They didn’t see where the shot came from, but the crack of the rifle was loud and beside her, Constable Matthew Arnold dropped to the ground.

The dirt driveway was long, and the trees ahead thick but to their left and right the cover was far and sparse.

Constable Rachel McCrow dropped to her hands and knees, aiming for the treeline to her left. But ahead of her, a gunman angled the barrel of his rifle and lined her up in the scope.

She grabbed her police radio and tried to call for help.

A second shot rang out. This one hit her in the back. The third and fourth shots hit her lower right leg and upper left – the latter severing her femoral artery.

Regardless of what happened next, Rachel would not survive for more than a few minutes.

She must have known this. The camera she wore on her vest would record her last words.

“I love you”, she recorded over and over for her family.

As she bled from the wound to her leg, she spoke words that she knew would be left for her colleagues to find.

She told whoever would find her body that they’d been attacked by a gunman. And then she said a man was coming towards her.

As Gareth Train walked towards her, a rifle in his hands, Rachel lifted her police-issued Glock and pulled the trigger.

She’d empty all 15 rounds, her finger pressing the trigger over and over – even after the magazine was spent.

And then Gareth was standing above her. She pleaded with him to spare her life, this young, beautiful police officer with the megawatt smile, who’d been so excited to become the local school’s “adopt-a-cop”.

He lifted his rifle and fired.

Three people would be murdered that day. Three families shattered, heartbroken, who say this should never happen again.

CHAPTER ONE

The Trains

Gareth Train was possessive, aggressive, and always right. As a young man, he’d had few relationships. The girls he did manage to woo, he soon scared away with bizarre proposals of suicide pacts.

He was one of four children to Ronald and Gwyneth Train, brought up in a conservative Christian family. But he was different from the others. He was quick to anger and had trouble at school. He was guarded, distrustful and had an overinflated sense of his own intelligence.

But despite his underwhelming intellect, Gareth was an avid reader. He amassed a large collection of magazines and read up on ancient and modern history.

He developed an interest in guns and bodybuilding and became obsessed with learning about military tactics.

His younger brother Nathaniel, on the other hand, was smart and talented. He was a gifted tennis player and made friends easily.

Their father, Ronald, raised his boys with religion. He was a Baptist minister who fell out with his congregation. But undeterred, he started his own church and recruited followers.

Stacey Christoffel and her family joined Ronald’s church when she was a teenager. She was highly intelligent and very close to her father, a strong, dominant type who wanted his daughter to focus and excel in her studies.

And while she would graduate as dux of Harristown High School, she was spending more and more time with Nathaniel and Gareth.

Stacey’s interest in Nathaniel soon turned romantic, and in 1995, Ronald married the young couple at the Toowoomba Baptist Church. Gareth stood beside them as his brother’s best man.

The married couple both studied to become teachers while Gareth, still obsessed with military tactics, applied to join the Australian Defence Force. His application was rejected.

By his early 20s, Gareth’s “research” habits had broadened to reading about conspiracy theories. But he could still be swayed back to logic.

By the late 1990s, Nathaniel and Stacey had a home and two young children – a daughter Madelyn and son Aidan.

When the children were young, Gareth moved in.

The three adults were close, very close, and when Gareth began fixating on allegations of sexual abuse, they listened. Gareth believed he’d been the victim of abuse as a child.

They believed him. Nathaniel would even come to believe he’d been spared abuse himself because Gareth had “distracted” the particular predator.

Soon Nathaniel and Stacey started to believe that they too had been victims, the trio becoming more and more convinced and their allegations increasingly bizarre.

There was a man known to Stacey’s family who had abused women. Stacey came to believe he’d abused her too.

Then the brothers claimed they’d been drugged and abused by many people during their childhood.

They finally made the claims publicly, at a family gathering. A relative challenged Gareth, asking him for proof.

“God told me,” Gareth replied.

Gareth and Stacey soon began spending a lot of time together. In 2000, Nathaniel and Stacey divorced. The following year, Stacey married Gareth. He took on the role of father to the children.

Nathaniel was unhappy at first but eventually gave his support. He would visit his children and at times lived with the happy couple.

But by the mid-2000s, Nathaniel had finished his studies and took a job as a junior teacher. He started dating again. It was time to move on.

He took placements around Queensland before settling in regional NSW where he was employed as a school principal.

Meanwhile, Gareth returned to his anti-government and anti-establishment conspiracy theories.

He needed to get away from the world. In 2015, he and Stacey found a large bush block in the tiny town of Wieambilla, 300km west of Brisbane.

They paid $95,000 for a two-bedroom house on 43 hectares, set back hundreds of metres from the road.

All of the properties in the area were similar – large blocks where the only time you’d hear your neighbour was if they started up loud machinery. Or if they fired a gun.

Stacey eventually took a job at the local Tara State College as head of curriculum. Gareth, who had various jobs with the department of education, quit in May 2016.

Alone all day on a remote bush block, he spent more and more time on the computer conducting “research”.

And then Covid hit.

READ CHAPTER II: TAKE ME TO CHURCH