Wieambilla inquest day 10: Expert forensic psychiatrist says Train trio were most likely delusional
A trio of cop killers would have most likely been found to be delusional and referred to the mental health court had they survived.
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An expert forensic psychiatrist says it is possible Gareth Train’s delusional system was fully formed around a time a meeting in January 2021 that he and Nathaniel referred to as “church”.
The Wieambilla inquest is examining the murders of police constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold and local resident Alan Dare, as well as the shooting deaths of Gareth, Nathaniel and Stacey Train.
The horror attack on police unfolded within two minutes of four officers arriving at the Trains’ Wieambilla bush block on December 12, 2022 to ask after former school principal Nathaniel Train, who had been reported missing in New South Wales.
The Wains Rd property belonged to Nathaniel’s brother Gareth and his wife Stacey, although Stacey had previously been married to Nathaniel.
Constables McCrow and Arnold were fatally shot with high-powered rifles fired from sniper hides as the four police walked down the dirt driveway.
Constables Keely Brough and Randall Kirk managed to escape, with Constable Brough hiding in grass eight inches high as the Train brothers hunted her and lit fires to flush her out.
The Trains also shot and killed their neighbour Mr Dare when he saw smoke coming from their property and came to investigate.
All three were killed by operatives from the Special Emergency Response Team following a lengthy shootout.
Dr Andrew Aboud, clinical director of Prison Mental Health Service and a consultant forensic psychiatrist, told an inquest that it was possible Gareth Train’s delusional system was fully formed around a time a meeting in January 2021 that he and Nathaniel referred to as “church”.
The would be cop killer’s “church” reference was to his brother Nathaniel staying with him and his wife Stacey for one night.
At a later point Gareth later texted Nathaniel: “As I have been saying for years and in our talk in January when we talked down here this is all Satan’s mind f*** game and the choice is a free will one”.
Dr Aboud said he believed the conversation between the trio had to be in person because Gareth did not want to communicate on the phone, most likely because of his paranoid suspicions he was being monitored.
He said it was most likely it was then that Gareth revealed the “grand opus and how everything came together”.
“World events, weather events, the worsening situation of the world, the various paranoid beliefs about ASIO monitoring, hacking, poisoning, chemtrails, people being abducted, being turned into non-humans, human beings wearing meat suits, police and authority figures being agents of evil,” Dr Aboud said.
Dr Aboud said Stacey mentioned some of this in her diary and also made a calculation for when the second coming of Christ was likely to occur in 2023.
“I would say give it a month either side it is probably around April 23, it might be a bit later,” he said.
“That revelation seems to have then influenced all three of them in the direction they were heading in, which was, to get to that date and be part of the second coming of Christ and reach religious salvation.”
Dr Aboud said Stacey appeared to be completely normal in 2016. But in 2021 she resigned because she didn’t want to get the vaccine, also sharing Gareth’s view and telling people it was something that should be avoided.
In early 2022 Stacey texted a friend: “I don’t want to freak you out but I am not joking when I say Gareth and I are both being monitored by ASIO. For example our text messages and emails routinely disappear and later come back.”
Stacey went on to mention “Raytheon” in the message and said there had been a Learjet flying “really low and repeatedly”.
“I know it sounds nuts but it’s true,” she wrote.
A month later she texted the same friend referencing the vaccination, corrupt criminal government, injecting children with experimental gene therapies, Antarctica falling into the ocean, bleaching of Great Barrier Reef and that World War 3 was “due any minute”.
Dr Aboud said that it was reasonable to say that by early 2022 Stacey was “fully immersed in Gareth’s beliefs”.
“The chances that she independently developed a psychotic disorder as a primary psychotic illness that happened to have exactly the same symptoms as Gareth is almost impossible to believe,” he said.
“For her to have exactly the same beliefs means that there has to be a connection between the two of them.
“And the most likely connection is she was developing a psychotic illness as a secondary to her husband who was the primary.
“Perfectly and classically fitting the description of Folie a deux in this case, at that point it’s two.
“They were isolated, they had a very close relationship, she had a typical vulnerability factor on being dependent on him and she was also suffering from some anxiety and possibly some depression that might have been related to just her beliefs about the state of the world,” he said.
“So Gareth may have told her things that made her feel anxious about the future of the world. So I think she was highly vulnerable and I can’t think of another explanation that would be able to properly describe how she came to have exactly the same symptoms.”
POSSIBLE TRIGGER
Dr Aboud said when police attended the Trains’ property in August 2022 it may have been a trigger for the trio to start fortifying the property.
He said Nathaniel hadn’t immediately lived with Gareth and Stacey after crossing the border in December 2021 to ensure they weren’t apprehended or tracked to the property.
Nathaniel moved into the Wains Rd property in about May 2022, he said, confident that months had passed and that he could safely live with them after escaping authorities.
Dr Aboud said the trio was focused on getting to the salvation date before the August police visit at the gate where a calling card was left.
“They were now having to go into a state of high alert,” he said
“We do not know exactly when they started to fortify their property.
“What we do know is the property was probably completed fortified in October 2022.”
Dr Aboud said at that point they became irritated and annoyed at police interest and that Nathaniel could be taken away and not reach salvation but be “forced, subjugated and turned into a non-human or something worse”.
“It wasn’t just about Nathaniel’s welfare, it was about theirs too,” he said.
The inquest was told that on December 10, two days before they ambushed police, Stacey wrote a message online in relation to one of Gareth’s videos.
The video was posted by user Jane, Stacey’s middle name, in which she referred to Daniel which is Gareth’s middle name.
“After dealing with covert agents and tactics for sometime now, Daniel believes that should they choose to cross the rubicon with public state actors our Father is giving us a clear sign. Monsters and their heads will soon be parted,” the message said.
Dr Aboud said the trio had named their front gate “the Rubicon”, in a reference to Julius Caesar pausing with his army at the banks of the Rubicon river in Italy where he said the “die is cast”, or essentially that he was at a “point of no return”.
“The first possibility is it means that we will now have to fight to the death because to be apprehended by the police would be a fate worse than death,” Dr Aboud said of Stacey’s message and one of their possible beliefs relating to someone crossing the front gate.
“We would be subjugated, drugged, turn into non-humans.”
Dr Aboud said the other possibility was that the trio believed that if somebody crossed the gate it would be heading for the second coming of Christ and it was the last day on Earth.
“This becomes terribly ominous because Gareth has led Stacey and Nathaniel to believe that if somebody crosses that gate, the Father has made a decision about what they now must do,” he said.
In another message Stacey wrote a comment on December 12 on the video “they have crossed the rubicon”.
NATHANIEL’S CARDIAC ARREST
Dr Aboud said he personally believed all three Trains were “fully deluded” at the beginning of 2021 following the “church” meeting.
“I can’t be sure that Nathaniel was fully on that delusional journey at that point but I suspect he may have been,” he said.
Dr Aboud said it seemed Nathaniel had been an “impressive individual” who excelled in his teaching career.
He said his vulnerabilities may have been his loyalty to his brother, his “significant empathy” towards others and his rigidity within his beliefs.
The inquest heard that while working as a school principal in regional NSW, Nathaniel began to have issues with the state’s education system and believed a teacher had been assisting a particular student to achieve high scores in a NAPLAN test.
Dr Aboud said by late 2020, the communication from Gareth to his brother began to increase.
“And I believe that Nathaniel started to allow those beliefs (of Gareth’s) to be things that he was not rejecting of,” he said.
“Nathaniel seems to accept these increasing statements that are essentially reflective of the paranoid beliefs and the religious beliefs.”
He said in August 2021, a “significant event” occurred when Nathaniel suffered a cardiac arrest at work.
“He was resuscitated in his own office and was taken to hospital,” Dr Aboud said.
“Left untreated he would not have survived.”
Dr Aboud said Nathaniel was left with only 20 per cent cardiac function and woke up with little memory of what had happened.
He told the inquest he had listened to a recorded phone conversation between Nathaniel in his hospital bed and Gareth and Stacey.
He said the conversation referenced the “church” meeting, as well as a poem from the film The Grey.
“It’s a kind of clarion call poem - it’s a call to arms … live and die on this day,” Dr Aboud said.
During the call, Gareth warned his brother not to take medication and not to have a “monkey heart” put in him.
“For me, the cardiac arrest is significant because it’s a life event … it would have seismically shifted Nathaniel’s confidence in himself,” he said.
Dr Aboud said Nathaniel, who had previously had a good relationship with police, spoke to his brother about having dreams of “going hand-to-hand” with them.
“There had been a significant shift in Nathaniel’s mindset and that shift had occurred before the cardiac arrest and in fact reflected something that had been growing potentially since late 2020,” he said.
He aid Nathaniel refused to take medication that would help his heart condition, refused surgery and did not want a pacemaker type device installed.
INSIDE THE TRAINS’ RELATIONSHIP
Dr Aboud said Gareth applied to join the Australian Defence Force and was “negative about it” after being knocked back.
He said he was possessive and controlling in his relationship with both Nathaniel and Stacey.
“And it would seem that neither of those individuals saw it in the same way,” Dr Aboud said.
“Nathaniel was incredibly accepting and supporting and protective of his older brother.
“Stacey did not appear to be particularly troubled by what other people could objectively see which was how controlling and domineering Gareth could be with her.”
Dr Aboud said Nathaniel and Stacey met as teenagers and then went to the breakaway church set up by Nathaniel’s father Ron.
He said Stacey became rebellious at the time, despite her father wanting her to focus on study, and became more under the influence of Nathaniel.
The two married in 1995 he said and the two moved out.
Gareth moved in with Nathaniel and Stacey after they had children, possibly because he was struggling emotionally and psychologically at the time, Dr Aboud said.
“But shortly after that people that had observed the relationships became concerned about the amount of intensive time that Gareth was spending with Stacey,” he said.
Gareth, who moved in around 1998-99 then began an intimate relationship with Stacey. Nathaniel and Stacey divorced in 2000 and Gareth married her the following year, he said.
Dr Aboud said Nathaniel initially struggled but later became supportive of the marriage and continued to see his children. Nathaniel would visit annually he said.
“I think the nature of their relationship at first pass seems really quite odd but one has to understand all three to understand what this relationship really was,” he said.
“Stacey also had a significant part to play.”
Dr Aboud said that while Stacey was highly intelligent and well-liked, she was someone who had “dependant personality traits” that started in her relationship with her father who was a strong dominant man who had expectations of his daughter that she would do the best for herself.
He said that dependency then transferred to Nathaniel and then on to Gareth.
GARETH BECAME FULLY DELUSIONAL
Dr Aboud told the inquest that at some point Gareth Train’s delusions changed from conspiracy theories about the moon landing and Port Arthur massacre to more personal, persecutory delusions.
Dr Aboud said a delusion was a belief held with “absolute conviction” by the subject and could not be changed by appeal to reason or contradictory evidence.
He said there were different types of delusions including persecutory delusions which were most relevant to the Trains.
“The individual who is experiencing it believes it is absolutely true and cannot tell the difference between that false belief and the other beliefs that may be in fact true,” he said.
“It’s only a third party that can make an appraisal that what that person is talking about is fundamentally untrue.
“Very importantly there is a referential nature to their beliefs. That means that there is something very personal about it.”
Dr Aboud said there were non-bizarre delusions which could seem possible - such as a spouse cheating on them - and bizarre delusions.
A bizarre delusion was more readily obvious to be fake he said, referencing one of Gareth’s delusions.
“It is bizarre to believe that there is biochemical neurological weapons designed to infect masses of people - including personally yourself - being dropped by planes through chemtrails in order to subjugate individuals as part of an ASIO controlled plan that also incorporates Learjets flying overhead to the point where you would actually shoot at those Learjets,” he said.
“That delusion was held by all three but led by Gareth.”
Dr Aboud said a person who had delusions had no cognitive deficit and the onset was when they were aged 35-45.
“It very gradually overtakes the individual,” he said.
“And that insidious progression means it is not so noticeable to people around them that they are progressing and developing ever more beliefs that ultimately become delusional.”
Dr Aboud said if the nature of the delusion was not impacting the person - who could be driving a car, working, shopping or cooking - it would not be noticeable and they would appear normal.
“Except in the area that is touched upon by the delusional belief and then they would be behaving completely abnormally,” Dr Aboud said.
“In the Trains’ case persecutory beliefs of a delusional intensity and religious beliefs of a delusional intensity.”
He said the disorder had a gradual onset where one or more delusions slowly elaborate into a “coherent and seemingly logically interconnected system”.
“In the case of the Trains, this became the impact of Covid, the meaning of Covid, its vaccinations and the issues related to their religious beliefs, and how that all made sense in terms of a second coming of Christ, Premillennialism-type belief system,” Dr Aboud said.
Dr Aboud said the primary diagnosis for Gareth was the persecutory subtype.
“It’s highly self-referential,” he said of the persecutory belief system.
“They are starting to see all these things very much relating to them and their lives and they think it’s about them. And it usually involves feeling they are being conspired against, watched, followed, monitored, phone calls listened to and incorporating mistrust of government authorities and also sometimes the police.
“And even leading to a desire to move to a different part of the country, only to believe that
their persecutors have found them and it’s all started again.”
ABUSE CLAIMS
Dr Aboud said Gareth had a “victim mentality” and he believed this began to be the case for Nathaniel and Stacey.
He said in the late 1990s, the trio began to make at times bizarre and unfounded allegations that they’d been subjected to sexual abuse as children.
For Stacey, this related to a man known to her family who had been accused of sexually abusing females.
He said she began to believe she too had been abused.
”There was no evidence that she was subjected to that abuse,” Dr Aboud said.
He said as she became closer to Gareth, she began to believe there might have been something inappropriate about her relationship with another man she knew.
”This was not at all supported (by evidence),” Dr Aboud said.
“It did place her as an individual who was starting to see herself as somebody who may have been in some way victimised.”
He said Gareth and Nathaniel also began making allegations of abuse, including “bizarre” accusations that they’d been drugged and abused by many people.
Dr Aboud said some of the allegations they spoke about with family members, who did not believe them.
“All three are saying incredibly vitriolic and accusatory things,” he said.
“It seems there is a complete lack of any factual or material evidence that any of that had taken place.
“And crucially this was not something that Nathaniel and Gareth had been talking about before.”
The inquest heard that one relative told Gareth the allegations were incredibly serious and that if he had any proof, he needed to produce it.
“At that time, Gareth offers up his proof. Gareth simply says, God told me,” Dr Aboud said.
He said this caused a major rift between Nathaniel, Gareth, Stacey and their families and that Nathaniel and Gareth never spoke to their parents again and had little to do with their siblings.
OBSESSION WITH CIA, MISSILE COMPANY
While at Wieambilla, Dr Aboud said Gareth became more and more preoccupied with conspiracy theories.
He said Gareth became fixated on Project MKUltra, an illegal program conducted by the CIA in which drugs were used during interrogations to weaken people and force confessions.
The program ran between the 1950s and 1970s.
Dr Aboud said Gareth then became obsessed with a company called Raythoen Technology, the world’s largest producer of missiles.
He said Gareth came to incorrectly believe the company was producing bio weapons and that bio weapons were being dropped from crop dusters to change people from human into non-human.
Dr Aboud said he soon incorporated Covid into his delusions and believed that bio-weapons were being used to mass vaccinate the population, changing people into non-humans.
“By now he and Stacey are very keen to discourage their children and others from having covid vaccinations … what they believe is that there is a battle going on between good and evil in the heavens and this is all written about in Stacey’s diary,” he said.
Dr Aboud said Gareth then became convinced that planes flying overhead were “Raytheon Learjets” and that they were monitoring and conducting surveillance on him.
“By now they are keeping their telephones in a tinfoil-lined box,” Dr Aboud said.
“They are being monitored … there are secret societies at play.
“(Gareth) is even shooting at those planes and videos himself on a number of occasions shooting at the planes.”
MOMENT GARETH’S PARANOIA CHANGED
Dr Aboud said he believed Gareth Train also had a paranoid personality disorder.
“In my view he was longstandingly paranoid and there is a point in time where his overvalued paranoid beliefs - such as the moon landing, false flag incident at Port Arthur - started to change into something that was far more focused, personalised, preoccupying him and taking over his life,” he said.
“And that’s the point at which I believe he became fully delusional. It’s hard to pinpoint but I think the closest one might come to was in and around the time when the property at 251 Wains Rd was purchased and moved to, around 2014-2016.”
“After which, Gareth was very much preoccupied with his research on the internet which was all designed to support his different persecutory beliefs,” he said.
Dr Aboud said psychiatric delusions were not contagious, but rather, the others succumbed over time because of their own vulnerabilities, the closeness of their relationship and their isolation from the rest of society.
He said he believed Stacey succumbed first and then Nathaniel “much later”.
He said delusional disorders were much harder to diagnose than illnesses such as schizophrenia because the person appears organised and their thinking structured.
“The treatment is still very much the same as that for a standard psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia,” Dr Aboud said.
He said he believed the shared condition - referred to as Folie a Trois or “the insanity of three” - could be more common than health professionals realised.
Dr Aboud said Gareth then became “very much preoccupied on his research on the internet that was all designed to support his different persecutory beliefs”.
PREMATURE BIRTH THEORY
Dr Aboud said Gareth’s premature birth could have resulted in a mild acquired brain injury that affected various aspects of his personality.
He said he developed very differently from his three siblings, was more prone to anger, had difficulties at school and had emotional and behavioural problems as a little boy.
“Nathaniel was younger and was far more proficient at everything,” Dr Aboud said.
“Nathaniel was a rather gifted child and Gareth was not.”
Dr Aboud said Gareth had a couple of brief relationships with girls but they did not last long because of his “unusual” behaviour.
He said the girls broke things off when Gareth suggested they “might engage in some sort of suicide pact”.
“They backed off and didn’t want too much more to do with him,” Dr Aboud said.
Gareth soon developed an interest in guns and bodybuilding, as well as a growing interest in military tactics.
He amassed a large collection of magazines and became an avid reader, learning much about ancient history and modern history.
“He quite liked to be a person who knew everything and would tell people about all these things that he knew,” Dr Aboud said.
“I do see them (his interests) as compensatory for a man who was in fact feeling quite inadequate.”
He said by his early 20s, Gareth had become interested in conspiracy theories but still was able to be reflective about them.
He said those who knew Gareth described him as guarded, distrustful, prone to anger and offence and someone who would bear grudges.
He said he believed Gareth formed a paranoid personality disorder with some narcissistic traits.
”He started to behave as though he saw himself as superior to other people. He was quite ego-centric,” Dr Aboud said.
TRAINS HAD NO INTENTION OF BEING APPREHENDED
Dr Aboud told the inquest the Trains would have most likely been found to be delusional and referred to the mental health court had they survived the Wieambilla massacre.
The clinical director of Prison Mental Health Service and a consultant forensic psychiatrist, said he formed the view after reviewing a large amount of evidence including witness statements, vision and photographs of the shootings, electronic devices, thousands of text messages and conducting interviews and visiting the property where the incident occurred.
Dr Aboud said he believed all three Trains were suffering from a shared psychiatric disorder, with Gareth the primary and Stacey and Nathaniel secondaries.
“The caveat to that was it was underpinned by their delusional thinking and their intentions at that time was not to be apprehended by police, believing that would be a fate worse than death - and in fact worse than anything they could possibly have imagined,” he said.
“They were not intending to be apprehended alive.”
He said it was hard for him to say ultimately whether they would ever have had a plan to flee the property but believed it was not as likely as “death by cop”.
“I think on balance from when the police entered their property, they were most likely not going to seek to flee,” Dr Aboud said.
He said the only argument against that was the Trains belief that a date in January 2023 was when they believed they “would reach religious salvation through the second coming of Christ”.
Dr Aboud said had they survived, he believes Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacey would have been found to be of unsound mind.
“I think it’s highly likely the assessments that would have taken place … would have supported findings of unsound mind for all three,” he said.
“But I cannot know if that’s how it would have eventuated.”
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