Jun 9, 2020
When Tracy Trudgett got the news in late 2018, she passed out. Tracy hadn't seen her brother Shane Snellman, since she visited him in prison nearly a decade before. Tracy and Shane had been separated from their father when they were just children - raised in a convent and then foster parents when the New South Wales authorities refused to let dad have the kids back due to his single parent status. Shane had not had an easy life - falling in with the wrong crowd and resorting to breaking and entering and other petty crimes, he had been released from prison in mid-2012 and then, after just a few months, seemingly fell off the face of the earth. But then Bruce Roberts died. Roberts was, according to his neighbors in the Sydney suburb of Greenwich - an oddball - a bit of a hermit and, it turned out, a rabid hoarder - as bad or worse as the kind of hoarder you see on those reality shows about hoarders. When Roberts stopped being seen in his neighborhood in 2017, police entered the home to find him dead on the floor from what the coroner determined was a heart attack. The home was filled with so much clutter and dust and filth, it was shuttered and eventually turned over to Roberts' relatives, who took well into 2018 to settle his estate. It was only then, more than a year after his death - once the family sent crews in to clean the house and prepare it for sale - did the full extent of Bruce Roberts'...er...eccentricities…come fully into the light - and the police to come knocking on Tracy Trudgett's door with the sad - and downright weird - news of her brother Shane Snellman's demise. Join Melissa as she relates the details of one hoarder's six-year secret, and the unlucky fellow who decided to break in and rob the wrong house.