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