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.
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Appearances
I understand.
Now, when Martin turned 16, he was legally allowed to leave school and get a job on his own. But again, his behavior made it impossible to employ him. And as it turned out, one could not make a living exclusively by diving for crayfish.
Not enough for rent. Yeah. A couple more times. Got more than that. You have yourself a cut. It's also Forrest Gump. Yeah. So Martin's parents took him to a psychiatrist to have Martin examined for a disability pension. And the psychiatrist had no hesitation in granting it. He deemed Martin completely unemployable because at 16, Martin still couldn't read or write.
And the doctor almost diagnosed Martin as a schizophrenic before backing off.
Yeah.
We'll talk about her next episode.
Yeah.
Sure. I do that all the time.
But Maurice Bryant still figured that Martin needed some structure and some discipline. So Maurice forced his son to start a door-to-door business selling vegetables that the family grew on their hobby farm. And that, not surprisingly, also didn't work out as a career for Martin.
It's a real aggressive cell. By the time Martin was 20 years old, his father was still trying to find something for him to do. So Maurice set Martin up with a job mowing lawns for some of the older people in the neighborhood. This, however, was how Martin fell into an extraordinarily odd relationship with a woman 34 years his senior, a woman named Helen Harvey.
Now, Helen Harvey was heir to a prominent gambling company in Australia named Tattersall's Lottery. And when her father died in 1961 and left her everything, she began a decades-long existence as an eccentric hoarder who wanted for nothing and did nothing. She lived the dream of life. Yeah.
Well, I mean, wanted for nothing, meaning she got anything she wanted.
Yeah. Have you ever seen, like, really rich hoarders? Some of the best episodes of Hoarders are the guys that are, like, multi-millionaires that have, like, six warehouses full of, like, wacky shit. Oh, that is fun.
Yeah. Well, Helen was also, like Martin Bryant, an extremely unpleasant person, an actual real-life crazy cat lady who lived with 40 cats, 13 dogs, and her ailing elderly mother. Yeah. Besides her mother, though, Helen had also been all but abandoned by most of her family by the time she and Martin crossed paths in 1987. So she was just as isolated as he was.
Well, no, they're really not. And it's also an almost entirely innocent relationship. It's strange. Throughout. Like for years. Like they're just buddies. Yeah.
Yes, it's very much like that.
Yeah. But in this story, they're just mostly like friends. Okay. He said they cuddle sometimes.
I know. We all do. Well, as far as how they met, Martin was in Helen's neighborhood one day to mow a neighbor's lawn, and he found the short and stout Helen Harvey aimlessly wandering the streets. Martin asked Helen if he could help her out. If he could help her out.
Help her out by mowing her lawn. Not like, can you help me? Well, Helen, I suppose attracted to this strange handsome boy, agreed. Soon enough, a sort of spark developed between Helen and Martin.
But contrary to what you'd expect when a relationship begins burgeoning between a 54-year-old eccentric and a borderline mentally challenged 20-year-old, Martin's parents thoroughly encouraged this relationship. Martin, they noticed, was calmer when Helen was around. And unlike everyone else on Earth, Helen found Martin entertaining rather than irritating.
Showing 121–140 of 210 · page 7 of 11
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