What lies beneath: the final hours of Derrinallum's Glenn Sanders

He was paranoid that people were out to get him, to either steal from him or to take him away and lock him up. The CCTV cameras dotted around the farm weren’t enough – he felt he needed to be awake through the night to watch over the place.

But on his final day, Glenn was up before 11am – uncharacteristically early for him.

According to Glenn’s best friend Andrew Breen, one of the few regular visitors to the farm in the last months of Glenn’s life, Glenn’s wake-up ritual involved a glass of chocolate Nesquik and a smoke of methamphetamine (AKA ice) from his glass pipe.

Mr Breen said Glenn was smoking the drug “probably every two hours” through the day, as Glenn claimed it helped him get things done and stay awake at night.

“We’d be trying to do something and he’d go ‘back in a sec’ then go and have another smoke (of ice) because he was getting tired,” Mr Breen said.

“Then he’d come back (fired up) and go ‘right, what are we doing?’.”

The ice was a contributing factor in his declining mental state, which had been markedly deteriorating since the death of his second wife Shirley in 2012. Glenn was paranoid and delusional. He believed a group of Indian scammers he called “Bundies” were trying to take his property.

He claimed to hear people talking about him at 3am over the CFA radio. He heard gunshots fired over his roof and said it was the police. He believed someone was trading on the stock exchange using his dead wife’s name. He felt the people of Derrinallum were out to get him and spreading rumours about him.

He was certain the police were trying to frame him, and that “men in white coats” were going to throw him in a padded cell. He said the CIA and ASIO were flying drones over his house.

It was this persecutory complex that led to Glenn wearing an improvised explosive device (IED) in a bra. It was a mix of explosive gel and detonation cord, with three triggers – one on his chest and one on each shoulder.

Over the 12 months or so that he was known to wear the bra, he would show it to people to either scare them or let them in on his secret. To some he explained the purpose of the two shoulder switches – they were so he could detonate the device by tilting his head should his hands be tied or handcuffed. Some people were convinced it was the real deal, some thought it was a bluff.

He wore the IED bra most times he left the house. He was wearing it on his final day.

The day before, Glenn had held his friend Gary Poole captive in the mechanic’s pit in Glenn’s workshop and sprayed Mr Poole with LPG. Glenn was highly paranoid and wanted answers – why were people spreading rumours about Glenn being a paedophile? he asked. Why were they talking about him? Why was everyone out to get him?

Mr Poole escaped and confronted Glenn, who said he was willing to hold a local child hostage to get the answers he felt he deserved. Glenn showed Mr Poole the IED bra.

Shaken by his encounter with Glenn, Mr Poole contacted police. The police were aware of Glenn’s increasingly bizarre behaviour and the supposed IED bra he wore, but until then no one was willing to go on the record about it and no crimes had been committed. But the incident with Mr Poole crossed a line. 

So when Glenn drove his 1974 brown Chrysler sedan out his usually locked farm gate for the last time on April 11, the police were watching.

The arson and explosives squad had been putting together a file on Glenn based on the unsubstantiated reports about him wearing explosives in public. They had planned to pay him a visit as early as the next week, but the incident with Mr Poole had escalated matters.

As Glenn drove to Ballarat, a surveillance team was deployed. First Glenn went to Sovereign Hill, where he was observed “acting suspicious and looking around nervously”. He then drove to a service station, before heading on to visit his brother Andrew Sanders. The siblings had been estranged for 15 years but since their mother had been diagnosed with cancer they had come back into contact.  

Andrew had heard on the grapevine his brother was paranoid and having mental health issues, but he saw it first hand when they began seeing each other at the hospital during visiting hours. Glenn told him his theories about the Indian scammers, about how he’d withdrawn $250,000 left to him by his late wife and buried it on his property so the “Bundies” couldn’t get it, about how ASIO and the CIA were watching him using satellites or through his computer.

On March 31, Glenn lifted up his shirt at the hospital and showed Andrew the IED bra. Andrew notified the police. Ten days later, Mr Poole contacted Andrew and told him about the incident earlier that day in the mechanic’s pit and the threat Glenn had made regarding a local child.

Mr Poole told Andrew the police were involved now and that it was “going to go down” very soon. 

So when Glenn turned up at Andrew’s Ballarat home on April 11, Andrew was wary. Oddly, Glenn was very calm and relaxed. Glenn had brought Andrew some magazines, saying they’d made him think “of the good old times”. He asked Andrew to look after the magazines before telling him he was in trouble.

He told his brother he wouldn’t be around much longer, but that he never harboured any animosity towards his brother.

Glenn left soon after. As he drove away from his brother for the final time, Andrew could see Glenn was crying.

The police contacted Andrew soon after, asking if he’d had a visitor. Andrew told them what had happened, and confirmed Glenn was wearing the IED bra.

Glenn arrived at Ballarat’s St John of God hospital soon after to visit his mother. He spoke to her one last time and gave her a note. Written in Glenn’s messy scrawl, it detailed all the people who he thought were out to get him. It was a rambling, nonsensical and almost indecipherable window into his mind. He asked his mother to keep it for him.

Meanwhile, police were on high alert. Unbeknownst to Glenn, two officers had followed him into the hospital but were keeping their distance. They didn’t want to approach Glenn in a highly populated place like a hospital. Officers were advised to do whatever was necessary if Glenn became a threat, but for the time being they watched and waited. 

Glenn said goodbye to his mother and left the hospital around 4pm. He drove to Bunnings, still wearing the IED bra, and purchased a timer device and a 10 kilogram container of chlorine. He then went to Coles and purchased groceries before beginning the hour-long drive back to Derrinallum.

He arrived home around 6pm and soon after, the police set up a safe perimeter around his farm. Police had been told Glenn’s house was booby-trapped and that there were explosives on the property. 

Glenn’s licence to use explosives had been suspended in September and explosive materials had been seized from his property by Worksafe, but it seems they didn’t get them all. Worksafe inspector Allison Dennis said “due to the volume of clutter from items and debris in this area I was unable to complete a detailed search”, estimating it would have taken a week to search Glenn’s workshop alone.

But no matter how long Worksafe spent there searching, it’s unlikely they would have found everything. Glenn had two shipping containers buried behind his shed, accessible through a hidden hatch. There was also an underground bunker hidden behind the old dairy. In his pantry, a light switch was reportedly connected to gelignite. 

On April 10 – the day before Glenn’s final day – Mr Poole had noticed a 1000-gallon tank sitting on metal plates inside one of Glenn’s sheds and thought it curious. In hindsight, and looking at the aerial photographs of Glenn’s property after the explosion, Mr Poole said the tank’s location appeared to be the epicentre of the blast. 

Mr Breen also recalled Glenn talking about a tank that was initially buried in a gravel pit across the road from Glenn’s farm. Glenn had claimed it had enough explosives in it to blow the top off Mt Elephant.

Around 6.30pm on April 11, police drove on to the Sanders’ property, first up the driveway to his mother’s house before heading back out and up the second driveway so they could better see Glenn’s house. They stopped at the bomb-shaped mail box and examined it to ensure it wasn’t a real bomb, before driving through the front gate and stopping further along the driveway.

Around 7pm, Glenn walked to his front door. He then disappeared from view and it is believed that at this point he started the timer that would later trigger the huge explosions that would destroy the buildings on his property and injure two police officers.

Glenn then exited his front door, carrying a can of drink and a torch. Police told him to stop walking about 15 metres from police, and despite appearing “erratic” and “rambling”, Glenn complied. He was asked to take off his baggy flannelette shirt. Half-an-hour later, Glenn showed them the IED bra and the ignition switches.

Over the next six hours he was repeatedly asked to remove the IED and lie down on the ground but refused.

“I am not going to do it – the only way it’s coming off is when it blows up,” Glenn told a negotiator.

During that time, Glenn largely stayed in the same spot, occasionally sitting down or crouching when his legs got tired. To two negotiators (a change of shift occurred due to the protracted nature of the siege) he spoke about a range of subjects – his late wife, his family, cars, motorcycles, his time as a mechanic.

He also voiced his distrust of governments, and his fears that he was being monitored. He denied having a mental illness, but said he’d spent time in a mental health facility.

The negotiators built up a good rapport, and Glenn was very talkative, but there was a sense of inevitability on Glenn’s behalf.

“It's definitely ending tonight,” Glenn said, adding he was worried because “it was going to hurt”.

The negotiators would regularly ask Glenn to surrender and take off the IED, and to point out they wanted to help him. One of them asked if there were any bombs on the property, but Glenn was evasive in his answers.

At one point, Glenn asked if he could take three steps back.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

On occasions he would get agitated and threaten to blow the device, even counting down from 10, but he didn’t hit the trigger. Sometimes he cried. Sometimes he laughed. Glenn would vent about who was out to get him. Occasionally he and the negotiators shared a joke.

Sometimes he would ask the time, or how long they’d been talking for. In hindsight, the police realised he may have been counting down until the timer went off on his explosives.

At 1.20am, while Glenn was speaking to a negotiator, a massive explosion occurred in Glenn’s house. The night was momentarily alight and a huge fireball shot up into the sky. One officer noticed Glenn had done nothing to initiate the explosion – in fact Glenn looked surprised by the blast.

A few seconds later, without saying anything, Glenn raised his arms and initiated his device. There was a large flash and Glenn was gone.

The house explosion then triggered five other smaller blasts around the property. Two officers positioned on the eastern side of the farm were wounded in the blast, with one of them receiving a serious head injury. Both were transported to hospital. 

Police manning a roadblock some seven kilometres away felt the earth shake from the force of the explosion and saw an orange glow in the direction of Glenn’s farm.

The repercussions of Glenn’s death would reverberate through the community for years. There were even ridiculous rumours around town that Glenn had survived, disappearing into secret tunnels, awaiting the time he would return to extract his revenge and blow up Derrinallum.

The incident still weighs on the mind of those involved. One policeman spoke of being shocked and deeply affected by Glenn’s death. Members of the Derrinallum community have followed the coronial inquest into the incident with great interest. 

Among it all has been a sense of what could people have done differently to help a man who ultimately didn’t want to be helped.