A house where a mummified body was found rolled in carpet inside a bedroom earlier this year sold at auction for A$2.07 million.
About 200 people turned up to watch the decrepit and previously junk-filled but now empty three-bedroom bungalow in Sydney's North Shore sell A$270,000 above its A$1.8 million reserve.
The result astonished many of those present, with one neighbour exclaiming: “Wow, A$2 million! But it’s so creepy … and that Bruce Roberts (the owner) was such an unpleasant character.”
In June this year, the skeletal remains of a suspected murder victim Shane Snellman were found in the ramshackle property, with police revealing the corpse had been inside the property for at least a decade.
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The buyers were an expatriate family living in Singapore.
They’d enlisted local builder Rob West, who lives around the corner, to do the bidding, who wasn’t fazed about the property’s history.
“Lots of people die in old houses … every house has a history and this one is just a bit more interesting,” Mr West said.
Before McGrath auctioneer Edward Riley, bidding had got underway at $1 million, with the underbidders a young Marrickville couple who’d looked like the likely buyers right up to the last moment. They’d intended to knock it down.
Mr West entered the bidding very late — at $1.9 million.
His clients were likely to ask him to do a renovation and rent it out in the short term, but the ultimate plan was to rip it down a build a new home.
McGrath agent Karl Ferguson had 11 bidders register, with five of them competing, for the home to Bruce Roberts, who died of a heart attack last July. Snellman’s decomposing body was discovered by cleaners almost a year later.
The theory is Snellman, who had suffered several injuries, was trying to rob the place and Roberts did him in.
Meryl Swinburn, a doctor who lives across the road, said she spotted Roberts at the local IGA often over a 30-year period.
“I saw the police taking away his body last July,” she said.
“He was definitely odd — a few sandwiches short of a picnic — and could never look you in the eye.
“It was the staff at the IGA who alerted everyone — he hadn’t come to get his stuff.”
The notoriety, cobwebs, peeling paint, disgusting kitchen and bathroom in the home was clearly no discouragement for the buyers who’d lined up — all seeing the potential of the 557sq m corner block, where a house in the next street sold for $5.75 million recently.
