Rubbish at the Greendale St, Greenwich home of Bruce Roberts, who died. Later, the decomposed body of Shane Snellman was also found inside. Photo / News Corp Australia
Rubbish at the Greendale St, Greenwich home of Bruce Roberts, who died. Later, the decomposed body of Shane Snellman was also found inside. Photo / News Corp Australia
WARNING: Graphic content
It was midwinter, 2017, when police officers walked up the path of 31 Greendale St, Greenwich, Sydney and knocked, unaware of the macabre spectacle that lay beyond the front door.
The property, known to local children as "the creepy house on the corner", was the home of Bruce Andrew Roberts, described by neighbours as "strange" and uncommunicative.
A recluse, always seen in a big brown coat regardless of the season, Roberts' odd behaviour had lately turned to paranoia.
He had ringed his perimeter fence with barbed wire, nailed his windows shut and was known to scatter cans around the house as a crude alarm for potential intruders.
Among the overgrown vegetation in Roberts' sizeable yard were the fruits of his hoarding obsession: debris and trash strewn in a trail up to the house which was piled past the windows with rubbish.
The reason police from Chatswood station, along with fire brigade officers, were knocking on Roberts' door was that he hadn't been seen for weeks.
Toxic debris is cleared from the house where two dead men lay decomposing. Photo / News Corp Australia
Neighbours had noticed the absence of the 60-year-old on his daily walk to the supermarket or pharmacy.
Entirely friendless, Roberts' sole social interaction was to write to relatives and send Christmas cards.
And so at 12.45pm on July 21, 2017, a Friday, emergency services forced their way in, breaking two locks that had been secured from the inside.
Confronted by a wall of boxes, paper, bags, newspapers, luggage and rubbish piled from the floor almost to the ceiling, the officers pondered what to do.
Smell of death
They could smell the unmistakable odour of death.
Soon, they identified a path which ran through the garbage from the middle of the lounge room along the hallway and wedged their way though.
Officers found a body, its lower half lying in the hallway and the upper half partially in the room, slumped over a radiant bar heater, which was turned on.
Bruce Roberts' body was burnt and in an advanced state of decomposition, with "extreme charring" of his right hand, right shoulder and the right side of his face, neck and chest.
Shane Snellman had been shot in the neck and died where he lay, half upright in Bruce Roberts' third bedroom at Greenwich. Photo / Supplied
The bony tissue of his ribs had been burned away and his thoracic organs, which include the heart and lungs, were also charred.
Around 6.30pm that Friday, Roberts' body was removed from the house.
Little did the police and fireys know, but beneath the columns of junk within the house, there lay another body, which had been decomposing for much longer than Bruce Roberts'.
The thermal damage to Roberts' remains made it difficult to ascertain the cause of his death, but he had complained to a local GP of chest pain weeks earlier, and refused treatment.
The house on the corner of Greendale St and Greenwich Rd lay empty, apart from its clutter, for the rest of 2017.
When John and Norma Roberts failed to receive their usual Christmas card from their nephew, they made inquiries and discovered that Bruce was dead.
Body under the rug
The deceased's solicitor, David Alexander, informed them that they and a couple of charities were the beneficiaries of Roberts' estate, which included the house and more than $600,000.
On May 15, 2018, police seized a rifle and ammunition, which were found in a bedroom of the house.
Alexander then hired professional cleaners to clear the large quantity of debris.
Five days after they began, the cleaners found more firearms and ammunition.
Shortly after midday on May 29, 2018, cleaners were removing stacked piles of rubbish from the house's third bedroom when they lifted a dirty rug and found a body.
Lying among hoarded items, the body of a fully clothed and mummified male was in a seated position with his back against a couch, slumped to the left.
Around the body and scattered throughout the bedroom were up to 70 air freshener products.
Police removed the body and found impact marks from shotgun pellets on the bedroom wall, and lead pellets on the floor.
Foot separated from ankle
A green trunk in the corner of the bedroom had dried blood pooled on its surface.
DNA samples were taken and a post-mortem made at the Sydney Forensic Medicine Department at Lidcombe found the body was "completely mummified".
It was identified via DNA, fingerprints and tattoos as that of Shane John Snellman, who had a lengthy criminal record and hadn't been seen alive since October, 2002.
Snellman's body revealed his left foot had been separated from the ankle joint and that two areas, around his right ear and the top right of his skull, showed heat exposure.
He had a gunshot wound to his left supraclavicular fossa, the indentation in the neck above the collar bone.
Bruce Roberts' hoarded trash was stacked from the floor almost to the ceiling of the Greenwich house. Photo / Supplied
The track of the wound indicated the shot had travelled from the left to the right side.
He also had shotgun lead pellets in his chest and abdomen, and toxicology analysis revealed methylamphetamine, amphetamine and ibuprofen in his system.
Two dead bodies in one home of people who had died almost 15 years apart was highly unusual, and police began to probe their backgrounds.
Withdrew from the world
Bruce Roberts had no criminal history and didn't use drugs.
He had been born in September 1956 to Athol and Joyce Roberts, of Coonabarabran, and had moved with his mother and half sister, Denise, to St Peters, Sydney when his parents separated.
As a child, Bruce regularly holidayed with his father in central western NSW, and completed Year 10 at Coonabarabran High school in 1972.
People remembered a curly-haired kid with a youthful passion for motorbikes and guns.
Bruce and his mother moved into the house at Greenwich when her wealthy mother died, and lived there together until Joyce Roberts died in March 1989, when Bruce was aged 33.
Left a million dollars worth of shares by his mother, he made a payout to wholly acquire the Greenwich house, and still had more than $600,000 left in the bank when he died.
Roberts never worked and between his mother's death and his own 28 years later, he maintained little contact with his father or half sister.
He received social security benefits and began to hoard.
Shane Snellman had been born in November 1963 to Herbert and Pamela Snellman and had a younger sister, Belinda.
When the couple separated and Herbert fell ill, Bruce and Belinda were placed in a Catholic convent home.
Shane lived in boys' homes, with his grandfather and with his father before leaving school for good, aged 14.
Drugs, theft and murder
From the age of 15 – when he was charged with the murder of a homeless man, but acquitted – until his death, Snellman became well known to police.
He served time in jail for property theft and drug offences.
At the age of 21, he went to live on the Central Coast with his sister and brother-in-law, and worked for a time in an abattoir.
Bruce Roberts was a hoarder and Snellman's body was only found when cleaners came in to clear the property. Photo / news.com.au
He was in a de facto relationship and returned to Sydney to live with his grandmother and his father.
In 1995, he began a relationship with a woman named Philippa Denney and they travelled around, living in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Canowindra, NSW.
The relationship ended in 1999, but they remained friends; Shane did further prison stints, including a year in jail for drug crimes until his release on June 27, 2002.
He was known to frequent inner western Sydney, was an itinerant between his spells behind bars, and occasionally underwent drug rehab.
He was living in supported accommodation at Campbelltown in southwestern Sydney when he met up with Denney who noted he was thin and probably taking methamphetamines.
Bank records show Snellman withdrew his dole payment usually on the day it was deposited each fortnight.
Vanished without a trace
On October 23, 2002, his payment was deposited but not withdrawn.
Denney wondered what had happened to the 39-year-old and reported his disappearance to police.
Nobody can say exactly what happened to place Shane Snellman, dead in a back bedroom, in the house of Bruce Roberts, who didn't have friends or invite people over.
But Deputy State Coroner Derek Lee has surmised the only way he could have got inside the house was "by unauthorised entry".
Magistrate Lee says in his inquest report on the two men that by October 18, 2002, nine days after his last dole payment, Snellman had been questioned by police and had no money.
His next payment wasn't due until October 23, and he was an ice addict.
Although police found no physical evidence of an old break-in at the Greenwich property, Magistrate Lee says "it is most likely" Snellman broke in to obtain property to sell.
Where's the smoking gun?
"If the above is indeed correct, then it also appears that Mr Roberts discovered Mr Snellman inside his home and discharged a firearm which inflicted a fatal wound," Magistrate Lee's findings say.
Inside Bruce Roberts' house were three shotguns, six bolt action rifles, three self-loading rifles, an air rifle, shotgun cartridges, rifle rounds, ammunition boxes and belts.
Spent cartridges were found in all three bedrooms, the dining room and the garage of the Greenwich house.
Forensic examination of the third bedroom confirmed Snellman had been shot and killed in there.
However, ballistics testing of the firearms in the house found no connection with any of them to the fatal wound inflicted on Shane Snellman.
Magistrate Lee found it was "more probable than not" Roberts fired the fatal shot that killed Snellman, then lived with the decomposing body, buying air freshener to abate the stench.
Bike theft
Police probed further to narrow down the time of Shane Snellman's death.
Between midnight and 10am on October 21, 2002, Shane Snellman and another man stole a bike at Camperdown and asked a friend, Kristen Carter, to pawn it because they had no ID.
Magistrate Lee concludes that Snellman died sometime between October 18 and 24, 2002.
There is no explanation as to how Snellman found himself at Greenwich, 60km from his Campbelltown sharehouse or 10km from Camperdown in innerwestern Sydney.
Long-kept secret
After police uncovered the ghastly scene of Bruce Roberts' cooked remains in 2017, and then cleaners found the long-kept secret of Shane Snellman in the bedroom, Roberts' possessions were examined.
Old photo albums stacked amid the magazines and newspapers contained images only of motorbikes and weapons, none of Bruce Roberts or his family.
Three old motorbikes remained in the backyard, but none of the neighbours could recall Roberts ever riding them.
A neighbour, Bob Meagher, described the unmarried, childless bachelor as the sort of person who spent time "talking to himself quite vigorously" while digging in his garden.
"He would send us a card and wish the dog a happy Christmas. Even after the dog died, he would still wish him a happy Christmas," Mr Meagher told The Daily Telegraph.
At the two men's inquest this week, Shane Snellman's younger sister Belinda could not support the finding that her brother had broken into Bruce Roberts' home to steal.
"He never gained forced entry," she shouted inside the NSW Coroner's Court.
"He never broke into that home. He already knew him."
