Andrew Rule: Deadly rogue shooters terrorising Victorian district and cost a man his life

Rogue deer shooters are terrorising the district around Jamieson with Russian roulette tactics that saw local Bryce Airs, an innocent man walking home from the pub, killed without a second thought. WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES.

Bryce Airs literally didn’t know what hit him: when a passer-by finally spotted his bleeding body on the empty mountain road, the dying man’s last words were confused.

He whispered that he’d been struck by lightning because that’s what it must have felt like: a bone-crushing jolt that smashed his body to the bitumen with a blinding flash of light.

But there was no lightning in the rugged country up past Lake Eildon on that Saturday night in November 2017.

Police deduced the 38-year-old father of two had been hit by a vehicle with its headlights turned off, then dazzled by a spotlight flashing in his eyes.

The well-liked electrician had been walking home late from the Jamieson pub when he was run down and left for dead by people with no conscience, prepared to let a man die rather than be charged with whatever laws they were breaking.

Airs was dead on arrival at Mansfield Hospital.

Angry residents are speaking out about rouge deer shooters behaving recklessly by firing at deer around homes and roads around Jamieson and Kevington in Victorias High Country. Picture: Jason Edwards

When local shopkeeper Paul Fletcher drove past the scene at dawn and saw police and crime-scene tape he knew it would be his friend Bryce, who’d done the right thing by not driving home and had paid for it with his life.

Hit run victim Bryce Airs was mowed down in Jamieson.

The killers are still out there. One of them drives (or used to) a high-bodied, light-coloured machine similar to the popular Toyota Hi-Lux utility, almost certainly with the bull bar that experts believe did the damage to Bryce Airs’ body.

But despite a thorough investigation by the police major collision unit, that vehicle has not been found. Nor have its occupants.

Meanwhile, rogue shooters still terrorise the district with the Russian roulette tactics that killed a man.

WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES BELOW

They drive along the winding bitumen road with headlights off, using handheld spotlights and, some say, infra-red telescopic sights that let them see in the dark, like military snipers.

According to those who live there, the vast area from the Howqua Valley south to Woods Point and southeast to Licola is not only wild but virtually lawless, something that has got worse since Airs’ death, not better.

One reason for this, perhaps, is that the lone police officer stationed at Jamieson has not worked for 18 months due to stress.

He still occupies the police residence and has not been replaced, which effectively means rogue shooters have open slather in his “patch”.

Deer carcasses with heads missing can be found around Jamieson.

Inevitably, locals fear that Bryce Airs will not be the only victim of “cowboys” using high-powered rifles dangerously close to their family homes, let alone to their livestock.

Feral deer are a serious pest and should be culled — but not like this.

Every other week local families wake up to scenes from a horror film: headless carcasses beside the road, on driveways and in their paddocks and yards.

Grisly as such scenes are, they are only a symptom of the real problem, which is that drug-affected, drunk or criminally reckless shooters are willing to risk killing people by shooting near houses — and sometimes into them.

An emerging type are those who describe themselves as “Ringbark and run” poachers on boastful social media posts, a slogan reputedly printed on hoodies, T-shirts and caps.

The name comes from the poacher’s trick of cutting off stag heads with electric chainsaws in much the way farmers used to ringbark trees when clearing paddocks.

If the driver who killed Bryce Airs is a Mansfield local, it’s odds on he’s well-known to one of the “Ringbark and run” crews and others like them.

Social media posts show hunters posing with stag heads and brazenly posting about selling meat to buy “truckie dust” and “devil’s dandruff”, slang for methamphetamine and cocaine.

One well-informed Jamieson resident names a notorious local shooter as “the biggest drug dealer in Mansfield”. He has seen a picture of him with a stag’s head and a big ball of cocaine.

Another talks of a Mansfield identity who fabricates illegal silencers. One of his clients was caught with a silencer in a secret compartment built behind the dash of his vehicle.

Investigators might wonder if there’s a link between illegal drugs, illegally-silenced rifles and the black market for antlers, trophies and venison.

Meanwhile, good people live in fear of them, and talk of vigilante action.

To grasp how much damage a “big game” bullet can cause, you need to know it leaves the barrel of a .30 calibre rifle at about 1000 metres per second: force that can puncture steel plate.

Wayne Poole shows the bullet holes found in their house walls. Picture: Jason Edwards

That’s enough to go right through a car — seats, doors and all — or to penetrate any building not made of concrete or brick. It could kill at a range of up to 3000 metres, which is why shooting anywhere within sight of houses is so risky.

Weatherboards and plaster might as well be cardboard for all they do to stop a bullet designed to drop animals the size of cattle.

Eddie Poole, plumber by trade and hunter by recreation, has lived in the Upper Goulburn area all his life.

A few years ago, his relatives lived near the Kevington hotel. That house still has patched-up bullet holes where it was hit by rifle fire some years ago.

Like many of their neighbours, the Pooles are shooters but, like the huge majority of hunters, they are law-abiding and safety conscious. They stalk deer in the hills but bring home the venison and never take risks.

Hardly anyone living between the Howqua Valley and Woods Point objects to shooting as such — Sambar deer overrun the bush and are a menace on the roads — but they are angry about night raiders illegally using spotlights and silenced rifles as a shortcut to score big stag “heads” that can be sold for cash. Or maybe even swapped direct for drugs.

The deer sneak into roadsides, paddocks and gardens at night looking for fresh grass and leaves, and that’s where the spotlighters can shoot them from the road.

A head with a good set of antlers can bring big money once a taxidermist has mounted it, and illegal shooters reputedly get $150 a head on the black market. There are thousands of mature stags among the half million or so Sambar deer infesting Victorian bushland.

At the Kevington pub, illegal shooters are the main topic of conversation.

Among the regulars is Ian Maynard, who got a phone call from a distant neighbour one night some months before Bryce Airs was killed, warning him illegal spotlighters were heading his way.

Maynard hurried to the road on foot to try to catch the car registration.

“They swerved across to the wrong side of the road right at me and hit (dazzled) me with the spotlight so I couldn’t see the number plates,” Maynard recalls.

He jumped sideways to avoid being struck, tearing a calf muscle so badly he couldn’t walk to the house. His wife came looking for him 20 minutes later.

He was treated at hospital and lost eight weeks work.

A deer carcass by a resident’s driveway.

Bernie Russell, interstate truck operator, moved to Jamieson for the fishing and the peace and quiet several years ago. He still fishes but the peace has been badly disturbed.

Russell looks like Angry Anderson’s bigger, tougher brother, down to the shaven head, tattoos and ear rings. And he’s angry, all right.

He tells of the night his neighbour was run off the road by suspected deer poachers but managed to get the registration of the other car. Police traced the vehicle — complete with a fresh dent — to an address at Traralgon, almost four hours driving time across the winding mountain road.

No charges were laid but the Traralgon connection does not surprise the residents of deer country. They speak of a spotlighting circuit that goes from the Gippsland side through the snowfields to the King Valley and Upper Yarra Valley.

On weeknights around Jamieson, poachers are mostly a few notorious local rogues. On weekends, spotlighters come from Melbourne and beyond, even Tasmania.

With no working police at Jamieson, and restricted hours and numbers at the Mansfield station, poachers are confident that if they arrive late at night they won’t be detected. Occasional police “set ups” are too early and too obvious to be effective, as the officers tend to arrive in daylight and finish before midnight.

Jamieson residents routinely glimpse distant headlights coming from Mansfield late at night, then see them switched off as cars roll down the hill into town in darkness.

One Kevington resident has found 15 deer shot dead in his home paddock over recent years. Worse, he says, shooters killed an Angus steer that cost $600 to buy and which he expected eventually to sell for more than $2000.

Gunshots have spooked his thoroughbred brood mare, who was injured stampeding through fences.

Headless deer carcasses turn up regularly in paddocks and gardens and on the roadside — even in the river.

Illegal shooting near homes is so commonplace that when householders call triple-0 to complain, no police come.

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Frustrated locals compare this with the instant and overwhelming (and completely justified) police reaction to firearms being used in public in or near Melbourne.

But long distances and short-staffed police stations mean that late at night the closest police are at Benalla, more than an hour’s drive from Jamieson.

There is, of course, good reason for police not to speed there — the deadly risk of hitting deer as big as a pony.

Angry residents held a meeting at Jamieson’s Court House hotel late last month.

One night that week, a local couple who work late as contract cleaners came home around 3am.

As they turned into their driveway, they saw a stag standing on the roadside. Minutes later, as they got ready for bed, they heard the shot. The shooters must have been hiding nearby.

The husband drove back to the road for a look. He saw the silhouette of a vehicle with its headlights off. It looked like a light-coloured Toyota Hi-Lux ute.

Such utes are very common. But locals can’t help wondering if it’s the one that ran down Bryce Airs … and why there is no reward for information leading to its driver.