Three months without a trace: the many unanswered questions surrounding Dezi Freeman

Trevor McKibbin met Desmond “Dezi” Freeman in unusual circumstances. It was January 2020, and Freeman was near Yarrarabula Creek in Victoria’s high country, a bushfire raging around him. Freeman was standing under burning pine trees, taking photos. With a colleague, McKibbin, the local Country Fire Authority captain, had to get Freeman out – and quickly. While this wasn’t the most devastating of the fires that ravaged the country over Black Summer, it was still perilous. Related: Victoria police re-enact single gunshot heard hour after Dezi Freeman fled into Porepunkah bushland “He was just standing there, taking photos, with pine trees going up above him,” McKibbin tells Guardian Australia. “He was wearing CFA gear. That’s how he’d got past the police road blocks.” McKibbin had little reason to think of Freeman again for five years, until he became Australia’s most notorious fugitive. But that period was transformational for Freeman. Only weeks after McKibbin rescued him from the Black Summer fire, another disaster swept through the country: Covid-19. Amid the many tragedies it wrought was an acceleration of Freeman’s descent into conspiracy theories. Three months after Freeman allegedly fled into the Mount Buffalo national park after Det Sen Const Neal Thompson and Sen Const Vadim de Waart-Hottart were shot dead at his home, where a third officer was wounded, there has been no shortage of stories like McKibbins’, or theories about Freeman. Rumours whip around the high country, murmured in local businesses, which teem again with tourists. Mike Bush, the chief commissioner of Victoria police, visited the region last week and has heard some of those theories. According to Bush, there are only three possibilities: Freeman is still in the area, being harboured by locals; he is dead; or he is somewhere else, on the lam. • Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads The first option is the most remote, he said. But they cannot rule it out. Bush said rather than any Australian cases, Freeman’s case has more parallels with Tom Phillips, the New Zealand man who was on the run for almost four years before being shot dead by police. “We’re still no clearer as to whether he’s dead or alive,” Bush said last week. There is no telling how long the search for Freeman may last, nor a timeline for when the many questions about what happened at the end of a dirt track in Porepunkah will be answered. How did Freeman get his guns? What did police know about the threat he could pose before they arrived? Why did the operation go so wrong? Amid the uncertainty, the mythology surrounding Freeman continues to grow. Property under scrutiny Around the sleepy village of Porepunkah, there is no obvious sign of the horror of three months earlier, nor of anyone seeking to claim the $1m reward offered for information about Freeman’s whereabouts. There is no whir of police drones overhead – just the whir of wheels and chains as cyclists head to Mount Buffalo. Mountain bikers in four-wheel drives have replaced the armoured BearCats used by police on dirt tracks. A gate is closed across the Rayner Track property where the killings happened. A cardboard sign taped to it warns a criminal complaint will be filed against anyone who goes further. A video camera perched in a tree inside the property watches on. Fabio Zambelli, who lives there, agrees it is strange to be surrounded by a crime scene at a property that has come under so much scrutiny. He says the bus where Freeman, who was born Desmond Filby, his wife and their two youngest children lived is still there. “The amount of stress, as I’m sure you can appreciate, is really quite a lot,” he says. Just down the track, neighbours are still grappling with the case. A couple, who do not wish to be named, remember when Freeman himself installed the gate at the end of the lane. In the past decade, Freeman lived at the end of the road at two other local properties too: at a house in Myrtleford, which was marked with acrimony, and on an old tobacco farm in Nug Nug. The neighbours, Mick and Jill*, remain deeply unsettled by what happened just over the rise. “It’s the first time I locked the fucking home for years, ever actually,” Mick says, as the couple sat on their back patio with a pool to his left and paddocks stretching down in front of him. Behind the house are more paddocks, and then the bushland where Freeman fled. Jill says the saga has “left a scar on our psyche, but on the community too”. “You want this area to be notorious because it’s beautiful and it’s a lovely place for people to come,” Jill says. “But now everyone has a nasty little tag in their mind about Porepunkah and Bright: ‘That’s where all the sovereign citizens are’.” ‘An incident’ nearby Mick and Jill did not know the owners of the land where Freeman lived – who declined to speak to Guardian Australia – had links to the so-called “freedom movement” that the alleged gunman became deeply enmeshed in during the pandemic. But they were close to Thompson, who they met when the police officer started hunting on the property of a friend. “To have it be one of your neighbours involved in this, and they’re all living up there and you don’t even know anything about it, all the shit they believe in,” Mick says. Mick and a friend were expecting Thompson to stop by the day of the shooting. Thompson had called the friend and told him he had a job up there that morning, and would stop by for coffee at Mick’s place afterwards. They did not think much of it when Thompson did not arrive. Mick did not know anything was amiss until a police car screamed up his driveway, and an officer leapt out warning him of “an incident” nearby. Then, in the early afternoon, a friend called and told him Thompson was dead. “I’ve gone, ‘you’re fucking bullshitting me. That can’t be fucking right.’ That just fucking floored me. It can’t be. Nobody is shooting Thommo.” Mick knew Thompson as “a hunter, a fisher … a bloke’s bloke. He’d drink all my wine and eat all my steak.” It was a gentler part of Thompson, however, that put him in harm’s way. Mick says Thompson knew Freeman, and was on the job to serve Freeman with a warrant in relation to historical sexual offences because of that rapport. “Thommo had a calm way with people, and a gentle way of interviewing … it would be ‘tell me how it happened’. That’s how he got stuff done.” The normally quiet Rayner Track initially crawled with police after that point, but Mick says for the first few days they largely left the densest bush leading up from the property to the Mount Buffalo national park alone. But there has been little sign of officers around the property for several weeks now, save for the recent “firearms testing”. Mick and Jill don’t know what has happened to Freeman. But Jill says that she can’t see how he could have died in the area without police finding his body. Misinformation and conjecture But the longer the case goes without Freeman’s fate being known, the more misinformation and conjecture spreads. This includes claims that the shooting may not have happened at all or was some kind of false flag event. Gerard Gill, a member of the Addressing Violent Extremism and Radicalisation to Terrorism (AVERT) research network at Deakin University, tracks the spread of these theories. He says that an inquest could counteract these myths, as well as find answers about the threats posed by people like Freeman. It could also reveal why Freeman was not on the radar of federal authorities, given his previous threats to law enforcement. “We’re trying to understand this as a social problem and community problem, as well as a policing problem, but if it’s become a policing problem it’s gone too far. “That’s what inquests can unpack.” * Names changed for privacy