Shane Madej
speaker
210 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Shane Madej’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah. Martin's injuries necessitated a weeks-long stay at the hospital, and he had to wear a neck brace for months. But without Helen around to manage Martin anymore, his parents were forced to step back into his life in a primary role.
Well, they sort of vacillated between letting Helen have, like, complete control, but the other part of it was is that they found after spending, you know, 20 years taking care of him, there was this weird hole in their lives when they didn't have to take... when they had nothing to do anymore. So they actually started, like...
getting back into his life, a little like they'd go and have lunch with him and Helen. His father retired and wanted to spend more time with him. It's almost like they liked the punishment.
But after the car accident, Martin's demeanor suddenly changed, and this was almost certainly due to the head injury. Where Martin had previously been brooding and solitary, he was now extremely chatty at all times, which increased his annoyance factor tenfold. Martin also regressed intellectually and tried making friends with the neighborhood children by inviting them over to play Nintendo.
The kids, however, recognized that Bryant was a scary dude, and they instinctively understood that he was someone to avoid.
Yeah, and that's the thing. Against his father's wishes, Martin returned to the farm where he and Helen had lived so he could make a life by himself. And Martin soon found himself in trouble with the neighbors due to his increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior. In March of 1993, Martin got on a bus and put his hand up a girl's skirt, which got him kicked off by the driver.
Martin, however, ran to the next stop ahead of the bus and tried to get back on like nothing had happened.
Yeah. When the driver refused, Martin unleashed a tirade of verbal abuse before hailing a cab. And he then had the cab follow the bus while he hung out the window cursing and shaking his fist at the bus driver.
Yeah, man. Well, everything with Martin changed in mid 1993 when Helen Harvey's will finally paid out. Martin was now a multimillionaire, although his father made sure that Martin did not have access to all of it at once.
Yeah, and I do wonder how many of those are out there.
Well, using Australia's Mental Health Act, Maurice Bryant set up a perpetual trust for Martin, which ensured that Martin would receive a monthly stipend instead of a lump sum. This is to make sure that Martin didn't blow all of it immediately. But after Martin's father set up Martin's finances, Maurice Bryant's alcoholism and depression finally caught up to him.
Seemingly broken by life, Maurice became sullen and quiet, and in August of 1993, at the age of 64, Maurice buckled a diving belt filled with weights around his neck, took a mix of Valium and antidepressants, and threw himself into a body of water. He had left a note saying only, call the police, taped to the door of his home. And it took investigators two days to find the body.
Martin, however, showed no human emotions whatsoever when told of his father's suicide. Martin smiled and joked with the police officers investigating his father's death. And while some thought that Martin didn't understand what had happened, most believed that Martin was being intentionally cruel with his demeanor.
No.
Well, yeah, he was also just very depressed.
And an alcoholic. Yeah, lifelong.
Yeah, he did have a reason to be sad.
Yeah. But in the end, what really mattered most here was that Martin Bryant had, within 10 months, lost the only two people who had ever been able to maintain any semblance of control over his actions. That, of course, would be Helen and his father.
See, Martin's mother, Carlene, had a habit of turning a blind eye to Martin's difficulties because she just kind of hoped they would resolve themselves. As such, after Maurice's death, Carlene basically abandoned Martin to the farm where Martin and Helen had once lived. Yeah, she peaced. Yeah.
Now totally isolated, Martin stopped trying to be accepted by people altogether, which was most evidenced by how he began to dress. Now flush with cash, Martin became partial to gray linen suits paired with lizard-skin shoes. Cool! Topped off with a, quote, rakish Panama hat.
Showing 181–200 of 210 · page 10 of 11
← Previous
Next →