Episode 618: Martin Bryant Part I - The Most Irritating Man in History

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There's no place to escape to.

This is the last hot pass.

On the left.

Right from your your blade.

That's when the cannibalism started.

Who's that?

Oh, yeah!

Yeah.

Yeah, okay.

Boom, hit.

Ooh, hi.

Yeah, I'm crying. I'm crying because I there, ooh.
Yeah, I'm crying.

I'm crying because I'm too dark.

God, I'm so dark.

I'm dark and mysterious.

You are.

Yeah, me and Trent Reznor.

Hanging out.

Yep.

The two of you, I could not see a better duo out there having fun.

Peas in a pod.

Eating sliders.

Batman and Robin.

There's Trent Reznor, there's me.

Hanging out. Just sitting there, just being like, hey.
Hey. Do you ever feel, hey, Mr.
Reznor, do you ever feel like you maybe are too sad? You ever thought about adding some... Some of that greasy-ass funk? When you did that closer video, did that pig head smell? Yeah, when you said fuck me like an animal, did you mean like a horse? Or a llama? Or were you talking about a guy? The perfect drug, is that heroin? Or a vagina? The perfect drug for for me it's a leave because it really helps me with my joint issues Mr.
Reznor come back welcome to the last podcast on the left ladies and gentlemen my name is Marcus Parks I'm tugging on your tunic Mr. Reznor please just let me in the clubhouse let me hang out with you I'm.
I'm here with Trent Reznor's new best friend, Henry Zebrowski. It's me.
It's your buddy. I got that gum you like.
Here you go. You want some cinnamon gum? I know it's super hard to chew, which is what you like.
And some people have called him the perfect drug. His name is Ed Larson.
That's right. I only listen to Trent Reznor because I like Atticus Finch.
Nice. Yeah.
Put them both together. That's right.
That's right. Yeah.
He's the guy he makes all the soundtracks with. Now I understand.
Yes. Now I understand.
After we saw Nick Cave, I did not understand that Warren Ellis wasn't the comic book writer, Warren Ellis. I had to argue with, I don't know if you remember, but after we left the Nick Cave show in Detroit, I might have been intoxicated.
I had to argue with you for a good two to three minutes

in the Uber that

the Warren Ellis that plays with Nick Cave

is not the same that writes the comic books.

You would not believe me. I still don't.

I mean, he looks like a prospecting

wizard. That's what

all comic book writers look like.

Have you seen Alan Moore? He looks just like

Alan Moore. Yeah, he does look like Alan Moore, but Warren Ellis does not look like Warren Ellis.
Because you know what it is? It's the pewter rings. That's what I thought, because all comic book writers that we have met, don't tell me I'm wrong.
Every comic book writer I've ever met loves giant pewter rings. Oh, James Tinian doesn't wear pewter rings.
No, but it's in his heart. Today, on Last Podcast on the Left, we're starting a new true crime story, ladies and gentlemen.
We're covering one of the biggest in history. Today, we're going to be covering the Port Arthur Massacre and its perpetrator, Martin Bryant.
Yeah, best to ever do it. Is that true? No.
No, no, no. He slid down the list now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, that's, if we're going to be dickheads about it, I feel like the guy from University of Texas probably the best.
Oh, you're talking about the OG. Oh, Whitman.
Whitman in the tower. Oh, yeah.
I mean, that was like, if any of them had talent. People can't see you do the quote on quote.
He caught it for me. Let's not say talent.
Maybe we can say skill. Skill.
Skill. Charles Whitman is like the Madonna of mass shooters.
He started it all. You know what I mean? He really kind of set the template.
One more share. So Martin Bryant, a.k.a.
the most irritating man in history, was the perpetrator of the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre on the Australian island of Tasmania, in which 23 people were wounded and 35 were killed. Using an AR-15, a semi-automatic .308, and a shotgun, Martin killed with incredible speed and utter cruelty, murdering 12 people and wounding 10 in just the first 15 seconds of the massacre.
Bryant even took a hostage, and the ordeal only ended when the bed and breakfast he'd barricaded himself inside began to burn down from a fire Bryant had set himself and the cops arrested him in the B&B's front yard naked because his clothes had been burned away. He's a dumber version of Wile E.
Coyote. I've been trying to figure out which cartoon character Martin Bryant is because the more you watch him the more you realize that he really was in his entirely own world.
He's an unreal person. Yes.
A totally unreal character. You're talking about doing mass shootings while walking around going like whistling and snapping and like laughing and walking around.
Like he's essentially in my mind, which Marcus didn't necessarily agree with, but I see him as like Roger Rabbit. Like he's like a...
Roger Rabbit loved everybody. He's just trying to make the world laugh.
Imagine Roger Rabbit with antisocial personality disorder and an extremely easy to use assault rifle. Can this guy sing? Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
He seems strong though. I mean, you're carrying around an AR-15 and a shotgun and, like, all those rounds and shit.
He actually was. Like, they said he was naturally, like, athletic.
Like, actually, like, pretty big. God, just.
But also, they're built. They are made completely easy to shoot.
They have no recoil. Anybody can shoot it.
A child can shoot it. A 14-year-old can shoot near a president.
We do know. But while the Port Arthur Massacre was the deadliest mass shooting in world history at the time, mass shooting being defined as five or more people killed in a single incident.
Thank you. It has since been bumped down to number 11.
Because of Australia's response to the massacre, however, there has not been a single mass shooting in Australia since Port Arthur. See, after the extremely unstable 29-year-old Martin Bryant purchased an arsenal of guns without licenses, using money he inherited from an eccentric middle-aged gambling heir he was possibly banging, Australia as a whole decided that there really was no way of preventing people like Martin Bryant from obtaining weapons of mass death so instead of throwing up their

hands and saying that mass shootings were just something we all had to deal with as a part of our everyday lives australia put strict gun control laws in place and as a result australia has not had a mass shooting in exactly 29 years as today is coincidentally as it always is the anniversary of the Port Arthur Massacre.

Yay!

Didn't realize that when we

scheduled it. We mean it.
We really did not realize it at all. Every time.
Yeah, if we realized it would have been the 30th anniversary. Yes.
You got to do a round number. Yeah, not 29.
Very strange. But, you know, I'm just glad we learned our lesson.
America? Yeah. How many times? I mean, you know, the lesson really for me is always is live and let live.
Now we're trained on how to not get shot when they happen. Yeah, that is true.
No, it's like I'm totally trained to, like, look at the exits at every place I enter. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know when I hear something like a car, a loud noise from something and stuff, and I'm scared in a public place, it's nice to feel the heart rate rise because I didn't get cardio that day. It's actually really helping with the obesity epidemic in the country.
It really does, yeah, because you get stronger every time you pick up a woman as a human shield. Always an old woman.
Unfortunately, it's got to be somebody who's near the end of life. They make great human shields.
Your life has been great, right? Yes. One more time, lady.
One more time. But really, when it comes to the gun control issue, the keywords here are people like Martin Bryant.
Because as we're going to see over the course of this series, there really wasn't anything that anyone could have done to put Bryant on a non-sociopathic track because people did try again and again throughout his life. See, this isn't the story of a kid slipping through the cracks who could have turned from the path of mass murder if only someone would have reached out.
Rather, this story is proof that some people are just straight up bastards from birth. And there's very little that any of us can do about it.
Dude, I knew this kid when my mom was watching, like she was babysitting. There was one kid who was just awful.
His name was Adam. He ended up being like, I met him when he was older and he ended up being completely normal.
Just straightened out. Yeah, he just straightened out.
But I remember, as a child, I have this distinct memory of him ripping off his diaper, looking my mom dead in the eyes, and then just putting the shit on the wall. And just being like, that kid sucks.
As a four-year-old, I'm like, that kid sucks. It's a strong-ass baby that understands their boundaries.
And, I art of the deal yeah now australia very

much did not want information about martin bryant to be available so as to deny him the satisfaction

of being known this is a lot like how new zealand has tried to erase the 2019 christchurch shooter

from the pages of their history altogether well there is also a cultural thing in australia and

in oceania right the idea of not putting out the and not talking about this shooter themselves

Thank you. together well there is also a cultural thing in australia and especially in oceania right the idea of not putting out the and not talking about the shooter themselves yeah but we're of the opinion that telling these stories can be helpful because they might result in someone recognizing the signs of an upcoming mass shooting event because we all know we're years away from any meaningful legislation being passed here in america years.
Decades. Maybe never.
Never, never. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Once the solar flare comes and wipes out the internet and then the first stockpile of guns and ammunition goes away, that's when we're really going to start talking about banning those guns. Yeah.
And while I do understand Australia and New Zealand's motivation in wanting to forget people like Martin Bryan ever existed or from even acknowledging they exist in the first place, I'm also of the opinion that whether it's one victim or 35 choosing to cover some true crime stories and not others, it's kind of hypocritical. Plus, there's the fact that even though Martin Bryant is an annoying shithead on every level, his story is still utterly fascinating.
It's kind of because he's an annoying Shadette. And again, never deny what makes you special.
So for our two sources today, we used Port Arthur, a story of strength and courage by Margaret Scott. That's for information on Tasmania and the shooting itself.
While Born or Bred by Robert Wainwright and Paolo Totaro, that's the only real source of information about Bryant's life. We use that for his biography.
Now before we get into Martin Bryant's life story, it might behoove us to talk a little bit about the history of Tasmania itself, because there is a fascinating connection between Martin Bryant and the island's past. To wit, Bryant's history is directly related to Australia's history as a penal colony for the British, and Port Arthur itself, the site of Bryant's massacre, only existed as a tourist town whose main attraction was an historic British colonial penitentiary.
Now, what I hope you guys do, and we talked about this before the show, is that what I hope you guys do as an audience is it's time to take your history aides prep, especially if you're not going to wear a full-body headom in order to list this because the history we're about to traffic it because i laughed when i read the script because they were like you know we like to set up context here yeah but then immediately it was like back in 1789 i was like holy shit oh god no oh no two episodes on Tasmania's rocks. Ah, fuck.
It's important for the historical context, and it's also fascinating stuff. I mean, to give a brief history of Australia's founding...
Get all right, kids. If you fall asleep, I'm railing your mother in front of you.
All right? That's how stepdads run in the school. Better than coffee.
The British, prior to 1776, sent many of their convicted felons to their American colonies. Basically, crime had hit a high in England in the 18th century.
And since they weren't executing people for petty crimes anymore, they didn't have enough prisons to hold all their criminals. So many British criminals were first sent here to America.
It's a little known fact about America is that there's a lot of convicts who are early settlers. I had a feeling.
I also feel like, yeah, we got a lot of runoff. Yeah.
And there's a lot of crazies. Yeah.
Plenty of other convicts ended up in colonies like Canada, West Indies, and Madagascar. But in 1788,

after America was no longer a British colony, their government

decided to send the vast majority of their

exiled prisoners to Australia.

Man, give us our

prisoners back. Yeah, man.

Fucking Australia, you greedy bastards.

You know what's nice, though, is that you go to

Australia because that's where the girls

are hot, right? The guys are fun. The beer is cold.
The koalas are hot. It's a great town.
Wombats kill people with their ass. I know.
And they're also, like, apparently, like, they taste good. I love Australia.
Me too. It's really cool.
Except for this. Yeah, well, they learn their lesson.
That's why it's cool. Yeah, that's why it's great.
They actually fucking did something about it. Now, British convicts were first sent to Botany Bay near Sydney, but within a few years, the British government began pouring criminals specifically into the island of Tasmania.
By 1832, the island was home to over 12,000 British convicts who were used mostly for slave labor. They produced timber and wheat, they worked in the coal mines, and they processed the meat and blubber from whales and seals.
Prisoners would work at least 12 hours a day in chains, and quite a few died either during labor or as a result of the brutal punishments enacted by their jailers. The most common punishment in the penal colonies was flogging with a cat-o'-nine-tails, where the prisoner would be tied to a triangle-shaped wooden frame and flogged while the guards and the other prisoners verbally roasted them.
You cry in pain like a little girl. Oi, your mother's a platypus in jean shorts.
Yeah. Oh, the way you're squirming around there, you're like a little girl.
Yeah, nice mouth. Looks like you can swallow a didgeridoo.
Hey, I want to take another whip there, won't you? A bunch of milk. I don't, I'm not a comedy writer.
I whip people. I'm sick of being forced to do all this business format.
Alright, I'm not, it. All right? So I'm just going to whip his butt off and not make another clever remark.
Still better than listening to Silverchair. Hey, Silverchair is quite impressive for all being 17 years old.
Yeah. When are they going to grow up? They were frozen in time by suicide.
But according to the prisoners, the punishment that was far worse than the potentially fatal practice of flogging was the psychologically debilitating practice of rock breaking which was saved for only the worst of the worst in this punishment prisoners would be chained to an iron post where they would be forced to smash rocks with a hammer for 12 hours a day without being able to move from that one single spot. The punishment here was the monotony, which drove some prisoners to the brink of insanity.
For example, one prisoner became so unhinged after rock breaking day after day that he beat another prisoner to death because a trip to the gallows was in his mind preferable

to enduring another second

of rock breaking. And that's gotta be so

hard to just hang out because

you're chained next to another guy.

One of you's gonna smash the brains

of the other. Yeah, eventually.
You know, like

at some point you have to figure out who's gonna make the

jump first. You know, like you got

maybe you do it at the same time. Like you go

at you and be like, ah!

Maybe next time! That! It's a funny-looking rock! And then turns into my sketch from the characters where you slowly form a pile of rocks that look like a lady. Mm-hmm.
You stick your dick in it. That's right.
That's right. Yeah, that hit series the characters.
Yeah, everyone was done. They could have done something with it.
There was a lot of opportunity there that they left on the fucking table. Okay? Daredevil season two killed us.
And then the new Pee-Wee Herman movie drove the fucking nail to the fucking casket. I mean, Tim Robinson's doing great.
He's fine. You think there's one guy who just hated rocks? Yeah.
And fucking loved it? Fucking rock? is the best day of my goddamn life. You mean all day long you get to torture rocks? I fucking hate you rock! I'm fucking rock! Now the slave labor was a pretty sweet deal for the British.
So sentences at the Tasmanian penal colony could be extended for infractions large and minuscule. You could get your sentence extended for anything from talking in church to failing to turn your shirt in on laundry day.

But once the prisoners finished their sentences,

they were free to settle the lands around them.

And as it happened, Martin Bryant's great-great-grandfather

and one of his great-great-grandmothers

had both been English convicts who'd been sent to Tasmania as punishment. Cute! Oh, that's nice! They met back in the day.
Oh, no, they didn't meet back in the day. They were, like, different branches of, like...
Criminal! Yeah. That's cute! Yeah, yeah, yeah.
People say dating's hard. Yeah.
No, they didn't... Again, they didn't date each other.
They were different branches of the Bryant, not the Bryant family, the other, his mother's side of the family. Cute.
It is adorable. I can see families having sex with each other.
Yeah, you can. Yeah, you can.
In prison. Yeah, just type that in.
Families having sex with each other in prison. Guarantee something's coming up.
Oh, wow. How erotic.
This private prison system need to be, we need to take a look at this, because I don't know where they're getting the lube from. So they sent women, too? Yeah.
That's crazy. Yeah, man.
They sent everybody. Because that's always the question of like, well, you know, if Australia was a penal colony, like how did- Where were the chicks? Yeah, where the women were also sent.
Wow. Cool.
it makes sense yeah now martin bryant's lineage didn't necessarily clean itself up as the years ticked by in tasmania bryant's mother carleen was raised by a man who often suffered from alcoholic psychosis this man married carleen's 19 year old mother when he was 54 years old well carleen's life actually seems to be one of those cursed existences that we sometimes find in our research. You know, these types of people whose lives are just marked by tragedy after tragedy, none of which are their own making.
For example, when Carleen was a young woman working as a waitress in the small Tasmanian coastal town of Swansea, she met and fell in love with a man who left her for another woman. Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

Sad. Sad.
Sad. Sad is the brighter side.
Brighter side here on Last Podcast Network. Each time.
Every week. Now a few years after her ill-fated romance, Carlene met her future husband, Maurice Bryant.
Maurice was an English immigrant from Newcastle who was one of thousands of Englishmen who migrated to Australia after World War II by paying just ten pounds for a ticket to the continent. What an upgrade.
Yeah. Right.
From Newcastle to Tasmania. To Australia.
Beautiful Australia. Just so much fun.
And again, with the volleyball and the fucking, and the shrimp. Yeah, but we're looking at- Prongs, please.
But we're looking at Australia from like a modern perspective. Australia in 1951, when he went, was fucking rough.
Yeah. Like it was underdeveloped.
I just feel like all the criminal ladies there must also be kind of fun. I mean, it was all leather and whips back then.
Yeah. Yeah.
I may be wrong on this decade, but I don't think Australia got color TV to like the 80s. Yeah.
Yeah. They didn't know what people were supposed to look like.
That's awesome. Maurice and Carlene met in Tasmania in 1965, almost 15 years after Maurice arrived.
And after just one date, Maurice proposed. Carlene, believing she was running out of chances to get married at the age of 27, accepted.
Very 1965. Maurice had just as much tragedy in his life as Carllene did when maurice was seven years old he found his mother dead in the home pantry but since maurice was so young he didn't register that his mother was now a corpse he thought she was playing a game so he jumped on the body and asked for a horsey ride it would have been even worse if she gave him the horsey ride that would have been it would have been a horror movie.
Well, then her body might have been jerking back and forth because of the electricity. No, she died from tuberculosis.
That may have been the case if she had been murdered very suddenly, but no, it was tuberculosis and your body usually withers away. She crawled into a hole and died.
There's no hurricane and jerking with that. Especially when you die next to the crackers.
That's a horrible way to die. Never die on top of the rice.
I want to say this right now. If you find me dead, go ahead.
Horsey ride all the way. Oh, yeah, dude.
It's going to be about a 25-minute bit of a picture. I'm going to do a shoot.
I'm going to do it from putting various fun costumes just to have that as the last because of course we're once we're booking out your funeral we're gonna use that as the projection show yeah turn my coffin into a submarine i don't give a shit it's easy to do wouldn't push into a harbor well maurice bryant claimed that this experience you know finding his mother dead scarring. What? And as a result of that and other factors, Maurice struggled with depressive mood swings and deep alcoholism throughout his life.
And never, ever show him more than five cans of beans. Because he will fucking just start crying and then he'll throw up.
Then he has a seizure. And then you got to clean everything up and go spend the rest of your day in an emergency room.
Yeah. Or lay down and give him a horsey ride.
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Only on Lifetime. Now by 1967, Maurice and Carlene had settled in the Tasmanian capital of Hobart.
This was just after the Black Tuesday bushfires of 1967, in which 52 people were killed and 1,300 homes were burnt to ashes. But Black Tuesday was a bit of an opportunity for Maurice.
See, while Maurice made money wherever he could by working at the docks, picking fruit seasonally, or flipping antiques he found in thrift stores, his passion was buying and selling real estate. And it was in one of the first homes he bought that he and Carlene welcomed their first child, Martin Bryant, in 1967.
Now, Martin seemed to be an utterly broken soul from the very beginning. As a baby, it was said that he rejected any sort of affection, and his mother, Carlene, claimed that she found it impossible to bond with her new child.
This is one of those things I think ladies do get afraid of when they have a baby, right? When it doesn't latch, right? If it doesn't do these things, they're all worried, is the baby going to turn into a Martin Bryant? But then sometimes it just turns out they don't have the suckle muscles to get it all through. You're talking about yourself.
Your big, crazy nipples. Yeah.
Your mother's big, crazy nipples. And they must be.
If I couldn't get the milk, how big are the nipples? Yeah. Because now I'm starting to understand a lot more.
So they blamed my sucker muscles on my mother's tits.

And now you think.

It was now I'm starting to understand.

I think it's my mom's tits fault.

Not my fault.

Is this something you came upon in therapy?

Yeah, and he said, stop talking about it.

And I said, no, this is huge for me.

It's not my fault.

It's my mom's tits fault.

And that's the new piece of merch. But you had no problem latching onto that Philly cheesesteak.
Oh, yeah, dude. I fucking, absolutely.
I'm blowing bubbles with gum. I'm doing lots.
I'm having milkshakes. I can suck, suck, suck all day long.
I can't believe for a second I couldn't get that milk because I really wanted it. Maybe it was backed up.
Do you think she had a yeah, like a little block? Whoa. Yeah, sometimes you gotta work at it.
Still, it's the tits' fault. Yeah.
Alright. Lastpodcastmerch.com It's the tits' fault.
It's not me. It's my mother's tits.
Now, once Martin reached toddler age, he also became fiercely independent and uncontrollable, wandering out of their house at all hours. Eventually, Carlene had to fix Martin with a harness and tether him to something just to keep him inside.
Sounds familiar. Did you also get a harness? We've talked about this.
Yeah. Really? Oh, yeah.
Henry was a harness kid i was fully hannibal lectured from place to place i had a strap from my waist to the shopping cart and then a strap from my wrist to my mother's wrist and i was elephant walked from place to place because i was like a little i was a i was ready to go i would take off my clothes and I would just run in one direction. And I knocked the whole display down once in a grocery store.
Oh, in Queens? Yeah, and they had to come get me and they found me. And then when they had found me, I had peeled the stickers off a couple of bananas and I'd stuck them up my nose and we couldn't get them out so then they had to take me to the emergency room.
The whole time I'm just sitting there like, yes, attention acquired. Yeah, you gotta tie them up sometimes.
Sometimes you gotta tie them up. When I see those kids on a leash at Disneyland or at the airport or something, at first you're like, oh, bad parenting.
Then you're like, no, you take care of them. No, you cut the leash.
Cut the leash and see what happens. Yeah, no, they're doing that for our benefit, so you don't turn around and the kid's rooting through your luggage.
They're not protecting me from you. They're protecting you from me.
Got any milk? Well, the neighbors looked down on Carlene Bryant for doing this, for tying up her son. They said that the Bryants were treating their child like a dog.
But Carlene, in what would be the first of many exhausted explanations throughout her life,

defended the practice by saying that she at least knew that little Martin was safe.

See, Carlene loved Martin,

but she found it extremely difficult

to actually like her child.

Likewise, Maurice Bryant found Martin to be just plain weird

and therefore spent most of his energy trying to make his son quote-unquote normal. Martin, however, was anything but.
Well, Martin was slow to learn how to talk and his fine motor skills didn't really develop, but the absolute worst part was that when he reached the age of three, Maurice and Carlene discovered that their son had an inexhaustible well of energy. I can't be contained! I can't be contained yet You won't even do it! You can't do it! You can't get me! Undisciplined! Carlene would take Martin for hours-long walks every day to try to tire him out, but the feverish, unstoppable motor that seemed to power his every waking moment was impossible to control.
For example, Carlene was getting her hair done at the salon one day when Martin fell off a balcony and split open his head. After being taken to the hospital, Martin had to be given adult strength sedatives so he could sit still long enough to get stitches.
And even then, it took an hour for the sedatives to kick in. I know what you're going to do.
You're trying to knock me out. You're going to replace me with another child.
And it's not going to happen because I got eyes on the sides and backs and bottom of my head gotta tell that kid i'm utterly uncontrollable and i'm a fun little guy so what are you going to do about it you're fucking doctor what are you gonna do you're gonna get me you're gonna shut me down doctor extraordinarily annoying yeah well i mean one of the things i really like i don't know if we've established yet so far, like just how incredibly irritating Martin Bryant grew up to be. No, we haven't.
And I won't let you die. Interrupting man, interrupting man, interrupting man.
I mean Martin Bryant like you know he was the type of guy that would book transatlantic

flights so he would have

someone who was forced to talk to him for 12 hours straight. You come around here often? I do because I'm a diamond.
Well, I'm just here for the flight. I'm turning right back around.
Oh, yeah. I love airports.
No, he was at an incredibly, and we'll get into it more. How'd it lack of exercise or has it just been a big tubby fuck but a digress like not just irritating but aggressive you know and we're gonna get into that right now i mean one school could only stand to have him for less than a year before the staff decided they couldn't deal with him anymore and they suggested suggested that the Bryants instead have Martin examined by psychiatrists and eventually be medicated.
Medication, however, did absolutely nothing for Martin. Can't touch me! And when he was sent to another school, a lifelong cycle of rejection, alienation, and solitude began because the other kids didn't like Martin any more than his mother did.
It was not, however, because Martin was just weird or because he had a speech impediment or because his learning abilities bordered on mentally challenged. All those things were true.
But as anyone who's worked in child care like I have can tell you, some kids are just dickheads and they're only made worse when the other kids volley back. And when Martin was examined in 1975 at the age of eight, he was determined to be a slow learner, possessing fairly low base intelligence.
But most of all, Martin was deemed to be an unusually aggressive child. Thank you.
I tried really hard to be. Martin was known to throw things at other kids, kick them, spit on them.
Sometimes he'd urinate on other kids, but Martin was also fully aware that he was doing something wrong when he got aggressive with others. To mitigate punishment, Martin would suck up to his teachers and had a whole routine worked out for showing remorse when needed.
Like some of the pyromaniacs we talked about a few episodes ago, Martin would play up his disabilities when he got into trouble. Likewise, Martin also had a defense mechanism against the other kids.
Since Martin was such a dick, the other kids would respond in kind and gang up on him. But when the other kids gave chase, Martin would cry and squeal so pitifully that the other kids would just sort of give up because they felt sorry for him.
Man, to break the heart of a larrikin.

Do you mean it?

You know, normally, when you're looking at your sniveling little fuck like that, I want to beat it to death.

You know what I mean?

I want to strangle it up, and I want to also play volleyball with his balls.

I want it to carve him up.

But this is kind of weak.

Yeah.

I'm not saying.

Because also, as an adult, remember, if you are ever attacked This is a good way to Alleviate the situation Cry Just start going No No Oh you know he did the go limp thing Oh yeah of course We had annoying kids like this And that's the problem See my bullies in, they understand you just keep beating the fucking shit out of them. You know what I mean? Like, they were never turned off by it.
Yeah, none of mine were turned off by that either. No, because I'll always remember.
America. Oh, yeah.
When they pulled the towel off me. The land, the country without pity.
Oh, yeah. That's America.
The closest I had was when I was in the school. I was at daycare after seeing Problem Trial 3 for the fourth time in a row, which is a lot of this story.

And they pushed me down to the bathroom and removed my towel after we went to a pool.

And they were laughing at my tiny penis.

Oh, that's what was underneath?

Yeah.

And when they were laughing at it, that's when they, but it was more like, then they just got, there was like the joke ended. Yeah.
And then I was just naked on the floor and they were like, well, see you tomorrow. I had an experience like that, except I was the, you were the guy.
Yeah, we're the big bully. Yeah.
Sorry. You just made guys like me.
Well, as long as it's, I think, we're majority receivers on this podcast, we're okay. Because me and Henry were both receivers of the bullying rather than the perpetrators.
I got bullied a lot until I realized I could beat up most kids. You see, you were big, and I was a tiny skinny boy, and Henry was a tiny fat boy.
But I had the power of the written word. Because as you see, the pen is mightier than the sword.
Bam! Yeah, ow! Why does it say that there? Well, that was also, that was kind of the part of the problem with Martin Bryant and the problem with a lot of kids like this is that like he starts off as extremely annoying, very aggressive, which causes kids to bully him. And the bullying throughout his life was extreme.
It got really bad. But the problem is that the bullying makes the behavior worse.
And it's this like, you know, this vicious cycle that just keeps going, going and going. Now, as Martin grew older, his endless energy did not abate one bit.
Martin disturbed every classroom he was a part of. and both of his parents had to work endlessly to keep him occupied, sometimes taking him for walks of up to eight miles long, where Martin would bounce relentlessly from beginning to end.
Martin's behavior actually got so chaotic that one of his fuck-ups made the local news. One day, he was playing with some fireworks he found in his father's garage and ended up lighting a rocket in the attic of his family's home.
The rocket lit Martin's clothes on fire and the resulting burns resulted in skin grafts, a six-week stay at the hospital, and embarrassingly for the Bryants, an interview with the local news. When a reporter asked Martin from his hospital bed if he would still play with fireworks after being hurt so badly, Martin energetically and enthusiastically replied, Yes! He literally said, yes? And then they were like, but didn't you learn your lesson? And he's just like, yeah, I learned a lesson, but I'm still going to play with fireworks.
And this is apparently a thing that would be how he responds to stuff from then on like his lawyer talked about dealing with martin bryant and one of the things where like every once in a while he'd be like you know martin you should feel bad for what you did you should feel bad about this you know and like you should feel good for and then he's just like well i guess i feel guess I feel bad then. That was like his response.
But then he was fully Bugs Bunny, though. Yeah.
Or the Joker. Yes.
Yeah. I mean, even calling the Joker, that's even giving him too much credit.
Yeah, he was not. The Joker plan.
The Joker had a crew. He had followers.
Yeah. Now, by 1980, Martin Bryant had reached high school, where his behavior and grades were just as bad as they'd always been.
Teachers also noticed that Bryant was extremely manipulative, because while he was consistently a monster to kids his own age, he always made sure to be polite to adults. And as I said before, he knew when and how to act disabled in order to get out of trouble.
Did you have that? My mom always had that. They were called the Eddie Haskells.
Ah. That's what the term was, from leave it to beaver.
She'd be like your friend Nicholas's little Eddie Haskell. And it's because they come in and they would be like, yes, Mrs.
Zabrowski. Of course.
I was one of those kids. Yeah, me too.
I was really fucking good at it. Oh, yeah.
I loved hanging with the parents. I was just good.
You just said that you had to be tied to a shopping cart. I was filled with energy.

There was nothing.

I wouldn't qualify that as good or bad.

I would qualify that as an energetic

shopping. That's bad.

If they could have harnessed it into sports

or something, if you were

a dog, you would have been sent to the pound.

Yeah, and guess what?

I would have made friends in the pound. I would have worked out.

Just me sitting a bunch of other dogs. Come on, come on, give me, give me.
Well, the whole thing about Martin Bryant being manipulative to adults, all that, this to me is partly what made Martin Bryant so incredibly dangerous. See, Martin was diagnosed as autistic after the massacre.
And while I certainly agree with that diagnosis, I think what motivated Bryant's bad behavior more than anything was antisocial personality disorder. Unlike many people on the spectrum who have a hard time understanding social cues, Martin Bryant proved over and over again that he had a keen understanding of what was acceptable and what wasn't.
He knew what would provoke negative reactions from other people. He just didn't give a shit, and he lived his life accordingly.

He definitely had, like, he was, like, not all there.

But he knew what he was doing was wrong.

Oh, yeah, always, at all times.

But he also had a perennial, like, this feeling of, like,

why does everybody hate me, though?

I am being myself. According to Martin Bryant, in his head, he's just being himself.
And he's just this, he's just born annoying. Yeah.
Do you know what it's like being me? When you're born half annoying, you know what I mean? It's just a part of your life and you have to either harness it or not. Yeah.
Do you think he had like every disorder almost? He's nothing, nothing good. I mean, some people say that he was possibly schizophrenic.
You know, there's, you know, the autism spectrum disorder, antisocial personality disorder. Like it's, he was clinically what you'd call all fucked up.
Yeah. He was all jacked up and he was cuckoo bananas.
And schizophrenic. I don't know much about this stuff.
He wasn't schizophrenic. It was a catch-all thing in a while where they were trying to figure out, like, any single time, schizophrenia got thrown around real loosely in the 90s.
Yeah, because apparently that's the worst one, right? Well, I don't know. No, they all kind of, it's interesting, on some level, at their extremities, they all sort of dovetail with the various symptoms that it brings up.
Schizophrenia is the most like you'd be the most dislocated. But it's anything can lead to these sort of like fugue states or like this type of thing.
And the schizophrenia is just one of them. But the paradox of Martin Bryant, at least when it comes to the average profile, the mass shooter, was that he was considered extremely handsome by the time he reached high school.
That's all anybody says about him. They just talk about it all the time.
You know what he kind of looks like? The dude from Die Hard? Like the head henchman? Yeah! Like for Alan Rickman? He's got head henchman look, definitely. Well, I mean, the best way I could put it, he's like a more handsome version of Dave Mustaine he does lead singer of mega yeah yeah blonde shoulder length hair he's got a naturally athletic build but yeah he is a objectively handsome man this is but it's a real block his lawyer talked about it his lawyer does a whole long thing about like he doesn't look i would it which is why people thought he could just talk to him but turns out he's heavily r-worded and uh for those of you who didn't understand that it was henry saying r-worded in an australian accent see martin's looks however did nothing for his social status but the thing is it is kind of a good point like because he did not look like he was mentally challenged he did have but he did have like learning disabilities uh and i think he kind of got a pass like a fair amount because of that because he was a good looking guy do you think they were learning disabilities or was it just like straight up i don't feel like doing this no he had learning he had definite learning disabilities yeah his looks however did nothing for his social status, and as he got older, his confrontational nature only led him to pull bizarre stunts that seemingly had no other purpose but to make other people feel weird.
In one case, Martin showed up to a nighttime beach party that was being thrown by a group of teenagers. All right, all right, all right.
These were the same kids who had called Martin names like Silly Martin, Bloody Simple Martin, or Rubber Lips. That last one, that was due to Martin's constant habit of tightly pursing his lips together as if he was always thinking about something he couldn't quite understand.
I like Rubber Lips. Yeah, Rubber Lips is fun.
I feel like I gotta save that one. Yeah.
But on the night of the beach party, Martin showed up with a can of gasoline. And as the other kids watched, Martin doused himself with petrol and lit himself on fire.
Again, it's like, you know when the Joker comes in and says, you want to see a magic trick? But then he just sets himself on fire. The kids tackled Martin and rolled him in the sand before he suffered any serious burns.
But Martin didn't seem to care at all about what he'd done to himself or how disturbed everyone at the party had become as a result of his actions. Yeah, that's crazy, right? It's fucking blow your mind, right? You like that bit, huh? I'll show you Burning Man fucking sucked that year.
Yeah, dude. Burning dude.
Oh, man. But the thing is, if they would have just let him burn.
Yeah, everything would have been fine. If they were normal stoners and were just like, man, that's fucked up, then it would have been done.
You know, but I wonder if it's because the last time he got set on fire, he got a lot of attention. And he starts kind of putting them all together.
He got on the on the news yep yeah maybe i don't know i i think he just liked to disturb people oh yeah he liked to fuck with people and just he'll he martin bryant loved to fuck up a day that he was he was very good at it now martin's father to his slight credit he did try to help his son as much as he could through his depression and alcoholism. And in the process, Maurice Bryant introduced Martin to the only activity he seemed to really enjoy in life besides making other people miserable.
Maurice took Martin snorkeling and taught him how to dive for crayfish, crawfish here in America. And Martin loved gathering buckets of mud bugs so much that he decided that this was going to be his career for the rest of his life.
This is my. This is my life.
My passion. I love snails.
I love muck. Martin, however, did also have a habit of pulling other people's snorkels while they were underwater just because he thought it was funny.
I mean, you know, in a way, if he's working, at least that is kind of funny. Yeah, fun is fun.
Daddy? Daddy? Oi? Don't you want to take me to do some bugging? Sure, let me show you how it's done there, son. Yeah, oh yeah.
Don't touch my goddamn stalkers! I got you, Daddy. You're my favorite Daddy.
I. I kind of like you.

But the massive mistake Maurice Bryant made was when he bought his son Martin an air rifle at the age of 14. It was at least powerful enough to kill birds.
This is ostensibly so Maurice could teach Martin proper gun handling techniques. Yeah, definitely the first thing up, you want to teach somebody at 14 who has really aggressive, some form of antisocial autism.
It's like, yeah, let's teach him how to use guns quickly. Yeah, if your child sets himself on fire twice, maybe don't get him a gun.
Marksmanship is not his hobby. You know what would be be golf club.
Put a golf club in his hands. Even that's risky.
A paintbrush? Oh, all water. All water hobbies.
That's why you send them to the crawfish. Oh, yeah.
Snorkeling. Perfect.
Literally can't set it on fire. The rifles seem to inspire a change in Martin.
As it turns out, handing a weapon to an aggressive, unstable teenager, even if it is just an air rifle, is usually a bad idea. Because all it really does is show them the power of a gun.
Where before, Brian had been annoying but mostly harmless, the rifle allowed him to be more destructive. He'd hide in a creek near the road and fire his air rifle at passing cars,

and he was known to shoot birds out of trees before walking up to the corpses to fire several more shots in their heads.

Hates birds.

Yep.

Hates birds, hates freedom.

He's also like, I just feel like if you find your son randomly practicing to be the DC sniper,

you might want to say, you might want to step in there.

You know, of all the countries in the world, though,

Australia does have extra animals to kill.

Certainly.

Certainly.

You can go after the spiders.

And birds are the biggest problem in Australia because of how big and scary they are.

You really should have went for the snakes.

That's what you do with kids like this. Just turn them into snake killers.
Yeah, roll out. That's a really good idea.
Strangely, you know. Yeah, go into the house.
Kill rats in the house. And then worse comes to worse, he just stays there.
Yeah, you know, and then he gets killed by a snake. Or he becomes an exterminator.
And then he gets to kill animals and stuff, but it's his job. He's in prison, right? Yeah.
So we can still do this.

Never know.

Now, the change in Martin's behavior to something far darker was noticed by one of the few friends Martin made over the course of his life. A kid named Greg, who'd bonded with Martin over their shared love of diving for crayfish.
You're the only one I know who larks slugs just as much as me, Martin. according to g Greg, Martin once caught a cat and tried to pull the animal apart with his bare hands before Greg stopped him.
You can't pet him that

way. You gotta leave the guts on the inside.
More dangerously, though, Greg saw Martin routinely

grab the steering wheel when Martin was in the car with his parents. Martin, of course, laughing

maniacally as he tried to pull the whole family off the road. Greg put up with Martin for years, but the friendship ended abruptly when Martin stabbed Greg in the head with a spear gun.
No serious damage was done, but Greg punched Martin in the face in response and never spoke to him again. Old spear gun to the head, friendship ender.
You know, friend breakups are some of the most devastating things that you can go through, but most of the time it's over money. Yeah.
Yeah. It's not over a spear gun to the head.
Or fucking your wife or something. Yeah.
Something like that. But you just get stabbed in the head with a spear gun.
It seems like it came out of nowhere, especially because they're both in the crawfish industry. Yeah.
You should know to not stab anyone else in the head with a spear gun. Yes.
That's what do you even need a spear gun for if you're just getting crawfish? I miss fun. The crocs.
Yeah, but if you're in the ocean. You can shoot the spear gun.
Saltwater crocs. They're bigger.
It's true. What would I do without you? Now, by the time Martin Bryant reached high school, his father had done pretty well for himself in the real estate business.
But in 1982, Maurice Bryant would make a miscalculation that would inadvertently cause Martin to choose Port Arthur as the site of his massacre 14 years later. See, Maurice owned a good amount of property in the town of Port Arthur.
The Bryants actually owned a vacation cottage there, so Martin was certainly acquainted with the town growing up. In the early 80s, though, Martin Bryant tried buying a bed and breakfast in Port Arthur, a little business called Seascape.
But due to circumstance, the property was instead scooped up by a couple named David and Sally Martin. Maurice spent years complaining that David and Sally had stolen Seascape, and he would often say that the loss of the property was what prevented him from reaching the next level as a real estate investor.
Martin would listen intently to his father's grievances, and in turn, he held a deep grudge against the people who bought the bed and breakfast, a grudge that matched his father's. That grudge would one day make the seascape bed and breakfast

the centerpiece of the Port Arthur massacre.

So, Daddy, would you say you'd be, like, fun if I brought hell to them?

I love you, boy.

Yeah, all right.

Yeah, Daddy, all right.

I think we're about to get along a little bit better.

Maybe I should get you a bigger gun.

Yeah, all right.

Yeah, we're getting along. You know, this is just the plot to What About Bob? Is it? Fuck you, Dr.
Martin! Dr. Martin scoops it.
He scoops the property from the two locals that have been waiting for the property to open up. Oh, yeah, the subplot to What About Bob? You've seen that too many times.
So, yeah. That's the plot.
Yeah, because that is a very low subplot on the totem pole there. Martin Bryant is Bob Wiley.
Bob Wiley goes find Dr. Leo Marvin while he is on vacation, while he's supposed to be on vacation from his problems.
He goes out there, and then they also famously did not get along on set. Bill Murray was very rough, too.
He also works out. He used to beat him up a bunch.
Very similar. Bill Murray used to beat up Richard Dreyfuss.
They used to get in a physical fight. Yeah, Richard Dreyfuss.
On the set of What About Bob? Yeah, he used to complain about it a lot. He said he tortured me during that movie.
But also, Richard Dreyfuss was annoying, so no one really stuck up for him, I think. I understand.
Also, I do want to correct myself uh i forgot we were in tasmania very itself there's the crocs aren't down there they're only up north great so i just really wanted to correct myself before i get yelled at by all the croc fans don't worry don't worry about it these croc people coming after they're a complete other way hi we're all modern we have the best of modern furniture and decor. Plus, our fast and free shipping lets you upgrade your space for fall with ease.
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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. I caught five.
Not enough. Not enough for rent.
Yeah, a couple more times. A couple more than that, you can have yourself a cut down.
It's also Forrest Gump. Yeah.
So Martin's parents took him to a psychiatrist to have Martin examine 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.
I saw a little interview with one of Martin Bryant's girlfriends. So he met a girl, one of the girls he's so, he dated.
Yeah. When he was 27, she was 16.
Yeah. We'll talk about her next episode.
Yes. But there was like a time where she said, Martin would do this thing where, again, he's handsome.
Yeah. So when she met him, she just thought he was a super, just a dumb, normal guy.
And then when he was talking, he would pretend to read.

He would do these things where he'd go, hmm, and he'd get the menu and go, ha, and then he'd order whatever he wanted anyway, whatever, didn't matter what the restaurant was.

He'd like look at signs and just go like, we're going this way and like have no idea

what anything ran and shit.

But again, she just liked having to decide her.

Yeah.

And it's all about that, really. Sure.
I do that all the time. Oh, yeah, I can't read.
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. You all want some fucking carrots? Oh, you piece of shit! You all squash! Buy my squash! Buy my squash! Or I won't leave! I'm asking my squash! Eat my grapes! Or I'll set fire to your home! Eat my grapes! It's a real aggressive sell.
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.

Don't hoarders want everything?

Well, I mean, wanted for nothing meaning she got anything she wanted.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

Yeah, she had access to millions of dollars.

Millions of dollars.

That's why she was a hoarder, because of that.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

You see, it's not just the money.

Poor people give me hoarders, too, Eddie.

Oh, yeah.

The best of them. Top-tier hoarders.
It's not really about the money. It's about the drive.
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. Again, it's the dream.
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.

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. It cannot really be stressed enough how old a lady she is.
She's 54. But when you look at her, it's different.
Look at Helen Harvey now. To be honest, in my head.
Hoarding 54 is always... It's different than a Lisa Ann 54.
In my mind my mind, as soon as, because of my training, I saw in my head, Helen Harvey, Lisa Ann, right? Like, I just imagined her as like a weird kind of like, ooh, because she's an heiress. I thought maybe she'd have a lot of plastic surgery and be like a weird kind of like that style of 54-year-old lady.
She looks like the woman from the book Stone Soup. She was born with a babushka.
Yeah. Like, she is that type.
She's got babushka head. And I have no idea how, like, these guys coming together as one of the funniest odd couples in true crime history.
Yeah. Because they're not necessarily fucking.
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.
It's kind of like Harold and Mott. It is.
Yes, it's very much like that. But didn't they sleep together in Harold and Mott? They're like in love with each other.
I think they banged once. Yeah.
But in this story, they're just mostly like friends. Okay.
He said they cuddle sometimes. Hey, I was still alive 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 jesus Can you imagine that? You seem out of sorts.
You need some help. You want some squash to shove up your ass? Help her out by mowing her lawn.
Yeah. Like not like hey you want to help me out? Hey you want to help me out? 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.
And that's a big thing for all you out there that are super irritating. Sometimes you just gotta hold out for that aimlessly wandering old woman that will take you and have you.
Okay? And then that's who showed up. And that's who you commit to.
As such, Martin's parents were so thrilled that their son had finally latched on to someone else that they supported the relationship in any way they could, to the point where they eventually began taking Helen on family vacations. I thought she was rich.
Yeah, but, you know, she liked to come along. Yeah, she was like his Teddy Ruxpin.
Yeah, it's not like they paid for her. She just, like, was there.
Yeah, you know, just, you know, always like having just a random old lady just there she's 54. This is look at Helen Harvey.
Look at her and tell me that is not the very description of an old lady. Also, they can finally take a vacation by themselves.
Yeah. And I will admit that hoarding does age you.
Like if you were a hoarder, it add 15 years to your age. I agree.
Yeah. Especially with, like, just around all the cat piss fumes.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it's not good for anybody.

And it's stressful.

But from what it seems like, the dynamic between Helen and Martin was that Helen basically

treated him like a helpful but rambunctious child, barking orders at him that Martin would

dutifully follow.

And seemingly, Martin did what Helen said because Helen was the only person in the world

that actually liked him.

Because as authors Robert Wainwright and Paola Totaro put it, Martin was the human equivalent of a stray dog that had wandered into Helen's yard.

She literally was the first person to not just be like, fuck you, Martin.

I hate you.

Yeah.

Get the fuck away from me right now.

Yes.

Which meant she was also a difficult woman. very difficult.
And so they got together famously. Now, Martin never did much yard work for Helen.
And as a result, her yard became so overgrown and filled with animals that the neighbors complained. The RSPCA intervened and rescued over 50 neglected animals from Helen's house.
But they also noticed that both Helen and her 79-year-old mother were in terrible shape. See, Helen's home was filled with filth and trash because Helen was a hoarder.
Even worse, it was discovered during the animal rescue that Helen was sick with infected ulcers, and her mother had an untreated broken hip. So both women were rushed to the hospital.
Helen's mother died there a few weeks later, but Martin stayed at Helen's side and took care of her during her stay. Additionally, Martin and his father cleaned out Helen's home while she was convalescing, and once she was released, Martin moved in with Helen permanently.
So he wasn't living with her yet. They had been friends for like three years at this point.
Like, he'd just go over there all the time, just hang out with her constantly. But yeah, at this point, yeah, it took about three years before he moved into their house.
He was on, they were, they viewed them, they said they were inseparable and that he would be over there all the time. They would be hanging out because they love doing the same things.
They love yelling at the, uh, turned off television. They both love wandering the streets aimlessly.

They both love hoarding animals.

And honestly, it's kind of nice.

Now, once Helen got out of the hospital,

she and Martin fell into a comfortable life.

By most accounts, though, the relationship was platonic.

Although Martin did say that there was a little kissing,

a little hugging, a little cuddling.

Sometimes she lets me kiss your bottom chins.

Do you think he was impotent? No. No, I little hugging, a little cuddling.
Sometimes she lets me kiss her bottom chins. Do you think he was impotent?

No.

No, I don't, unfortunately.

No, I've got a ranger.

I've got a ranger, don't you worry.

I'll try to stick her with my shift stealer.

I'll try to get her with my little shovel.

I'll try to push her around.

But Helen, turned out, hole grew over.

She said the hole grew over,

a spider moved in, it's a bunch of wibs. I love my Helen.
Just nothing but a cocoon. Neither Martin nor Helen had any concept of money.
Infamously, the two of them would go to car dealerships and buy new cars on a whim. Whoa.
Because Helen also hoarded cars. That's awesome.
By the time of her death, she'd bought no less than 50. But Helen usually only kept these cars for a few weeks or a couple of months before trading them in or wrecking them because Helen was such a bad driver that she had to take her driver's exam 19 times before she passed it.
Don't they cut you off? No. At some point? And she comes again.
And she comes're like, This time I'll go. This time I'll go.
She immediately crawls in the trunk of the car. No, no, no, wrong end.
You gotta start driving your own car later. All right, all right, I'll gain a run, Aaron.
Crawls under the hood. Which way is left? Which way do I watch the wheel? Now helen had such disregard for the value of a dollar that she'd often buy a car at the beginning of the month when the monthly payment from her inheritance trust came in then she'd sell the car at the end of the month when she needed cash for food oh i think she's hustling the problem was that during that month she and martin would have spent weeks driving around aimlessly with a car full of filthy animals constantly urinating and defecating.
Try to get it in the ass tray. Try to get it in the ass tray.
Come on now. Try to get it.
All right. Try to get it in the way we keep the change.
The stench would be so intense. A stench that would develop within weeks that any car Helen traded in had to be fumigated and thoroughly scrubbed.
Which car smelled worse, theirs or John Bunting's? Oh! I mean, John Bunting's. John Bunting's because he had the fucking slop.
He had human remains turned into chowder. No matter what, decomposition's going to be defecation every time.
Every time. For a bad smell.
Put it on your gravestone. It's going to be a long gravestone.
Marcus says decomposition beats defecation every time. You don't believe him? Dig him up! True word.
Dig him up. He actually got buried with a box full of shit so you could compare.
Oh, wow! Then someone comes and fills it up every week. That beautiful strange woman.
God! Sweet, sweet Helen. Now, Helen, of course, had begun rebuilding her menagerie of strays as soon as she got out of the hospital, and the smell and the noise were causing the neighbors to once again complain.
So, to avoid another visit from the RSPCA, Helen bought a farm outside of the Tasmanian town of Copping, not too far from Port Arthur. Once Martin and Helen moved on to their new land, they soon acquired three donkeys, nine ponies, three dogs, and an untold number of cats, in addition to 30 canaries and quite a few budgies.
What's a budgie? It's a budrigar. It's like a canary.
It's a small bird. Oh, okay.
Remember I think that bird, remember the bird's head fell off in Dumb and Dumber? Yes! I think that's a budgie. Okay, great.
Pretty, pretty bird. Pretty bird.
Pets' heads are falling off! But once Martin became, and man, this sounds like a dream. Three donkeys? Yeah.
And three dogs and three donkeys? I mean, I can, you know, the cats, let's have like maybe four walking around. Yeah, no, it's, no, it sounds like a cute life.
Yeah, and nine ponies is too much. Yeah, yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. For them it is.
Yeah, just a couple. Just one horse.
One horse. But three donkeys? Sign me up.
Again, I think you can handle it. I don't know if Martin could.
No. Ponies are useless, right? No, yeah.
You can ride them. You can ride them, yeah.
You can ride them. Yeah, but that's it.
You can just like, you know. No, you can farm them for their meat.
You can get them for their milk. I never ate pony.
Yeah, we can have some. I've had horse.
I've had horse. Horse isn't good.
No, it's not. No, yeah, I don't really like horse.
We're not normally, we're not used to horse. I don't, yeah, order horse.
No. Well, I have.
I have, yeah, several times. Yeah, I ordered horse once.
Yeah, of course you order horse. Like, you didn't go to the fucking supermarket and buy horse.
Eat it. Eat it.
Eat the horse, boy.

Once Martin became more isolated on the farm,

the meager social skills that he developed over the years began to regress.

He became more irritable, more erratic, and extremely quick to anger.

But since the only person who saw him on a regular basis was Helen,

nobody noticed that his behavior was getting darker.

But perhaps what was most harmful when it came to Martin's eventual actions

I think it's a good thing. who saw him on a regular basis was Helen, nobody noticed that his behavior was getting darker.
But perhaps what was most harmful when it came to Martin's eventual actions was Helen's insistence that Martin be made the exclusive trustee of her estate. She wrote up a new will explicitly forbidding any of her money from going to her blood relatives upon her death, which meant that when Helen died, Martin Bryant was all set to become a multi-millionaire who could pretty much buy and do whatever he wanted.
So crazy. This guy can't read.
Hasn't passed any school. Does zero skills.
Can't even take care of the yard. Is going to become a millionaire and still wants to kill everybody.
I want to see this movie that is Brewster's Millions directed by fucking David Finch. Like, the David Fincher, like, you literally do a thing where you have, like, you have to spend all the money and he's also on a killing spree.
Yeah. But concerning Martin's darkening moods, there were some red flags.
A few weeks after Martin and Helen moved to their farm, a neighbor came by for tea. But before the neighbor finished her cuppa, Martin shooed her out the door and told her that if she ever came back, he'd shoot her.
Well, Martin also began skulking through his neighbor's properties at night, where he would use his trusty air rifle to shoot dogs. But for most of the people in the town of Copping, Martin and Helen were merely the local eccentric couple.
Every day, Martin and Helen would wake up late, then wander the local town aimlessly, shopping, eating long lunches, and driving around in a continuous stream of new cars filled with animals. This is all I want to do.
Why is this so much? Why is this asking too much? It's all I want for my life.

Obviously, it's not going to make you happy. No, but that's just because that's

them. I can maximize it.

Well, actually, I mean, I don't know. They were happy

though. They were.
I mean, they'd drive around with their dogs,

their cats. Sometimes they'd stuff

a pony in the back seat,

which greatly disturbed the locals, as it should.

Ponies don't belong in the back seat

of a sedan. Unless they're taught to drive or handle the map.
Yeah, you're supposed to tie them to the hood. That's the key.
It is true. Now, naturally, Helen would do all the driving, but Martin had never given up on his old habit of suddenly grabbing the steering wheel to try and make them crash, because he thought it was funny.
To avoid accidents, Helen started driving slower and slower, but Martin still caused three accidents by jerking the wheel. When you got to get a joke, sometimes you got to let it ride for decades.
Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me or are you talking to my father? We both have. That's what you have to have.
It's called house jokes. I will say the one time I did this to my dad was the one time he like hit me in the face.
And I agree with him. Yeah.
Still to this day. No, it's a lesson to learn.
It's a lesson to learn. It was only a matter of time, of course, before Martin's steering mill shenanigans would have real consequences.
In October of 1992, Martin and Helen loaded three of their dogs into a brand new Mazda and drove north to do some shopping. Martin later told police that at one point during this drive, Helen had become distracted by the dogs and she let the car drift into the other lane.
It's far more likely, however, that Martin reached over and jerked the wheel because according to the person they hit that day, Helen's Mazda very suddenly swerved across the line and crashed into their sedan head on helen's neck snapped upon impact killing her instantly in addition to the dogs martin meanwhile suffered a fractured vertebrae while the third dog survived ran back to the farm if i was that dog i would have ran the opposite goddamn direction Not back to the farm no god a good look but this is what we see a lot in these types of accidents martin lived because he was like if there's something about not being like when they say with drunk drivers yeah like how they always live through the crash because well it's because they're like bodies are loose and they're not they don't react they don't clench the way that's kind of what they say for you to do. You're supposed to go loose.
Yeah, you do it. Yeah.
Martin's injuries necessitated a week's 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.
And forced is the key word. I think partially helen came in they were super happy to be like you got him now bye bye they worked their whole life or his whole life for this 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 had nothing to do anymore.

So they actually started 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.

They're martyrs, like real parents.

They're martyrs, and so they go through the process because they feel like they have to.

This is what Julie's making me get the hunchback dog. It's cold.
It looks really cute though. I mean the dog's definitely cute and it's going to be a great dog but at the same time it's a hunchback.
But you know we're getting a bell put in and it's going to be fine. And then Julie can wear your favorite style of dress, like what's her name wears in the Hunchback.
Esmeralda. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Actually, that's kind of nice. Yeah.
Think about it. All right.
I'm in. And you're the evil monk.
Always. Always.
But after the car accident, Martin's demeanor suddenly changed. changed 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. Man, imagine sucking so much that kids don't even want to play Nintendo with you in like 1989.
It's like the coolest shit in the world. Well, you know what it was.
One of the affectations he gets, and you see like 1989. I know.
It's like the coolest shit in the world.

Well, you know what it was?

One of the affectations he gets,

and you see it now,

like later on when you watch all,

like there was a couple interviews with him.

It's a girlish titter.

It's like a ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Everywhere he goes,

and everything's funny,

and everything's like a funny bit,

and everything, which is like,

again, when you're married to a comedian,

it's great.

Yeah.

But when it's just some guy

that doesn't know how to do it,

Thank you. And everything's funny and everything's like a funny bit and everything, which is like, again, when you're married to a comedian, it's great.
Yeah. But when it's just some guy that doesn't know how to do it, I could see how it gets annoying.
Yeah. You know, we'll all be abandoned at some point.
That's a comedian's life. You know, but also you got to imagine his house fucking smelled like shit.
Yeah. Like it's just covered in fucking piss and shit.
I mean, the bar's real low. Yeah.
low yeah 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. Oh, he's a Kramer.
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.
Cabbies will do anything you ask them to do. Have you ever done anything? They really will.
Dude, have you ever done it? I did it one time. Follow that car? No, not a follow that car, but I did a step on it.
Me too. Yeah, it worked.
It was awesome. Yeah, they do it.
I was like, let's go. That was like, get back in the yellow cabs.
Cab drivers have a fun life. 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.
I only wish that he could have had the jerk-style lifestyle where he'd have the white suit and like the tennis courts and all this shit. Like that's what this this story really could have went to the best millionaire ever.
Like that's where the story could have ended up. And it didn't.
Yeah. And I do wonder how many of those are out there.
Many of them. And they buy whole companies and then become billionaires.
And then we all have to pretend like they're geniuses because they just came into the money in the first place. And then did they bought some hot air balloon business that all of a sudden takes off and now they're the balloon king of Tulsa or some shit that's true man Tulsa and their fucking balloons I'm sick of Tulsa and their fucking balloons which is why I'm bringing my hand-picked needles to Tulsa pop the balloons take it Tulsa down we're 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.
Do you think there's any chance he killed him? No. No.
Let's just say he didn't kill him with his hands. He killed him by being himself.
Yeah. Well, yeah, he was also just very depressed.
Yeah, he's sad. In an alcoholic, yeah, lifelong.
He has every reason to be sad. Yeah, he did have every reason to be sad.
And he just set his son up for life, too. Yeah.
So he probably was just like, fuck it. My job is done.
Well, definitely. It's like, I'm out.
Now that he's a multimillionaire and he can do whatever he wants, my job is over. 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.
Yeah, that's right. Put the rake in the head.
I don't know what it means. Martin also began carrying around a briefcase, proudly telling strangers that he had a job that paid $400 a week.
That's not that much money. That's a really funny idea.
I've just been like, yeah, quite the businessman, eh? Hey, you like coral fish? Opens up a brief case. Just a bunch of coral fish.
You like that? It's a boiler. Other times, Martin would wear an electric blue suit with flared pants and a ruffled shirt.
Cool. It's just Austin Powers, isn't it? Oh yeah yeah baby in other words his appearance was objectively amusing and people began laughing at him almost everywhere he went martin's isolation and rage therefore began to build and by the end of 1993 martin bryant began using helen harvey's money to buy an arsenal of guns and ammunition.
This, of course, was the first step towards the Port Arthur massacre, which we will cover in full devastating detail next week. So what happened? Because he dressed like shit? Yeah.
I mean, that was part of the beginning of it. Well, because in the end, he really thought like, all right, now I'm going to dress like a big timer.
I'm going to dress like they all do in the movies. And like, which I get.
That's what I want to do. Yeah.
I love a stupid shirt. It's weird because it's disarming.
I actually wear like big, friendly, colorful stuff because I don't want people to be scared of my appearance. Yes, Mark Ryan.
At first, though, but he just could not understand what the laughter was. Yeah.
And he intentionally took it in the worst way possible. It's like the first time he ever made people happy, he decided to kill everyone.
Yes, because he thought that the happy was angry. He couldn't tell the difference.
Yeah, he didn't know. But yeah, that's where we're at.
At the end of this episode, what? No. Oh, you were just wagging his finger at him just wagging his finger if you want to see video of henry wagging his finger a video of henry wagging his finger at me go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the left where you can watch full video episodes of every episode we do you can also watch side stories for free on youtube you can also follow us on all the socials at LP on the left.
TikTok and Instagram is where you can find us. And of course, come see us on tour.
That's right. Yeah, we're going to have a good time.
I can't wait to do these live shows. We are going to have so much fun.
I think right now we're in Toronto. We're in Toronto and it is there.
I'm there for my birthday. Also, if I believe right before this, check out the LPN Funhouse live on Twitch.
Twitch.tv slash LPN TV. And I want you to check out my birthday celebration which apparently I'm going to be lording over everyone.
Isn't this going to be going out the day after the Funhouse? But then they can watch the replay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Go to the YouTube channel. Last podcast on the left YouTube channel.
Fucking subscribe and all that stuff. We're going to be in Toronto on May 3rd.
Atlanta on June 28th. And the next night, Henry and I are doing a side story show at Dad's Garage on June 29th.
July 12th, Salt Lake City. August 8th, Charlotte.
August 9th, Durham, September 20th, St. Paul, Minnesota, October 11th, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 25th, Oakland, California, November 29th, two days after Thanksgiving, we'll be in Cleveland.
Just cheeseburgers for Thanksgiving. Yeah, we really got to be careful, man.
We got to watch some of the way we eat. After Detroit, I had to take a look at my blood again Oh my god And December 12th and 13th Both nights were in Portland at Revolution Hall Also, starting on Tuesday On May 6th I begin my second leg of the Invasive Species Tour I'm coming to Naples And then I'm doing Fort Lauderdale Improv With Henry and Jackie the, uh, that's going to be a side story show.
And then we're doing two shows at the funny bone the next night after that. And of course I'm going to do the weekend in Key West.
So come on out. If you're around in those spots, if you're on vacation in Naples or Key West, please come hang out with us.
The late show in Orlando still has some tickets. The early one sold out.
It's going to be a fucking blast. I can't wait to come back to Florida.

I actually truly love it.

He does.

And we're going to have a good time.

No matter what you do, we're going to have a good time.

So we'll see you out there.

And if not, you will be there, so I can't do anything to you.

But if you are there.

You never do anything to anyone.

No, make them laugh.

Yeah.

Hail Satan. Hail Geed.
Maurice. Hail Maurice.
Sure. Enough.
Right? Was it that bad? He kind of helped. Yeah, but he bought him the gun.
He did buy him the gun, but he was stupid. Yeah.
But he's the nicest guy in this story, I think. Everybody is.
You know what? How's about this? Hail donkeys.

Donkeys are neutral.

Yes, and dogs.

The dog that survived the crash.

Yes.

I'm going to hail the dog that survived the crash.