They were there to ask after a missing person, a former rural school principal who’d disappeared from New South Wales.

Two minutes into their walk, past a dummy camera mounted to the letter box and another placed high in a tree, they were fired upon.

Hidden ahead in the trees was the man they were looking for. Nathaniel Train had been camping in a carefully concealed sniper hide with a high-powered rifle.

The first shots killed constables Matthew Arnold and Rachel McCrow.

Constable Randall Kirk hid behind a tree before making a terrifying dash to one of the police cars. His partner, Constable Keely Brough would spend two hours hiding in long grass while Nathaniel and his brother Gareth hunted her and lit fires to flush her out.

The fires drew the attention of their neighbour Alan Dare, who drove to the gates to see what was happening. They killed him too.

A group of local police, armed with rifles, soon came to Constable Brough’s rescue, not willing to wait for the highly-trained Special Emergency Response Team to arrive.

When they did, driving onto the property in armoured vehicles, it was a shootout.

Nathaniel, Gareth and his wife Stacey - all conspiracy theorists with a hatred for police - were shot and killed by SERT following many attempts to secure their surrender.

These are the issues that have so far been explored in a marathon inquest into the six deaths:

LOCAL RADIO BLACKSPOTS

So bad was the reception in the area, the first three police to the Wieambilla scene misheard a crackly radio and drove to the front of the Trains’ property.

They mistakenly thought they’d heard another police crew was on scene and believed they might need help.

When the officers arrived it became clear no other crew was there and they came within seconds of being shot.

Other responding officers during the night said patchy communications plagued the response to the incident.

COMMUNICATIONS ISSUES

Constable Arnold was killed before the four officers realised they’d walked into an ambush, but the others had time to make desperate calls for backup.

After seeing her partner shot, Constable McCrow used her radio to call for urgent assistance. She was shot multiple times as she made the fruitless attempt.

“Unable to call out on her radio, Constable McCrow nonetheless recorded the harrowing events she lived through (on her body worn camera) … she also recorded a message of love for her family,” counsel assisting the coroner, Ruth O’Gorman KC told the inquest.

She was fatally shot minutes later.

Constable Kirk used his mobile to call his sergeant before making the terrifying dash from cover to his police car. Constable Brough called Triple-0, telling the operator at times she thought she was about to die.

NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION

A paranoid Gareth Train knew police were looking for his missing brother and warned he’d be waiting for them with “an eye open” in an email to Nathaniel’s son - the heated exchange continuing until the day before the Wieambilla massacre.

The inquest heard there was also information available that Gareth, who had a hatred for police, was known to have had a stash of illegal weapons hidden in a secret storage compartment on the bush block.

Much of this information was known to NSW Police, who did not pass it on when they requested police from Chinchilla check Gareth and Stacey’s property for Nathaniel.

“If all of that information was available to those police, I believe that they would have approached that job much differently,” one QPS officer said while being questioned.

REMOTE LOCATION

For two terrifying hours, Constable Keely Brough lay in grass just eight inches high, whispering into her mobile phone that she was being hunted by the two gunmen who’d murdered her colleagues.

And while teams of SERT operatives had begun the journey from Brisbane, local officers weren’t willing to wait.

The remote location of Wieambilla - 300km west of Brisbane - caused many problems and one of them was the proximity to the help they needed to neutralise three armed offenders.

Referred to at the inquest as the “extraction team”, a group of local officers went in with rifles, not knowing where the Trains were hiding, and shouted for Constable Brough to break her cover and run towards them.

The inquest heard a Triple-0 operator provided the young officer with the code words “pink and blue” so that she’d know her rescuers were not the killers enticing her out.

MOST COMPLEX JOB IN SERT HISTORY

SERT commander Tim Partrige thought he’d likely lose one of his men in the firefight with the Trains.

They had limited information when they went in, only that there had been an ambush and two officers and a civilian had been shot.

Snipers in the 19-strong contingent crept into position as fires burned around them on the 107-acre property.

As the heavily armoured BearCat got within 100m of the Trains it was thudded with 30-06 (high powered ammunition) rounds shot with precision, rocking the 9.5-tonne vehicle and forcing a retreat.

Patchy communications meant the operatives had to improvise.

Negotiators used Microsoft Teams to talk with commanders and the Polair helicopter crews sent screenshots of the incident as it unfolded in the absence of their usual live feed.

INFORMATION TO THE PUBLIC

Alan Dare and Victor Lewis lived close to the Trains’ property on their own 100-acre bush blocks.

On the afternoon of the massacre, Alan and his wife Kerry spotted smoke coming from the area around Wains Rd.

Mrs Dare made a call to Triple-0, telling the operator they could see smoke and had heard gunshots for about an hour, as well as several explosions.

Mrs Dare told the operator her husband had taken the car and was off to investigate, along with their neighbour Mr Lewis.

The inquest heard the operator told Mrs Dare she “absolutely advised” against that but did not provide any further information.

Mr Lewis told the inquest residents should have been warned there were active shooters at the property and said they would have stayed in their homes if told to.

But police said it’s not as simple as texting a message to residents and it would have likely taken significant time to get the warning out.