Today The Daily Telegraph can reveal the secret life of reclusive Sydney eccentric Bruce Roberts, whose death from a heart attack has triggered a homicide investigation.

Cleaners at his dilapidated Greenwich home sifting through the accumulated ­detritus of compulsive hoarder Mr Roberts’ life lifted a rug last week to find the mummified human body of small-time crook Shane Snellman.

He had been dead for more than 10 years and had suffered significant trauma, ­“numerous injuries” and is believed to have been shot.

Mr Roberts’ family in Coonabarabran, central western NSW, remembers a curly-haired kid who left the local high school in 1972.

They described him as a “good person”.

But his youthful passion for motorbikes and guns turned into an adult ­obsession. Police found weapons, including at least one rifle, in the house. Tarnished photo albums pulled from stacks of magazines and newspapers were packed with snaps of only motorbikes and weapons. There were none of Mr Roberts or his family.

Three old motorbikes are still visible in the backyard of the Greendale St home, which local Anglican Reverend Eric Percival said was known to local children as “the creepy house on the corner”. But no one can ever remember Mr Roberts riding them.

The unmarried, childless bachelor was a man who neighbour Bob Meagher described as a recluse who spent time “talking to himself quite vigorously” while digging in his garden. “He would send us a card and wish the dog a happy Christmas — even after the dog died he would still wish him a happy Christmas,” he said.

Mr Roberts inherited the house, in a quiet street on Sydney’s affluent north shore, when his mother died in the early 1990s. He moved from his home in St Peters, where he had relocated after becoming estranged from his family in Coonabarabran.

Mr Roberts died of a heart attack in his cluttered home in July last year and shopkeepers at the local IGA raised the alarm when he failed to collect his groceries.

Solicitor David Alexander, who had drafted the 61-year-old’s will more than 20 years previously and recalled a strangely uncommunicative man, settled the estate.

He informed Mr Roberts’ cousins in his hometown that they and a couple of charities were the beneficiaries and ­arranged for forensic and normal cleaners to visit the Greenwich home. As the cleaners sorted through the stacked piles of rubbish last week, they lifted a dirty rug to find the mummified body and “got the shock of their lives”, Mr Alexander said.

Police identified the body as that of Mr Snellman, who had done time for theft, drugs and firearm possession, and knocked on the Campbelltown door of his sister Tracy Trudgitt to break the news her missing brother was dead.

“I screamed and just fell to the floor. I’m still in shock. I can’t believe that this has happened,” she said this week.

Mr Roberts’ Greenwich neighbours remember his strange behaviour turning to paranoia with the installation of razor wire and surveillance cameras. One theory police are considering is that petty crook Mr Snellman entered the home, possibly to rob it, and fell foul of Mr Roberts. They are looking at a Nokia phone found in the house.

What happened next turned into a gothic horror worthy of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, where a mad eccentric kills his victim and buries him under the floorboards of his house.

“Clearly we are dealing with someone who was fluctuating wildly between ­depression and psychosis,” criminal psychologist Tim Watson-Munro said.

“It is likely that he committed the crime and then wanted to cover it up.”

Even if Mr Roberts did not kill Mr Snellman, there is no way he could have ignored the stench of a decaying corpse in his home. “Some people as part of their illness become adjusted to the smell,” Mr Watson-Munro said.

And keeping the body in the house was the logical ­solution for a compulsive hoarder. “It makes complete sense to keep the body there because … the likelihood of anyone coming in and finding him is minimal,” he said.