to fifty banks. Glenn spoke about how the postcard bandit was eventually caught and the game of cat and mouse between him and Brendan when he was trying to track him down. This investigation is currently being portrayed on the TV series called Run. You should check it out. It's a great show. But that's just one of many of Glenn's stories from his amazing career
in the Western Australian Police. We also talked about his role as a police negotiator and his involvement in Australia's longest running hostage situation. Wait until you hear that story. It's a cracker of a police story. We talked about tactical policing and dramatic arrests, including the investigation into the disappearance of a former soldier who was caught up in
an international diamond fraud with links to Romania. Glenn also tells me about the worst injury he got as a policeman, which was whilst riding a horse, which is quite on it given the fact he's also an accomplished rhodeo rider. Some of the stories Glenn's got you won't believe, but you just can't make this shit up. I hope you enjoy. Glenn Potter, Welcome to I Catch Killers.
Good a, Gary, happy to be here.
When you joined the police, I'm sure you didn't have an expectation that there'd be a TV series playing out about an investigation you were involved in. What was that like? Was that a sort of surreal experience for you?
It was. But I built up over a number of years with the intention of getting into the movie industry, you know, during it after I retired, and as you and I discussed previously, I worked with animals, horses. I've been a horse rider for my adult life and I wanted to take horses to film, and so I got into the industry through acting lessons and it just evolved from there.
Yeah, that's an interesting side hustle train the animals and in the police. But you actually, and we'll talk about it later in the podcast, you were involved in the horses when we were in the police.
Yeah. Look, I decided to go for a career changed about twenty five years into the job. I was a detective senior sergeant, and I decided that I'd give something different a crack, and I was asked to take over the matter section to try and fix some of the problems there and in the end I had fifteen years there and with the dogs God as well, traveling the world talking about matter and policing all through the world.
So he was quite surreal that alone. And of course I got to meet people like hethe Harris who was responsible for horses and things like Gallipoli, and a man from Snowy River and so I a famous force trainer, and that was through the police because New South Wells Police were using him to train their police forces, and I thought that's a good gig. We're going to have a crack at this, and they did well.
It's nice having a fallback position after the police. You enjoy the police, but you never know where that's going to take you or when it's time to leave. So a good good thing to have a back up. The actual TV series we're talking about run related to Brendan Abbot. For people that don't know Brendan Abbott, he escaped from prison twice. I think he escaped from a police station once before that. Was on the run for years. Bank Robber, the notorious bank robber and at the peak of his activity,
he is probably Australia's most wanted wanted man. We're going to talk about that investigation and your involvement in the investigation, but just to give the listeners an understanding about who Brendan was as a person, how would you describe him? Because he had such a high profile.
Brendan was a four full criminal and I underlined criminal. From a young age, he'd gone through a series of issues with family. He was made a ward of the state. His mother put him up for a warden of the state. He went into a boy's home. That's where he learnt his trade. At eighteen, he started committing your normal petty offenses, but he was also a little bit more organized than most.
He initially took on stealing electrical goods from shops and reselling them at a bit of a side hustle, and from there he was pulled in by the detectives at Nola marac Iv and that's when he made his first escape through the back door of the police station. From there he went on to bigger and better things and
eventually went on to become the drop in bandit. He took on a bank and dropped through the ceiling of a bank that hadn't been done w a before that created the initial start of a myth behind the man, and ultimately he was arrested at Perth Airport and charged with the robbery, got a sentence, and then that's when things really kicked off.
Hear what you're saying and watching the documentary and reading up about Brendan, And it's not glorifying crime. We know from being police officers the impact those type of crimes can have. But there was something about him in the way that he carried out the crimes. And we'll delve into that because I think it's very interesting you talking about the investigation how he was eventually caught. But let's learn before we go into that, Let's learn a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow.
Up in Perth and a little bit in the Northwest. I initially wanted to join the army and that's all I wanted to do. And I got as far as almost accepting in to apprentices school at fifteen when my father, who had served in the Navy, said you're not going. You're too young, so he can that and I said, well, what am I going to do? Can I join the police? He said sure, So fifteen I applied for the police
I've got images. I just turned seventeen at and then spent the next few years bouncing around doing different jobs till I decided what I wanted to do. I spent some time in the pipe band because I played the bagpipes as a kid.
Of course, you did, you ride horses, play the bagpipes. You do all sorts of things here in negotiator. Yeah, so yeah.
I did a couple of years in the pipe band, and then I decided I'll give traffic at a court go and tore around on my motorbike and love that. And then I got into an investigative section in the traffic branch, which was run by an old protective ex detective sergeant, and he said, I think you should be a detective. So he arranged for me to go and see the chief super of the COB at the time, probably the most harrowing interview I've ever done. I didn't
realize it was an interview. I went in there and he just hammered me for about forty minutes. Made me say something silly about letting a shotlifter be summoned, and he hammered me for that. Then he threw the criminal Code at me and said now find Arson, and I'd been given a tip on what to do when he said, fine, Arsen, never go to the front, go to the back. So I went to the back about Arson, answered the questions
stood out and thought, I've really blown this interview. I'm never going to be a detective, shook his hand, said thanks for the moment, went back to the office. By the time I got back to the office, while Jack Dearing had run Bill, my boss and said he's a good fellow. We're going to take him just to tell him his comment. He's joined the CIB and far out well. So that's how how my life's detective started.
What the year was that?
What that was nineteen eighty five?
Ok, that's We had something similar in New South Wales. If you wanted to become a detective you had to pass what they call the bull ring. And I think it was aptly call the bull ring for a reason because you'd have three old, cranky detective sergeants sitting at the table opposite you and like at sounds, look what
you went through. Put the pressure on you. Just see how you're going to react, Just really stir you up, and how you come across that dictates whether you get the invite into become a detective or plane clothes.
I think had I'd not been told about the index on the criminal Code, it probably would have been in traffic for a very long time.
Well it's handy to have informants, isn't it.
Oh yeah, I learned very early in those days.
Yeah, a little bit of inside knowledge that might have been part of the test you also got into. And I want to break it all down, but just again to give you a sense, the listener, a sense of the diversity of work that you've done within the police. In negoshading. You were in negotiater at some stage.
I was, at the same time as becoming a detective. I was also what we had apart time emergency Squad, which became the TRG, which is the Tactical Road. So I was an operator in that, and we were off doing course in that type of thing, and I saw
negotiaters and I thought, yeah, that's pretty cool. So I made the choice become a detective, and then eventually gave the tactical side up and when that became full time, and then later on became a negotiator, a hostage negotiator, And yeah, I went to Queensland, did all the courses and ended up some pretty fascinating jobs as a negotiator in wa.
Yeah, you were telling me about one that you're involved in that I want to touch on later on in the podcast, but it was particularly particularly interesting when you were looking at the Brendan Abbot case. How did you get involved in that? At what stage of your career was he first came across your raidar.
I was in the seventy nine division about between ninety two and ninety four, and I was a detective senior constable and that seventy nine division was crime cars, so you ninety percent of the time you're working nights and roving around the metropolitan area. They used to have four detective cars or neron division, one uniform, one detective permanent
partners roaming around the city and it was fantastic. There was just excitement every night it was and seventy nine division was that, you know, that was the go to crew for the night if you had a major crime. We do the initial stuff. From there, I got promoted detectives ergeant and so I had to leave and I
got sent to robbery squad. So from there I went to four years at arm robbery and I took over a team, a team of three guys and myself, and of course all the files for that team were just landed on my desk and I was just going through the files and I came across one that said Operation Elma Fudd and that's what they called it, and that was into Brendan Abbott. And this was five years after
his escape. So I've been on the run. We've been they've been chasing around the country trying to get, you know, leads on him. But really in those days, the states were very siloed. They would he kind of be interested in what they were doing unless you were doing interchange between squads, which at that stage had since ceased, so there wasn't much sharing. So I mean, I'm reading Operation All the Fund, which was about Brendan Abbott, and it
sparked a memory of mine. While I've been in seventy nine Division, which is that I had we went to a domestic, violent domestic and I was talking to a woman there by the name of Kelly Fisher, who was the de facto of Glenn Sammott aka Glenn Abbott, which was the younger brother of Brendan Abbott and she was pretty angry with Glenn at the time, and she started telling her stuff and she said, oh, that he was over east, and I reckon he was with his brother,
Brendan Abbott, between such and such states, And that sparked a memory because when I was reading through the files and as the investigation went on, a gunshop robbery came up, and the Gold Coast and it was near the Pink Poodle Hotel, and those things clicked the timing, the fact that maybe suspected that Brennan was involved with that. So I changed tact on the investigation, which was initially focusing
on informants and the family. Here the whole family too, focusing on Glenn because to me, that was a proven connection.
It's not a bad way to run or focus an investigation. If that's a connection, then I assume you're working on the belief that as two brothers, they had a bond and they would likely meet up at some stage.
Well, that's right. And the other thing that sparked my interest obvious is that we couldn't find him. We could not find Glenn Sham anywhere. We didn't know where he lived. We eventually we founded Glenn Salmon, a Glenn Norman Salmon working in a factory in Bayswater. So for the next week we set surveillance up until we realized that this was a different Glenn Norman Salmon. It wasn't our guy, so we just continued on trying to find him. We've
got a lucky break. We got some information that that Glenn Salmon we were looking for was appearing in court and Mandra for a speeding driving offense. So we set up on that date and sure enough we picked him up and we conducted surveillance on him and we found he was living covertly in Mandrara, which is south of Perth, under a false name, false rental agreement, false bank, false everything,
completely covert, and so that was our focus. We started working on him very closely surveillance or as much as of the svealance we could get on him, and we worked through our tactics of what we're going to do to try and see whether he linked up with Brendan, which became a story on its own.
The way you talk surveillance and it was a different ballgame back then, Wasn't it a lot of physical surveillance. We didn't have the technology tracking phones as much as available today, and it was easier in a cash society to go off the radar and not track people. So I would imagine when you found the hideout that Glenn had or where he was off the off the records, that would have felt like a good step in the right direction.
Look, we knew we were onto something and I was this stage talking both Sid Thomas and South Australia and Jerry Costello in Queensland and ultimately then Clan Pritchard who was a detective on the Gold Coast, And can I add at this throughout this investigation, even before the five years before me, a lot of credit must go to the guys who were doing the previous investigation, a lot of credit to Sid Thomas, and a lot of credits
to Jerry Costello who were detective sergeants in their respective jurisdiction. So it wasn't wasn't a one man, one team, one state job. And by this stage we got up a better communication between states.
Tell us about the first breakout from Freemantle Prison, just so people have got a sense of what we're dealing here with Brendan Abbott, because it's pretty ballsy, as most prison breaks are because the consequences are if it goes bad that they can be shot, as the corrective services
are entitled to do. How did he break out the Freemantle I've been the Freemantle Prison and those that don't know that it's a very old style prison, the way you'd expect something from the previous century, sandstone blocks and iron bars. How did he actually break out of there?
So that to take a step back, there was a prison riot and Brendan was one of the people involved in the right and ultimately had to base court with a number of a defendants and they were going to and from court high security every day during the trial.
And that this is important because Brendan was they'd take off their prison greens, they would put on civilian clothes they'd taken to the prison, come back, strip off, and over that period he was able to accumulate some civilian clothes obviously take one item every now and then and so, and he stashed those away. So he was always thinking about escape. So we move along post the prison riot trial.
He's convicted, he's got extra time and a sentence. He got himself into the prison tailor shop where they were making uniforms, prisoners, gear, overalls and this type of thing. And I think it dawned on him very early that he needed He couldn't just tunnel out. He couldn't go out just over the wall. We couldn't walk out. So he had to come up with a pretty devious plan. And the plan he came up with was to look like, get out of the tailor sho shop through the bars,
get across the roof and over the wall. He had a pretty good idea of the setup of the prison because during the course of the trial there were maps shown at the prison, and obviously he took those in so he knew roughly where he had to go to get out over the wall, and the tailor shop gave
him that access. So he'd managed to secure getting hold of a hacksaw blades through the workshop there, and he'd also managed to get onto making overalls, and once days they'd had the overalls stashed away and made and they were cutting through the bars over a long period, but one of the bars broke early, so they made the decision to go there. And then that was him Reynolds and a guy called I actually can't remember soon on the other one, but so they were going to do
to get out. They saw through the bars. Three of them got through the window across the roof. They had to jump agap. Reynolds and Abbott got over the gap, and the third one fell down the gap and broke his leg. So they continued on this gap through the roofs over the wall, they dropped a big drop and scarp and getting rid of the overalls, they had civilian clothes underneath. From there they got on a bus and went and got a hamburger from hungry Jacks and then
continued on their merry way. And Abbot ran for five month or five.
Years, breaking down a couple of things. The jump the gap, like prisoners are set up not to escape, So I would imagine that's a pretty big gap and consequences if you fail that gap. But I suppose if you're trying to bust out of the prison, you highly motivated.
Yeah, And look they had a good run up to it, and they got across, and of course one of them didn't didn't quite make it. I think it was it was quite a gap. And of course the prison guards are seeing people in what they initially thought were overalls, prison overalls as prison officers, so they got a fair distance before it was realized that they were they were escaping prisoners, So it was pretty ingenious.
Yeah, and the fact that the planning, because in the people I've spoken to or I know that they've escaped from prison, you tend to have two types, ones that are planning it and ones that are opportunistic that they're just see a moment and they decide to take the chance. And I've got to say most people that get out of prison get caught relatively soon after because there's a
lot of focus from law enforcement. Obviously, if someone's busted out of jail, it's a humiliation to the corrective services. It's almost waving the red flag at police and corrective services if you've escaped from escape from prison. So a lot of work goes into it, and most people that escape from prison don't spend that long on the other side of the wall before they get caught. Brendan for out on the run for five years five or six six years.
Five years, five years, whereas Reynolds, the fellow he escaped with, he didn't take long to get caught, And that was showing the difference between two types of crip Brendan was the thinker. Reynolds was the opportunist and not as I don't think has had the smarts of Brendan had. And Brendan got rid of Reynolds in the end when he realized he was a liability. And that was one of the things. Brennan was always thinking about staying out. Reynolds
was always thinking about what can I do next? Because I'm enjoying this life. There was one was a strategic thinker and the.
Other knot What sawt of things? Did your assessment of it? And you've been heavily involved in the investigation. What saw the things? Was Brendan doing that set himself apart in being strategic enough to keep that low profile and slip under the radar.
I think staying on the move and keeping a low profile when he was on the move and doing things that people would normally do. I mean he went on an I think it was a kentiquy tour or a tour through the through Lord and Territory, met up with a Japanese tourist. They just look like pals. They headed off and climb There's ulu As Rock as it was called. Ben did real touristy stuff that didn't draw attention when they If he did a job, he planned the job
and left no trace. Really, most of the stuff he was nailed for is based on his m O and maybe some you know, caught with some of the items later on. But so he was a He was a thinker and I often said he thinks like a good detective. You know, he just what. I'll conceptualize a plan, I'll analyze it and I'll figure out where this plan is going to go. But I always have a plan BEAR, and a plan C and a plan D.
And minimize and reduce the risk. You talked about MA. I know when I worked in the hold up Squad it was familiar with Brendan Abbott because it was around that same time when he was on the run. So you know we were were in New South Wales that you had a bloat that was traveling around robbing different places. But I remember my work in the arm hold up Squad. The MA was the type of things that you'd link
the crimes to. It was a way that people approached It might be the words of what they say when they storm into the bank, what they wear just said, demeanor and the way that they would conduct themselves. What type of bank robber was Brendan? How did he go about when he was in the bank.
Well, he'd start before he was in the bank. He does surveillance, so he knew the setup, he knew who was who. He did a lot of planning. He understood the alarm systems. He was technically pretty adapt He liked tinkering, taking things apart. The family always talked he'd take radios apart and put them back together and so on. So he understood technology, and so he'd do all that groundwork. He'd find out times when things were drived, when the vault was going to be open, when staff arrived, So
a lot of groundwork. So that was before he went in the bank. So when he went in the bank, it was relatively smooth. Whether he came through the ceiling, whether he was already in the bank, or he was coming in through the front door. He just knew what was going to happen. He was ahead of everyone, you know, a couple of the jobs. He'd actually done things to the alarms. He'd put listening devices into various banks to hear who was in there, so he knew what was
going on. But then when he went in. He was very he unlike some of his people he went with, he was very systematic about what he was doing. I mean, anything that went wrong in the bank usually was one of his co offenders to do something dumb and stupid, and so he would minimize the risk by knowing exactly what was going on, you know, And I think that's what made him apart from other bank robbers. I mean I worked on a lot of bank robbers, you know.
I can remember one. You can see him rushing on the camera going into the bank with a sauna, but he hasn't put his balaklava on. His nose is sticking through his eye hole and he runs into the door. This is the type of character you were dealing with. Whereas Brendan had done is he's pre planning.
So he was on after escaping from Fremantle Prison. He's on the on the run for five years. Are you is at the stage you started looking at it on that run at that stage or is this after he got locked up again.
No. I started working on him at the at the end of his five run five years, when they were all celebrating, We were getting you know, we were picking up messages on various people's phones or whatever that you know, congratulations on your five years from a couple who knew the family and so on. So that's when I picked it up. And that's a real thumbing nose. Now Ley's talked about thumbing the nose and the postcard. It's pretty
well known now that he didn't send postcards. After he escaped with Reynolds, there was a purshuit, a pretty wild purshoot. Seventy nine Division working nights had got behind him and he was driving a Cordier. He was driving and Reynolds was the passenger, and they'd done a break in on a gun shop and got a couple of shotguns and obviously to do hold ups. So when the chase was on, Reynolds was hanging out the window firing at shotgun at
the car. The car got dumped in a Perth northern suburb, and Abbott and Reynolds had hidden the shotguns in a sandpile out in front of the house and then run and hit in the bush and as we say, went doggo. So they lay still, and of course the search went on and on and on. They stayed where they were. They weren't picked up. Cobbs got pretty close to them, apparently, and by daylight they just made off and got away. But in the car was all their camping gear. They'd
been camping out in the bushdown and dwelling Up. They bought a hip of camping gear and so on, and they found a camera, one of those disposable old cameras, and developed the film and sure enough there's Reynolds standing outside the dwelling Up police station. It looked like a postcard taken by Abbott. And so that was before I got there, one of the and when I was there, we liked generating publicity because publicity got people talking.
It puts a pressure on someone on the run.
Yes it does, and that was one of the main tools we used, and they had been used. So the photographs were released to the press. I think it was the Austrasian Post at the time who decided to think run the story that was a postcard. We didn't say no because that then got everybody interested, and that's how the myth of the postcard bandit started.
Okay, well that's interesting, and from a tactical point of view, I understand that too, because it puts the pressure, keeps people talking about it and that, Yeah, makes it hard for someone like Brendan trying to be keeping a low profile. So how did he actually get caught after the five years? What was the catalyst for that?
Look, I think it was just under two years that we worked solidly on him. You know, we were dealing with other armed robberies all the time and that.
And you just a reference it again. You said from South Australia, Sid the Thomas sergeant there said Thomas. And from Queensland.
Yeah, Jerry Costello and Glenn Pritchard. Jerry was robbers in Brisbane and Glenn was at broad Beach CIB at the time. I think it was. So we were dealing with them constantly. We had lesser dealings with Northern Territory, Victoria and New South. Any time there was a bank robbery, with any imagination, it suddenly became Brendan Abbott.
Yeah, you can get drowned in that.
And look some of them were and some of who was never charged with because we didn't have the evidence. But you know, Brendan Abbott. Every time it's a bank robbery, was it Brendan Abbott? And we were getting sightings in w A. I remember we got contacted by a UCO who was working on a drug job who said that Brandan Abbott had come in on this fella's place. We were never able to confirm that that was the UCO's
identification obviously didn't say he was Brendan Abbott. So there was lots of these these rabbit holes we were running down. But having decided to work on Glenn, we came up with a strategy of what we were going.
To and how just on that, how did that play out for you guys like from different different states. It sounds like you got the a team together of three or four obsessed detective sergeants from different locations. And it's got to become personal, hasn't it when you when you're chasing the blake that long, and it's not personal in the negative sense, But you've got to be driven.
Look, this is you know, and you know from being an executive that if you if you get something that really interests you, that's got a bit too that you don't want to let it go, you know, and so you really push for it. And of course you also know that from above hierarchy is saying, hey, pull your
head in. That's not the only case you got you're not getting these resources, you're not getting this, you're not getting that focus on and so you've got a kind of your butt edge with hierarchy as well, which we did. But working on Gwen, knowing he was driving around while suspended, I decided to run a strategy on him and when knew a car he had, So what I was going to do was pull him up, leave his car on the side of the road, get him processed through as
driving on suspension in his real name. And then what we had done was we had did a rehearsal on the same type of vehicle of instilling in putting in a listening device and a tracking device, all new technology for the time. So we did that. We knew how long it was going to take us to do it, and that was the plan. So anyway, we seven year OD Division, couple of fellows, Brahan Randall and Doug Nelson who I later worked with Doug at M Robbie when he became a detective. He was in uniform at the
time they pulled up Abbott. As part of the plan, surveillance was on sorry Salmon that pulled up Salmon. Surveilance were on him for the moment up until it became an interaction between policing him. So surveillance pulled off and I give him these instructions, which were to if he identifies his self as Glenn Salmon, just lock him up. Don't do anything else, just lock him up for driving it suspension to leave the car there. We'll deal with it.
We'll get the keys and we'll deal with it. So when they pulled them up, Glenn was being a bit shady and the Graham started searching the vehicle and in the back he found what looked like a silencer to a gun, and so Doug rainy and said, look, we've got him here. He's also produced a false identification, a Northern Territory license, and so I said to him, whatever you do, just let him go because we needed him to be with his real identification. We'll get another chance
for it. So he said, yeah, no, ours, we'll let him go. In that time, Graham had also found some ammunition, whizzed Abbot about it and Oh Salmon about it, and then got Salmon got out of oc spray a pepper strode sprayed both in the eyes. A fight started. They were rolling around fighting. Salmon had managed to remove one of the officer's gun from his holster. Had the gun upside down, so it was holding it like that, and
it was pressed into the stomach at the officer. I'm pretty sure that was Randal, and we saw it later because we could see that the whole imprint of the gun in his stomach. And this fight went on for a while. Two coppers blinded, they managed to get the gun out of his hands, throw the gun away. A bysender then picked it up and took it away while they eventually got him into custody. After that, Nelson ranged me and I said, did you let him go? What the fuck's going on? And they then he told me
the story. Oh Jesus, surveillance are pulled off, so no one who was seeing this going on until after it had been resolved. So we made a decision that Salmon should just be dealt with as that incident, not talk
about Brendan, not talk about anything. While we got a pager off him, we found other guns, We found pistols in the car and so on, so we thought we'll follow those leads down while he's in custody and being dealt with, so we knew he would be remaining in custody and let seventy nine Division deal with that side of it. We stayed right out of it. Meanwhile, we're then looking at the pager messages and we can see he's got direct links to Brendan some of the messages.
So we worked on it. I think we left it for twenty four hours and had him brought up from Canning Vaal Remand and Shackles their tactical people shuffled him in. We put him in an interview and our aim was to try and elicit Brendan's whereabouts room to give him give Brendan up using the fact that we knew that he had a new child coming I think the kid had just been born or was about to be born, that he was going to go away for a long,
long time un left. He helped us all these negotiation tactics and over a period of about five hours working on it, eventually we went through the whole gamble of emotions with him. Now, this is a hardened crook who initially didn't want to talk to us, to the fact that okay, I'll give you a post office box, and his thinking was that he would be able to get to Brendan as soon as he got back to the vision to warn him
not to his post office box. So as soon as we got that detail straight on the phone too Wesland, they went straight down, raided the post office, got into the post office box, found a bill for an address on the Gold Coast, set up surveillance opposite this high rise which was quite a high up in the thing, and we're watching directly across and shure it up, there's Brendan. I think they told me he was naked, ironing shirts and so on. Meanwhile, we let Samon go back to prison.
He was dealt with all that. He was very unhappy with us. We got a message shortly after saying on the thing that the page's dirty girl is off, so in other words, Kelly's off, and so he got a warning that we'd already set up in the Tavannes. They saw him go downstairs carrying a couple of bags. He was wearing his bum bag because he was always known to be armed, and then the bum bag was always a pistol, and they were kind of caught off footed
because things were moving very fast. But they had a Savannaes guy down there down below, so everybody's charging downstairs. The Savannas guy is moving towards him, and I later spoke to Brendan and he thought he was about to be mugged. The Savannahs guy pulls out his gun pointed at Brendan. Brendan thinks, have I got time to get to my gun? He hasn't. He lies down and he's arrested and the cavalry come in. That's the summary of the arrest and how that first arrest happened.
It's interesting a couple of points there, and I think people will be fascinated about what goes on in the negotiations when you arrest someone or you're dealing with him in an interview room. And you talked about with Glenn Salmon, Brendan's brother, how the thing that you had to negotiate was how long he was going to spend in prison and a young family, and they're the type of things
I think that's fair on the table put in. That's just the realities of the world in the type of the crimes that these guys are involved in, and these are the type of things that police officers have to bargain with and quite appropriately, I would suggest.
Well, we had raided his house the night before the night, so the next day he was brought into us. That night after the incident, we raided his house and we found all sorts of stuff. We found a picture on a wall of a blank driver's license for Northern Territory and Western Australia, and so you'd stand in front of it, they'd add in the detail, take the photo suddenly you've gotten and then reduce it down. We found a stolen police id. We found pistols with silencers, without a taser.
I later found out that he'd uced the taser on himself to see what it was like, and it took him about a day to recover. It was one of those ones the old style had about one hundred and twenty thousand bolts go through. Look, it was a very long interview. There was two of us, another detective Steve Drown, a very good detective. We were bouncing off and we
weren't doing so much good cop, bad cop. You know, it's you have to tailor how you speak to someone when you're interviewing him, and so it took some time, and you know, to get that post office box. I think Glenn was thinking, I'll give you that and I'll be solved the problem because I'll be able to warm Brendan. Not realizing how quickly and how prepared we were to move.
Well, how did you guys collectively as a team, all the people looking looking for Brendan Pheel when he was taken in the custody.
I think there are a few beers to be had, as they as should be. I mean, I was pretty well on the plane very quickly because we had stuff we wanted to talk to him about, and you want to get in there as quick as you can. By this stage he was at Waco prison. Sid Thomas came up from South Australia. So Jerry, Sid and I went
to Waco prison to interview. It's funny, you know. When we went into the prison, they said they had an interview room for him, and Abbott was in the corridor, standing up against the wall, and he just did not even acknowledge us, wouldn't even look at us. I think Jerry had already to him, so there was at least some recognition that there was an association there. And so he was into an interview room and over the next two hours we went from nothing to talking about the
cricket and there was really an interesting two hours. I mean, there were three of us, so I went there with pretty well no expectation he was ever going to cough to anything, but we still had to ask. I wanted to hear what he had to say, but probably more likely he wanted to know what we knew and how he was caught. Of course we weren't going to tell him that either, so it was a bit of a cat and mouse talking about what we're going on, about
how things had happened and so on. But from my perspective, for any crimes that he committed in wa it was not that he wasn't going to confess to anything. And you know, we had the identifications had been tainted by newspaper articles. We'd found the identification of Brendan had been done earlier stages by showing the witness and newspaper article of Brendan Appott with the headlined suspect for that bank hold up. Well, that's that's going to go nowhere.
You've blown that for the course.
Yeah, so we really had nothing And my view was at that by that stage, unless he was going to give us anything, he was going to do a long stretch in Queensland anyway, and likely a stretch in Adelaide.
So did they have it? Did they have him for well, you've got him for a Western Australia for escape custody, but did they have him for other jobs? They had him locked in because yeah.
They had him for jobs in Queensland that there was stuff they had, They had good CCTV. So he was charged. He fought every charge every step of the way. And that came out later on when all the committal hearings were occurring, and.
He charged for robbing the bank, leading not guilty and fighter that.
And Chris Niss was his lawyer, and I have to say, what a articulate Yeah, he was obviously good counsel, could every money yeah yeah. And and really as far as the charges was on, I had a very small part in it. Still copped as you do in those days. We did. I expected to get a hard time.
It was a it was a different different world than you got ripped apart and a good good defense barrissa or solicitor seemed to have open slather on you that could just question everything you get out of the witness box sometimes and not even sure if your name is actually Glenn.
Well, that's right, you know, but I think also we came. We come from a time when I used to enjoy court. Yeah, it was, you know, it was a contest, whereas these days no one goes to courtney law.
Well, the evidence was it was different from the evidence you gather now. Sometimes the evidence that we get with electronic CCTV links to phones and all that, it's overwhelming by the time it's presented at court. Quite often, it was when you were taking people to court for the stick ups. Back in those days it was identification. You might get lucky and have a fingerprint on the or hair in an abandoned balaclava or something like that. So yeah,
I can imagine. I'm just interested in the psyche of him speaking to him shortly after and you said two hours you spend with him, he starts to talk cricket did he have? Was it like I would imagine life on the run would be a very stressful situation. You have to be hyper alert the whole time. Was there a sense of relief or did he still come across as a caged animal he.
Did not want to be there. Yeah, I sense that he was. He was going to get out. You know he was going to try and get out. There was no way he was going to go, oh, well you got me now, it's a fair cop. And that came from the fact that he was trying to elicit information from us, right. He wanted to know everything, not just how he got caught, but what we knew, what offenses he committed. He was only going to tell us, and he only told us what we had absolute proof on.
He talked about a radio he got out of the police academy and adelaide and laughed about that. He didn't tell us who got that for him, but he had a police radio.
Oh, police radio?
Yeah, yeah, So yeah. It was a very interesting discussion. And I remember afterwards listening because they had LD's listening devices. And I can say this now in the visitors rooms at the time for Abbott and the family were in there, and the family he told his brother to get up to Cairns and you with his safe safe house or safe workshop or whatever it was up there. So Queensland got onto that pretty quick. The family weren't involved with
his apart from Glenn. And also people talk about how much money he a stolen, you know, as talk of in one two million dollars at that time was a lot of money. And but how expensive it is to be on the run like he was everywhere was you cost him, cost him through paying people off, cost him through hotels, cars, travel. He was flying business class around the country doing his jobs. You know, he'd put on a suit and looked like a businessman with a wig.
He was doing disguises. Everything he did cost him a lot of money and quite fatally, even if he has money stashed away now currency has changed, I'll do anything with it.
One million dollars.
Yes, and you know the denominations the notes have all changed. Now you walk into a bank with a whole lot of those old notes, what's the first thing that's going to happen.
It would be hard pressed someone trying to pass off two dollars ten dollar notes, and.
It might as well burn it because it's worthless. So to say, he's got a lot of money now.
And.
Did you recover his disguises or the fake passports and different things? Did you find the stash of those.
When we raided Glen's house, we found a stash. I'm pretty sure Queensland found a fair bit of gear too to cover that. It's funny though, when it got to that stage of who'd caught him, things kind of retracted in that we start it's ours now. You can get your you can get your hands on in ten years time, but this is ours now. But if they wanted our help, oh yeah, wee had to help.
Yeah, I know, that's that's the nature of the How did you guys feel like collectively before you sort of withdrew your thought that's the end of it. We've got him, you get it through court. You know he's going to get a lengthy sentence. Did you think that was the last you'd be thinking or hearing of Brendan Abbott.
There was always something in the back of my mind that maybe he'd have another crack again. But then when I saw the security was under I thought, Jesus, you know he's going to have to walk through walls to get out of there. Well he almost did, didn't he?
Yeah, Well tell us about that. How long he was in before he escaped again?
I think from memory it was about two years, and I had this stage gone back to TRG as a uniform senior sergeant. I got promoted to senior sergeant and I went to TRG.
Which is our tactical tactical teams.
And so I was working out of there and I got a phone call and said, yeah, he's gotten out. We need to look at your security. So they looked at my security. I'd never been concerned by that because I think, you know, coppers, anyone who's got any brains is not going to go after a cropper because it's just going to bring a lot of heat on you.
But you know, as a copper as adjective, you've always been security conscious anyway, So I learned about that, and then I knew that they had started another investigation here, and it turns out Brendan had come across the WA did a stick up on Mirror Booker Bank, and I ended up running a team chasing what was a citing around yanchat Way for him. But I think that's pretty well got stayed out at WA apart from that one job.
How long was he on the run for the second time?
Six months? You know. Look, and they had the cooperation was certainly better between states by the stage they'd gotten their act together. The National Crime Authority existed now and so that they were involved in as well well. And you were getting sightings all around the country. I remember I got asked to go into the because I was one of the last croppers in WA to speak with him, and they wanted me to listen to a phone call they thought may have been him, and I did listen.
I went in there, listened to the phone call and I think it was up in far North Queensland, and yeah, it did sound like him, and I said, yeah, that look that sounds like him. So yeah, so there I was brought in on that. I think Northern Territory said no, it wasn't him on that phone call. He was in
Northern Territory the whole time, which is fine. Interestingly, during that period we got a information from I think over East that Abbott has been seen boarding a plane coming to w A and they were absolutely convinced it was him. So we'd set up an operation to meet the plane when it came here, and I was in TRG. But I was also the last person actually had visual identification, so we had people along the way saying yeah, it's
definitely definitely him, definitely him. We were sitting at the base of the escalators on the other side of a one way glass door. We had TORG teams everything they were all gonna pounce on the sky coming down the escalator. And of course, so I'm sitting there looking waiting for him, and then they said that's him coming down the escalator. I said, no, it's not, it's not him. It's definitely not him. Didn't even look anything like him, and they pounced on him and it wasn't him. But this is
the level people were operating. Now. We were seeing Brendan Abbott everywhere.
Well that's what he's shown before, like escaping five years on the run, robbed how many banks and cause the chaosity did then he's back in and release again. I know from my experience in the stick ups, armed hold up squad. Christopher Bins. He went by the moniker of badness, Christopher Badness Bins. He escaped from a Victorian prison, came up to New South Wales, robbed a bank. We locked him up for that, you know, a high high risk arrest.
Robbed the Commonwealth Bank at chats with I think it was we put him away and charging with all the offenses we're aware of. And he escaped from his escape from Victoria. But then he was in prison here in Parramatta, then escaped again and I know the pressure that put on everyone to find him before he was put away. So yeah, you've got these people that you can't break. They're always looking for an opportunity to get out of prison, aren't they.
Yeah, And of course they're always looking for the gaps in our capabilities, you know. And that's how Brendan operated. I mean, when it came for the second escape, did work out what their gaps were in the security and how he could take advantage that. And I think that is the more interesting escape, is the second escape, because he really, in my mind, really strategized so many things would make life, take advantage of the gaps and make life very hard or police to find him afterwards.
Hey guys, it's Gary Jubilan here. Want to get more out of I Catch Killers, then you should head over to our new video feed on Spotify where you can watch every episode of I Catch Killers. Just search for I Catch Killers video in your Spotify app and start watching today. And how the prison he escaped that second one, I think in my research it's talked about he had some stuff smuggle into the prison to cut through the bars. What's a diamond string or what is it called a diamond wire.
He was aventually let into the general prison or population, which straight away it's the opportunity is to watch what's going on and find the gaps. So he got diamond wire smuggled in via an antenna of a radio transistor radio to you sta Haven time. You know, they searched obviously the radio, but no one thought that it put diamond wire antenna. So he'd got that into the prison.
You just can't hold diamond wire and do that. You had to work out and make a handle for it, and I think got a handle off a bit of furniture, and so he'd made a handle to slowly cut through the bars of his self. But of course going by himself makes him an easier target than that. She gets four other guys to go with him. There was a fellow in the prison of the guy by name of Brendan Bereshon who befriended Abbott while he was in a
general population, and Bereshon was obviously in Abbott. With Brendan Abbott, he had a celebrity status, which both worked for him and against him. You know what prison's like cut down the tall poppy as well. So he be Isshon was due for parole and got parole and offered his services to Abbot, And so there was a plan that when the time was right, he would you know, obviously source the diamond wire, that he would assist in the escape. And so the plan came together. Brendan had cut through
his bars the diamond wire. They had gone down the line, passed to other ones. Four other prisoners, two murderers and I think two racists. So they were bad buggers and they at all the same time had a plan that Beverishon would be outside to assist him with bolt cutters being thrown over to if there was any response armed response from the armed response vehicle, he would in that
vehicle down using a rifle, which he did. And so when the signal was given that it was all clear to go, there were signals for either flashing lights or dropping burning paper out to say it was a cell window, to say it was a go. The operation their part started. There were floors in the prison system because of lack of staffing, because of changeovering and staffing so on. So they were through the bars. They had joined a bunch of plastic chairs together. So once they were out in
the first area, whether the first lot of wireors. These plastic chairs were melded together and formed a bridge over the first wire they reached. The bolt cutters got through the second wire. When the response vehicle started tunneling up an armored responsive vehicle, Barison started putting rounds into the vehicle so that stops, so that stopped their ability to respond. The meantime, the prisoners are making their way out and gone embarrass and Abbott went off in their own direction.
The other four went off by themselves. Abbott was never going to run with them because they knew he was going to get them caught, and then started the next escape. I think they lay low in the mangroves for quite some time before they then got clothes and got on their way, while the other four created mary hell around Queensland, you know, doing what crooks who have been locked up for a while, going to brothels, causing problems and pubs and this type of thing, which then took the attention
or reduced the attention on Brendan Abbott. It was pretty smart.
How was he caught on the run for five months?
What five or six months? He was up in Northern Territory in Darwin. He was caught coming out of a laundromat right, and the cop has got a tip off and grabbed him out in the front of that chicky bugger at the end of it said can you finish by laundry for me? As he was loaded into the car.
I don't like to give him respect, but there is something that you think you're going to rattle them with a shotgun pointed to the head and when they just throw back something like that, are you going to pick up my laundry?
Yeah, it's critical because that's then when the next stage started, the constant isolation solitary, you know, And that's when it became a political football, both in Queensland and wa WA for losing him the first time, and very much of political football. I think the Opposition used to shout out in Parliament where's Brendan Abbott? That blame was being politically heaped on the government of the day for not being able to keep him in. So what's going to happen.
No politician is going to no attorney general or whatever it's going to say, I'll just put him in the main prison population. There's going to be in solitary for years.
And is it true that he he's one of the longest serving prisoners for solitary confinement.
I think so, I mean, I guess, but yeah, I don't. Yeh. Look, you know, I think he did six years pretty well in solitary first up. And I once said, you know, try to spend twenty four hours by yourself.
Yeah, it's tough and inhumane. You know, they're put in there for a reason. And obviously there would have been a lot of pressure. And I know, quite rightly, corrective services don't take kindly when someone's escaped their custody, and the police don't like putting people before the courts having sentenced to prison. So there's a lot of people that he would have impacted on. And also, and we haven't spoken about it, but it's obvious and we'll just touch
on it so people understand that we get it. It's not glorifying these crimes. That these crimes. You've worked in the arm toiled up squad. I've worked in the arm told up squad. We've spent a lot of time sitting down getting statements from victims that have been traumatized. When someone put it's a gun to their head has a lasting effect. Quite often people think well, there's no physical harm, but the psychological harm that it causes people that destroys
some life. So we do understand that. Would you agree with that sentiment?
I absolutely agree, and Rennand's deserved everything he got as far as I mean a minimum term of imprisonment for an armed Robbie had been six years. He carried out a lot of armed robberies that a lot of people's lives were destroyed or traumatized, and so he deserved his sentences. I think the way the sentences were carried out were probably you know, prison authorities are always understaff there. It's not a vote winner for governments to maintain prisons at
a high level. I mean, prisoners even today are left in solitary because there's not enough guards constantly. It's not something that wins votes. So there's two sides of that coin. Yes, he deserved to be in prison, he deserved to do the time probably what he got. It's a manner in which it's done, which I tend to have a bit of a conflict over it. I thought, to someone being in solitary, you know, either twenty four or twenty three hours a day, that's just cruel.
It's inhumane when the impact it hasn't. People argue, well, they're in prison, but I've spoken to a lot of people have spent time in there, and when you break it down what's going through and what they're going through, there's a reason that there's restrictions on that type of treatment. Where is he at now, He's still in prison.
He's a Casuarina prison in WA. He's actually been doing a lot of legal of his own legal work, and I mean he's had a lot of time in his hands. He's no dummy.
How long has he actually served up until this point.
I think thirty three years all up.
It's a long time.
That's a long time. And look, I have said that murderers get less, but as is what rightly pointed out to me, most murderers commit their offense at thirty minutes of madness, whereas he was calculated, c needed money, conscious planned and did that. So again I think I don't have an issue with the sentence. So he's a Casuarina. He's fighting through the courts to have his releases sorted.
He's just gone through a Supreme Court hearing. It's come back that he will serve his time, which I think takes him up to twenty thirty, but he also his parole date is now twenty twenty eight, so you know it's two little bit years away. Now after thirty three years, two years is probably waitable. He was originally going to be then extra guided to South Australia because they had a warrant in existence for his arrest over there that
was a thirty five year old robbery. That warrant was stopping him from getting any rehabilitation maintaining his status in maximum security here because you then had to go on there. And I was asked to co sign a letter saying that the warrant should be washed because it's not in the public interest. And I think that we let too many prisoners on us out without any rehabilitation, and what do they do. The only thing they know is crime. Yes, he might commit crimes again, but he deserves to have
some training of rehabilitation. So I, after a lot of thought and a lot of soul searching, I put my name to that the warrant was withdrawn by the Attorney General in that state. I don't think SID was very happy with me, and I can understand SID would not be happy, and some of my colleagues weren't either. But you know, it's a case I've followed, and it's not because it's Brendan Abbott. It's because I do believe in
in proper rehabilitation as well as incarceration. And yeah, so I signed it and that so he doesn't have to go to shout Australia. So after he's released here, that's the end of it.
I respect you for that, Glenn. And it's hard because there's a police officer where often thought to look at things in black and white and yeah, well he's a bad guy where good guys, he should get the punishment. But I understand what you're saying, but I also understand that the costs that would Yeah, you've made an informed decision or a conscious decision on what's the right thing.
I not relating to Brendan's case, but other cases where someone's serving the custodial sentence in Queensland, knowing that the sinners they're released from Queensland, New South Wales is sitting there with a warrant and they're going to get another ten years. I don't see the benefit of that. If someone's in custody as well, have them all dealt with and say there's something something to aim for. Otherwise I see why people going, well, fuck this, I've got no
chance of rehabilitation. Let me out, and I'm going to fall back into mild ways.
Yeah, because that's all they know. And of course institutionalization in prisons, they everything laid on from where do you buy your toothpaste? How do you give a toothbrush? You know, shopping if you don't, And of course the world has changed in thirty odd years. You know it's going to be a shock to him. Fortunately he's got a family of son that wants to take him under his wing. But you know, there is a risk of letting people out like Brendan, There is a risk.
Yeah, I've got to speak and I'm sure you've got to speak with his son at that premiere and he presents as I met him for five minutes. He seems on the surface like a decent, decent young fellow that hasn't had had his father in his life. What I want to ask on the night because I had you both on stage and I just didn't want to ask the question where you don't know the answer to, what's your relationship like with Brendan's son. When you're caught up in matters like.
That, look, it's a little bit awkward. Yeah, it is a little bit awkward. But having said that, he seems like a stand up young fella. I don't know him that well. I think it's awkward for both of us. I'm part of the reason why he hasn't had a father, and as he said on stage, if we caught him earlier, he wouldn't have been born. And he's got a sense of human swings a roundabout. But yeah, and I have often said I'm not any of their friends. I respect
their privacy, their lives. I respect prisoners after their release they've done their time, and I would respect that his son has. James has a good relationship with his father, and good on him. Luck to him. It's funny. After that. The next night after that premiere, I was having a few drinks with the cast and James turned up and I'm sitting and talked to one of the members cast and he passes me a phone. Hello. He said, I thought,
I know who this is. There's Brendan. And that was an awkward conversation because you know, I said, you know who I am? He said, yeah, I said, well, let's give it up. Let's let's get this out of the way straight up. Look, there's no real will on my part. I hope life goes really well for you. I hope you get out when you get out, and have a great life and a great relationship. Yeah, this is really awkward. But he laughed about it. He was good about it.
You gotta laughs. Yeah, yeah, awkward, But what are you to do? And that's just a sort of surreal situation that you found found yourself in. That's it's bizarre.
But hold on that point. Sorry. I just looked up at when I was on the phone, looked up. There's about four different camera phones on me.
Oh this could yeah, yeah, you don't want that on the on the front page. We might, we might take a break here. I just wanted to cover off on Brendan's case and your involvement because I find that fascinating. And we haven't finished with you yet, because when we get back, you've got a lot more stories. I don't know. I think it's something about Western Australian types. There's always always some stories.
One who was wait a while here.
Yeah, yeah, I want to talk about the murder of what or suspected murder of Wayne Drill, which is a fascinating case. Your time as a negotiator and different things, and how you how you got your injuries. That's just for starters and perhaps for our question. Is there one that's got away, that one case that you think of that you know, you wish you could have could have resolved. But over all that in part.
Two excellent mate. Look and I'm glad you touched on the one that got away because that is a that is a story.
And okay, look forward to it.
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