The police four-wheel-drive bounced along the narrow dirt track, an unsealed road with high embankments lined by tall gums – the perfect place for an ambush.

Police had been following the man in the silver Nissan Navara for 26 minutes, from Toowoomba town centre, along the Range with its stunning mountain views and down into the Lockyer Valley.

Ricky Maddison, an angry, violent man with an overt hatred of police, did not care for the rules - but seemed to be following one: the speed limit.

He’d been evading them for weeks. And when police finally found him, he did not run away.

He led them somewhere.

By 2.17pm on May 29, 2017, they had worked that out.

“He’s taking us somewhere,” Senior Constable Cath Nielsen said to her partner, Senior Constable Brett Forte. They were uneasy. Sen-Constable Nielsen got on her radio and asked again for the police helicopter.

Their car, with its call sign TW753, was the first of three following Maddison along Wallers Rd, a rough track through farmland on the edge of the Lockyer National Park.

Sen-Constable Forte had taken the lead because they had a 4WD.

The car’s dashcam showed just how rough the road was. It bounced and jolted as Maddison’s vehicle threw up dust.

They weren’t going fast, but most of the time they could not see the car they were following.

They saw nothing but dust. The occasional flash of silver. The black of the Navara’s back window.

Then, as the clock hits 2.18pm, the dust clears. There’s a flash of red. The Navara’s brake lights.

There’s no time to react. TW753 hits the brakes.

Maddison, in long dark pants and a sleeveless shirt, steps out. He raises a modified SKK automatic rifle and looks through the sight.

The muzzle flashes.

Sen-Constable Forte throws his 4WD into reverse and hits the accelerator.

A voice – an officer in the car behind – yells into the radio: “Automatic gunfire! Automatic gunfire! 269 urgent. Automatic gunfire! A police car has rolled!”

‘WE GET TOLD ZIP’

ON September 27, 2013, 50 Bandidos bikies roared into Broadbeach looking for a rival gang member.

The brawl that followed – in front of shocked diners at the Gold Coast restaurant strip – would lead to the introduction of the LNP government’s hardline VLAD laws and a massive police effort to stamp out crime associated with outlaw bikie gangs.

Nearly 200km away, in the regional city of Toowoomba, local police were told to form a unit to tackle local OMCG activity. In the picturesque Lockyer Valley, this meant the Life and Death gang.

Officers from the Darling Downs Tactical Crime Squad (TCS) established a unit called the Tactical Action Team (TAT).

TAT operated within the TCS, with the whole squad under the command of Senior Sergeant Scott Stahlhut.

But while the remaining TCS officers worked on traffic matters and property crime, TAT looked at higher end offences. The 20 or so members of Life and Death were their major focus.

At an inquest into the murder of TCS officer Sen-Constable Brett Forte, much was made of possible tensions between TAT and the rest of the TSC team.

Brett himself texted as much to his police officer wife, Sen-Constable Susie Forte, when she asked him how the search for fugitive Ricky Maddison was progressing.

“Who knows,” he wrote back. “I’m in the B team. We get told zip.”

THE HUNT BEGINS

RICK Charles Maddison was a local crook who had been annoying police for years. He was known for being aggressive and mouthy.

He knew bikies, his name had come up during drug raids and in 2007 he’d been heard making a serious threat towards Sen-Sgt Stahlhut (Stahlhut would tell the inquest he did not know about this until 2017).

He told people he was going to ambush the senior sergeant and other officers in a driveway.

Maddison and a mate would hide behind mulch piles and take them out with an automatic weapon.

That same year, the inquest was told Stahlhut wrote an intel report detailing information from a police informant that a man named “Rick Matterson” had possession of an automatic weapon.

Police would later identify that the informant was talking about Ricky Maddison and Maddison was raided.

They searched a wall cavity and found a pistol – but no automatic weapon.

But despite his fringe existence in criminal circles, Maddison still made close, loyal friends. One, Andrew Beveridge, had children who called Maddison “Uncle Rick” – and the two would play chess together.

By 2015, Maddison was on the police radar as a serious domestic violence offender. His former partner had accused him of pouring fuel on her. Of stabbing the headboard of the bed where she was laying.

He was charged with a raft of offences, including torture and deprivation of liberty. The charges were withdrawn after the complainant didn’t turn up to court but a domestic violence order remained in place.

Two years later, he was being accused again. This time he was said to have gone to the home of his ex partner and fired a gun in the air.

The woman spoke with police and was put in contact with Sen-Constable Susie Forte, who worked in domestic violence prevention. It had looked like an old fashioned “pirate gun”, she told Susie.

They list Maddison as a wanted person. He makes Toowoomba’s priority offender’s list. Soon he would top their most wanted.

Ethical Standards Command detective Sen-Sgt Fiona Hinshelwood would tell the inquest that it was Brett Forte who issued the arrest warrant for Maddison – after his wife brought him CCTV footage of Maddison on his ex-partner’s property.

In the following weeks, police would conduct extensive searches for Maddison. Eventually, the search for Toowoomba’s most wanted would fall to the officers in the TAT.

A list of 28 “associates” was drawn up and police would look into every one. They’d visit Maddison’s brothers, his friends. Anyone they thought might be harbouring the paranoid fugitive. Police in Toowoomba were sent “officer safety flyers” warning them Maddison was likely armed.

MACHINE GUN IN THE BUSH

ON April 17, neighbouring Gatton police embarked on an investigation of their own. Residents in the vicinity of Wallers Rd, on the fringe of the Lockyer National Park, had been reporting what they believed was a machine gun being fired in the bush.

Residents had been calling since January, with one told by the officer who answered the phone there was “no way” it was an automatic weapon they had heard.

By April, they had proof.

Gatton police Sergeant Brad Smart drove out to a resident’s property after she told him she’d recorded the noise of the gun being fired on her phone. He listened. She was right.

The old school copper printed out a map of the area – rugged farm country – and visited every house. He identified suspects – even raiding one.

At one point he approached a man who was herding cattle. The man had been on his suspect list.

“Oh, are you here about my cattle?” the man asked him.

“No,” the sergeant replied. “What’s your cattle got to do with it?”

The neighbours had been complaining about the animals on the verge, the man told him, before going on: “Are you here about the gunfire?”

The sergeant said he was.

“Automatic gunfire?” the man asked. “It’s coming from next door.”

The house next door – more of a shack used on weekends – was owned by the Byatt family.

The son, Adam Byatt, had once been a reporter at the Gatton Star.

These days, the inquest heard, he was considered an associate of the Life and Death OMCG. (Byatt would deny this in court.)

“I thought that’s who it’s going to be,” Sgt Smart told the court.

“He’s up there fooling around.”

On May 17, Sgt Smart went back to Wallers Rd. This time, he brought a camera that he hid on a neighbouring property.

The plan was to leave it there for two weeks.

Maybe they’d see who was coming and going from the Byatt place.

LUCKY COINCIDENCE

MAY 17 – the day a camera was put on Wallers Rd – was the same day TAT were tasked as the primary unit searching for Maddison.

It was about then that Sen-Sgt Stahlhut made a call that would put the fugitive on the radar of the elite Special Emergency Response Team.

The very next day, there was more police activity on Wallers Rd.

Sen-Constable Andre Thaler, a TAT officer, drove down the remote track on the edge of the national park to go for a bushwalk on his day off.

He wasn’t, he told the inquest, looking for Maddison. Nor did he know about reports of automatic gunfire. His presence there was a coincidence. But he didn’t drive into the national park, telling the court the road was too steep and difficult.

Instead, he parked near the Byatt property, saying he had planned to walk the rest of the way.

The off-duty officer, who was accused during the inquest of entering properties without permission, of being a bit “loose” on the job (he and other officers adamantly denied these claims) got out with his police QLiTE device (a small device that accesses the police information system) and a pair of binoculars.

He walked past the gate (and its sign “Smile, you’re on camera, trespassers will be prosecuted”) and heard a car idling behind him.

The car approached. The driver, a big, bearded man, stared at Sen-Constable Thaler.

He asked who he was. What he was doing.

“There’s hillbillies on these hills, mate,” the man said, warning him to stay off his property. “I wouldn’t want to see anything happen to you.”

Sen-Constable Thaler took note of the man’s numberplate.

He left without going for his walk. Later, he would determine the man was Adam Byatt.

“I was suspicious of him,” he told the inquest. “I was suspicious of what was going on at that property.”

Byatt wasn’t sure who Sen-Constable Thaler was. He took a photo of him with his phone and texted it to the man who’d been crashing at his shack. Ricky Maddison.

Of all the bushland around Toowoomba’s vast national parks, Sen-Constable Thaler had miraculously ended up right at the gate of the very place police were seeking.

An area of bush where a machine gun had been heard firing for months, where police had been conducting inquiries the officer knew nothing about.

Sen-Constable Thaler had been standing outside the hideout of their most wanted man.

TACTICAL RESPONSE

ON the weekend of May 20-21, elite SERT officers arrived in town to search a property at Murphys Creek for Maddison at the request of Toowoomba Sergeant Peter Jenkins. Sgt Jenkins had been called back from leave by Sen-Sgt Stahlhut to write up the request to the specialist unit.

The property belonged to Maddison’s ex-girlfriend. He wasn’t there. Nor was he at a series of other properties they went to that weekend.

PERSON OF INTEREST

SGT Smart planned to leave the camera at Wallers Rd for two weeks. It had an SD card that he planned to replace with a fresh one at some stage.

In the meantime, he searched the police QPrime database for anything on Byatt. On May 22, he spotted an update – an intel report logged by Sen-Constable Thaler four days earlier, written after he returned from the bushwalk he never took.

He described concerning behaviour from a man who confronted him on the road: Byatt. The sergeant typed out an email to Sen-Constable Thaler as a courtesy. An FYI.

Byatt was a suspect in reports of machine gunfire in the vicinity of Wallers Rd. He’d installed a covert camera to monitor the property.

Sen-Constable Thaler forwarded the email to his boss, Sen-Sgt Stahlhut, former TAT Sergeant Peter Jenkins and TAT Sergeant Dan Curtin.

At the inquest, when asked why TAT officers never told their TSC colleagues about Wallers Rd, Sgt Jenkins would say he did not notice that email for months.

Sen-Sgt Stahlhut responded to Sgt Smart: “Have been very interested in Byatt for some time. Keen to work with you in this regard.”

Sgt Smart replied to Sen-Constable Thaler: “The fact that they are using an automatic weapon may be the reason for the interest in you.”

Sen-Constable Thaler, known as a local expert on Life and Death OMCG members, responded that he was aware of Byatt’s links to the club.

THE FIRST SOLID CLUE

TWO days later, police who had been searching for Maddison for weeks, got their first solid clue that he was still in the area. Bank records showed he’d stopped in at the BP at College View where he’d bought a small amount of fuel in a jerry can and three bags of ice. The service station had caught the fugitive on CCTV.

The shopping trip told them a few things: Maddison was driving a silver, dual cab Nissan Navara. The small amount of fuel meant he was likely staying close by. As did the purchase of ice without an Esky.

That same day he called Toowoomba Police Station from a pay phone. He got Sen-Constable Cath Nielsen and demanded to know what police had on him. By this point, Maddison was living a sad, lonely existence. He had no money and couldn’t see friends or family for fear of being caught. And he blamed police for all of it.

NATIONAL PARK SEARCH

THE following day – May 25 – Sen-Constable Thaler, Sgt Curtin and two others searched a section of Lockyer National Park for signs of Maddison. They carried a rifle in the car.

Sen-Constable Thaler, in his evidence to the inquest, insisted he never linked Maddison to reports of automatic gunfire in the area.

But he said they talked about it. While driving through the park – the park that bordered Byatt’s property – Sen-Constable Thaler said he mentioned the gunfire to his colleagues.

They were “quite some distance” from the Byatt property, he said, but he told them nonetheless.

HIDDEN CAMERA FOUND

ON May 26, Sgt Smart drove back to Wallers Rd to put a fresh SD card in his hidden camera. He told the inquest that when he arrived, there was a car parked at the place where he’d hidden it. A man stood beside the car.

Sgt Smart decided to come back and try again later. When he did, the man was gone but the car remained. The officer left. He would get his camera another day, he decided.

He did not give the inquest a description of the man or the vehicle, but the court had earlier been told Maddison found the camera. He took it, downloaded the footage, and repositioned it. Was it Maddison the officer had seen that day?

CONVERSING WITH A KILLER

THREE days later, a phone call came through to the station. It was Brett Forte who picked up, sharing a brief conversation with the man who would murder him an hour later.

It was the call they’d been waiting for. Having failed to find Maddison, they’d come up with a plan to find him at a pay phone should he call again.

Brett transferred the call to Sgt Jenkins, who planned to keep Maddison on the line as long as possible.

In the Toowoomba communications room, Sgt Ian Douglas was just signing on for his afternoon shift as the district’s communications co-ordinator, or “COMCO”. He jumped in, sending out every available car to search pay phones for Maddison.

On the phone, Maddison was abusing Sgt Jenkins. “Why the f... would I come in and talk when youse don’t listen?” he yelled. “Youse know you’ve f...ing mentally, financially f...ing ruined and broken me and I don’t have anywhere f...ing else to turn.”

“Well, Ricky,” the sergeant said, “I don’t know why you’re blaming us.”

“All you’re trying to do is get me to come in so youse can lock me up,” Maddison continued. “Why can’t you just say it instead of f...ing around?”

After 30 minutes, Maddison had had enough. He abruptly hung up.

“F…,” the sergeant said.

Seconds later, a patrol car spotted the Navara on Mary St, Toowoomba.

‘HE’S TAKING US SOMEWHERE’

At 1.52pm on May 29, 2017, police vehicle TW208 began following Maddison’s Navara. Initially they just followed him. After a few blocks they attempted an intercept. They turned on lights and sirens. Maddison ignored them.

“He’s doing about 60 kays,” an officer said. “Are we able to pursue him?”

They are asked to justify the pursuit. Maddison is wanted for serious crimes. He is not driving dangerously, the officer said.

At 1.56pm, the pursuit was authorised by the COMCO.

Maddison led them out of town and on to the Toowoomba Range, at one point pulling on to the right verge before veering back on to the road.

Was he planning to stop and take out his rifle? Would he have sprayed automatic gunfire across the Range?

He led them on to the Warrego Hwy. They call for the police helicopter. He stuck mostly to the speed limit. He swerved around road spikes waiting police threw into his path.

Then, he swerved off the road.

Back in Toowoomba, police had run into the communications centre to see the pursuit unfold.

One of them was Sgt Jenkins, who a week earlier had been sent an email about automatic gunfire on Wallers Rd. He had not read that email, according to his testimony given at the inquest.

So when three police cars followed Maddison down that dirt road, towards the Byatt property, towards an ambush, none of them knew that for weeks an investigation had been under way into reports of machine gun fire in the bush.

None of them knew – and nobody told them.

At the front of the police convoy, Sen-Constable Nielsen turned to her partner, Sen-Constable Brett Forte.

“He’s taking us somewhere,” she said.

Seconds later, a machine gun fired.

FINAL ACT OF HEROISM

BRETT Forte tried to save them. He reversed, hit the embankment and rolled the car on to its side.

He’d been shot twice.

Sen-Constable Nielsen, trapped on the high side of the car, screamed into the radio.

“Urgent, urgent urgent,” she said.

Then: “Can someone help? We need help here. We are sitting ducks. Fortie’s injured. There’s blood. We need a hand here.”

Sen-Constable Nielsen didn’t realise until later that the car behind her had rolled as well, attempting to reverse out of the narrow road with its steep embankments.

She freed herself and began hitting the windscreen, desperate to free her partner.

She bashed it again and again, taking an eternity to smash a hole big enough to drag him out. The whole time, the machine gun sprayed bullets into the bush behind her.

Together, she and her fellow officers dragged him out and to safety. They tried to save him. But as she dragged Brett out of the car, she saw that he’d already stopped bleeding.

NO SURRENDER

MADDISON held SERT officers at bay at the Byatt shack for 20 hours, firing into the bush, at the hovering helicopter, at the BombCat robot.

They asked him to surrender at least 85 times.

Then he ran at them, firing.

They took him out.

TRAGIC DISCONNENT

TWO weeks into the inquest into Sen-Constable Forte’s murder – and the death of paranoid gunman Ricky Maddison – a tragic narrative has formed.

Until the day of Brett Forte’s funeral – where thousands of police formed a guard of honour that stretched nearly a kilometre – police in Toowoomba grieved together.

Friends, family and off-duty police were in and out of the station. It was a place of comfort.

Then, as time went on, things changed.

Sen-Constable Cath Nielsen ­started to ask questions. So did Sen-Constable Susie Forte, Brett’s grieving widow.

Who had known about the automatic weapon fire on Wallers Rd? Why hadn’t they been warned?

Giving evidence in court this week, Sen-Constable Nielsen testified she had been lied to, threatened with police complaints and had even had her gun taken away “for asking questions”.

“My time (at work) in July and August was terrible,” she told the court. “I don’t know how I didn’t unravel. It got so bad, I knew I had to leave – which I didn’t want to.

“That office was my connection to Bretty, my connection to my work friends that loved me and had my back and I had their back.

“I had done nothing wrong.”

Barrister David Funch, representing Susie Forte, painted a picture of an “A team” who would not share information with their colleagues.

He asked the officers who had known about the automatic gunfire whether they would have wanted that information as they drove down Wallers Rd in pursuit of Maddison.

He suggested some officers had even blamed Susie for her husband’s death because of her role in the domestic violence matters.

All his claims were denied by the officers involved.

The inquest heard details of two separate investigations that never aligned, where police were unable to connect the two until the tragic death of one of their own.

In days of tense and often extraordinary testimony, police officers once united in grief are now accusing each other of lying, with each in turn denying that allegation.

“Brett Forte’s death cannot be in vain,” an emotional Sen-Constable Nielsen told the inquest.

“We have to change cultures.

“We have to do better because this cannot happen again.”

The inquest continues.