Andrew Rule: Victoria Police needed hunting dogs earlier in its hunt for cop killer Dezi Freeman
The search for Dezi Freeman is entering its third month, with police supposedly turning their sights interstate — but there’s a way the force could have hit the ground running in their hunt just hours after the shocking murders took place.
Helicopters are great for whipping across the state or Bass Strait for a conference. Not so good for finding lost people and fugitives.
Police horses and “general purpose” attack dogs are great for snaring public relations pictures, facing rioters and chewing burglars into burger meat. Great biters, not so good at finding lost people and fugitives.
Search and rescue police are wonderful at rappelling down cliffs and mineshafts. Not so hot at finding lost people and fugitives.
The police special operations group is world class at taking down a dangerous fugitive with deadly efficiency. But finding the fugitive to begin with, that’s a different matter, as the fruitless multimillion-dollar hunt for police killer Dezi Freeman has shown for eight weeks.
While the search for the man who shot two officers dead at Porepunkah ends its second month, police are supposedly turning their sights interstate — implying they suspect Freeman is alive.
Whether that’s a genuine conviction is debatable, but it is certainly a way to stir up a flurry of telephone “chatter” among the network of people known to Freeman.
If, by chance, he is still alive and someone knows that, they might let something slip on a telephone. The ways in which Freeman could conceivably have escaped from the search area is a subject for another time.
Modern investigators are brilliant at electronic surveillance, as shown by the proof assembled to convict the killers in both the mushroom case and the Wonnangatta campers case.
What they are not brilliant at, especially in Victoria, is tracking people in the bush using methods as old as time. One reason for that, arguably the main reason, is that they do not have man’s best friend on the team.
The fact the police have eventually borrowed cadaver dogs from interstate to search for Freeman’s body is a silent admission of the obvious fact that trained animals are several thousand times better than humans at sniffing out a particular target.
Calling on cadaver dogs this month was smart but arguably weeks overdue. Just as it was when interstate dogs trained to detect electronics (as in mobile phones, iPads and USB sticks) were eventually borrowed to investigate both the Erin Patterson mushroom murders and the sinister disappearance of Ballarat mother Samantha Murphy last year.
In both cases, the visiting dogs did a great job, leading police to Patterson’s hidden devices in South Gippsland and to Samantha Murphy’s mobile phone in a farm dam near Ballarat — but four months after she’d vanished in February last year.
The time lag is not the dogs’ fault. Good dogs can do anything they are trained to do. The fault lies with the clunky Australian police system that fails to use dogs to track people the way they have elsewhere for centuries.
It’s more than a thousand years since ninth-century Belgian monks started breeding the forebears of the bloodhound to track boar and deer by scent, an ability easily transferred to trailing humans — or anything else.
Despite the glaring need to track lost people and fugitives in a country the size of Australia, we arguably don’t use every resource available.
There are plenty of examples of this, some raised by this column before. But one that stands out is the disappearance of grandfather Christos Pittas at Dinner Plain in May, 2022. Up to 130 people tried to find him at the height of the search, which lasted 27 days in rough country near Mt Hotham and ended with a coroner declaring him dead, despite the absence of his body.
In that useless and heartbreaking search, as in others, the lack of proper tracking dogs underlined the fact that our police forces resist being dragged into the tenth century. The brains trust buys helicopters and bag pipes and Beemer pursuit cars but don’t bother with elite scent hounds to do the one thing that modern technology so often can’t: finding those who are lost or who don’t want to be found.
The hunt for Dezi Freeman is front of mind for Victorians. But over the border in outback South Australia, the case of the missing four-year-old Gus Lamont is causing anger as well as anguish.
When Gus went missing on his grandparents’ remote desert sheep station near Yunta on Grand Final day, September 27, his grandmother Shannon Murray spent hours searching around the lonely homestead before raising the alarm.
At the time, according to reports pieced together since then, Gus’s mother Jessica and Gus’s other grandparent, Josie Murray, were mustering sheep 10km from the house.
By the time police and SES searchers arrived the next morning, the ground around the homestead was inevitably crisscrossed with human and tyre tracks, and the footprints of working dogs that Shannon Murray was pictured with that week.
To search immediately for a missing child is natural and completely understandable. But if the child isn’t found quickly the situation gets tricky. When the lost person isn’t found (as with William Tyrell in 2014) it’s too late to preserve a possible crime scene.
In the case of little Gus, days passed with no sign of life — no footprints, not an item of clothing, nothing.
As one experienced searcher put it bluntly, there wasn’t even any sign of birds of prey and scavengers that might flag the presence of a body. The single footprint that was found quite far from the homestead seemed odd because there seemed to be no other prints nearby.
As a huge search of the 60,000ha property waxed then waned, followed last week with a renewed effort by army troops, it led to the usual outburst of theories, from the bizarre to the brutal.
Had he wandered just far enough from the house that a wild dog had snatched him?
We know from the fearless attacks on humans by dingoes on Fraser Island and elsewhere that it’s easy for aggressive carnivores that prey on mammals like kangaroos, sheep and calves to take a small 4-year-old boy.
It should be just as easy for searchers to have instant access to the sort of tracking dogs used in many overseas jurisdictions with much success.
There are many examples. Here’s a couple.
In 1977 James Earl Ray, the man who shot and killed Martin Luther King in 1968, escaped from Brushy Mountain Penitentiary in Tennessee.
Police brought in Huey helicopters flown by Vietnam veteran pilots, and they used electronic equipment, but that didn’t work. It was a pair of bloodhounds, Missy and her littermate, J. Edgar, who trailed Ray through the forests and caught him after 55 hours on the run.
Trained hounds like that pair find fugitives and lost people, mostly children and the elderly, every year in the United States.
In 2014, Indianapolis police sergeant William Carter used his bloodhound Grace to find a four-year-old boy who had wandered deep into a cornfield and had been missed by helicopters and human searchers.
Sgt Carter told reporters he had taken up using bloodhounds after seeing the body of a seven-year-old boy dragged from a lake in 2005 because help had come too late.
“Time is one of the biggest obstacles,” Carter explained later. After just three hours alone, every hour is critical to a lost child or elderly person.
Hounds follow the scent — not a theory, plan or schedule.
In June this year, a two-year-old toddler went missing from a big feed store in Westchester County outside New York City.
The search started around the store but when a police dog handler turned up with his bloodhound Essex, the hound led him straight into the store and found the child hiding in a narrow space between stacks of dog food bags.
The discovery happened in minutes and minutes can be the difference between life and death. Or a quick arrest.
Now that police chief Mike Bush has embraced the virtues of taking commercial flights, he might turn his thoughts to what could have happened at Porepunkah if tracker dogs like Missie or J. Edgar or Grace or Essex had hit the ground running within two hours of the murder of his officers.
The force has an excellent chopper to fly such hounds anywhere, any time. Sadly, it doesn’t yet have the right dogs.
Originally published as Andrew Rule: Victoria Police needed hunting dogs earlier in its hunt for cop killer Dezi Freeman
