Wieambilla coronial inquest told how Gareth, Nathaniel and Stacey Train shared their delusions
The trio who gunned down two police officers and their neighbour shared a persecutory delusion which stemmed from a bizarre list of beliefs, an inquest has been told.
The trio who gunned down two police officers and their neighbour shared a persecutory delusion which heavily featured a “sequence of signs” that forecast the second coming of Christ would happen in 2023, an inquest has been told
Constables Matthew Arnold and Rachel McCrow were murdered by three members of the Train family – Nathaniel, Gareth, and Gareth’s wife Stacey – on their Wains Rd property at Wieambilla, in Queensland’s Western Downs, on December 12, 2022.
The two Tara-based officers had attended the rural property alongside constables Randall Kirk and Keely Brough, from Chinchilla police station, as part of a welfare check for Nathaniel, who had been reported missing.
An arrest warrant had also been issued for Nathaniel after he’d illegally crossed the NSW/ Queensland border 12 months prior during Covid-19 restrictions and discarded weapons in a ditch.
The Trains were killed after an intense standoff with QPS Special Emergency Response Team officers hours after they’d murdered the two constables and their neighbour, Alan Dare, after he’d come to investigate a fire he spotted at their place.
As the inquest into the massacre continued on Monday, consultant forensic psychiatrist Andrew Aboud said after examining the case he found the trio had been experiencing symptoms of a shared psychotic disorder.
Dr Aboud said the Trains suffered from identical persecutory and religious beliefs and delusions at the time of the fatal ambush.
The inquest was told Gareth was the primary and Stacey and Nathaniel acted as secondaries to the shared delusion.
Moving to Wieambilla
Dr Aboud said he’s unable to confirm when Gareth’s delusions escalated but he had become “more and more consumed by ways of personalising” those persecutory delusions by the time he moved to his Wieambilla property with Stacey in 2016.
“It is actually very difficult to tell if he was delusional, such that he wanted to be isolated because he was paranoid and persecuted and wanted to protect himself, or if it was the isolation that allowed him to go down the rabbit hole and support what were overvalued ideas to the point where they started to become unchallenged and delusional,” Dr Aboud said.
The inquest was told those persecutory delusions experienced by Gareth were extensive but focused around his obsession with neurological bioweapons, religion and his distrust in authority organisations.
Dr Aboud said Gareth had become fascinated with MKUltra, a military program run by CIA between the 1950s to 1970s which has been labeled as human experimentation using medications or drugs to assist with interrogations.
He said Gareth then “progresses” his interest in MKUltra to Raytheon, a company that manufactures weapons.
Dr Aboud said Gareth “becomes concerned” Raytheon is producing bioweapons, which they do not, and it’s these concerns that influence his belief that the Covid vaccination was a way for the government to target the population.
“His view about Covid is that it was a method for people to then become mass vaccinated, and then that is married up with the concept of neurological bioweapons, changing people’s DNA,” Dr Aboud said.
“We now have Gareth believing that human beings are being turned into non-humans.
“And it’s that these chemicals may well be turning people into non-humans, and that government authorities wish to compel people to have them.”
The inquest was told Stacey had been writing about Gareth’s delusions in her diary, giving a somewhat precise timeline of how his mind was operating, and her diary entries indicated that she was starting to incorporate Gareth’s beliefs into her own understanding of the world.
The couple had also started to believe they themselves were being monitored by government services, including ASIO, and even started putting their mobile phones in tin foiled lined boxes.
Dr Aboud said Gareth’s delusions were also starting to include beliefs that the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Jesuits and Mossad were involved in their persecution.
Gareth’s ‘opus’ of shared delusion
The inquest was told while it’s unclear exactly when Nathaniel started to share these delusions with his brother, Dr Aboud believed it most likely began in late 2020.
Evidence about a recorded telephone call between the trio as Nathaniel recovered in hospital after experiencing a heart attack in August 2021 was referenced during Dr Aboud’s testimony on Monday.
“When I listened to that call it struck me that Gareth was not gaslighting his brother,” Dr Aboud said.
“He was speaking exactly what he genuinely believed.
“So his undermining of the medical profession and encouraging his brother not to take medications and not to have what he called a ‘monkey heart’ put into him was all genuine.
“The cardiac arrest is significant because it’s a life event (for Nathaniel).
“It would have seismically shifted Nathaniel’s confidence in himself, and it also allowed Gareth to further reinforce the things that he had been talking to Nathaniel about from late 2020 … and ongoingly, up until that time and he had the opportunity to reinforce these things at a time when his brother was particularly psychologically vulnerable.”
Dr Aboud said the Trains’ psychotic symptoms included the shared belief system that included a range of religious and persecutory beliefs.
“They were of delusional intensity,” he said.
“They reflected high levels of paranoia and referential thinking.
“The cover of their belief system was religious, considered an interpretation of pre-millennialism that Christ would return for the Second Coming.
“This would mark the beginning of the New Age … to obtain religious salvation.”
Dr Aboud said Stacey’s diary stated the trio believed there was a “sequence of signs” they would experience to know when the Second Coming of Jesus would occur – which they calculated to be around April 2023.
Those “signs” included the Russian invasion of Ukraine, extreme weather events, political incidents and the pandemic.
“In addition to these religious beliefs, they were underpinned by numerous persecutory beliefs that they were in themselves unrelated or largely unrelated to religious ideology,” Dr Aboud said.
“But Gareth pulled them together as being related.
“Many of these have little or no direct relationship with any Christian belief or even pre-millennialism type that beliefs, but they were pulled together by Gareth as being somewhat related and being the underpinnings of what I called his opus.”
These “signs” ultimately culminated on December 12, when the four constables jumped their front gate – known to the Trains as ‘Rubicon’ in a nod to the Rubicon River where Julius Caesar began a civil war that led to the downfall of the Roman Republic.
“It’s my understanding and interpretation of their situation on account of their shared delusional psychosis that their motivation, during the incident on (December 12) was to reach their religious salvation by confronting and ultimately dying at the hands of police,” Dr Aboud said.
The Trains relationship with each other
Dr Aboud said he believed Gareth had gradually transitioned from paranoid ideation to paranoid delusion.
The psychiatrist told the inquest about his examination of Gareth’s mental health throughout his life.
He said Gareth had been born prematurely after his mother was involved in a car crash, leaving him with possible hypoxia brain damage and, speculatively, that injury “may have been the seed of his problems”.
“He developed very differently to his three siblings,” Dr Aboud said.
“He was more prone to anger, he was impulsive, he had behaviour problems and he became attached and dependent on his brother, Nathaniel.
“Nathaniel was younger and a rather gifted child. Gareth was not.
“In my view and again only in hindsight, Gareth’s childhood was reflective with a child struggling with his difficulties associated with his ability to learn, his cognition and his emotions.”
Dr Aboud said as Gareth got older, he developed certain obsessions and interests, including guns, bodybuilding and history.
He said that by the time Gareth reached his early 20s, he started engaging in conspiracy theories but noted these were not the delusions he later experienced.
Dr Aboud said he believed at this stage in life, Gareth had a paranoid personality disorder with egotistical tendencies.
“Even at that early age, he was mistrustful of other people, he had a tendency to think he knew best,” Dr Aboud said.
“He started to behave as if he saw himself as superior to other people, he was quite egocentric.
“He could be arrogant, quite hypersensitive to criticism.
“I believe he’d developed a paranoid personality disorder, and there were also some narcissistic traits that went with it.”
Dr Aboud said Gareth’s relationships with his wife Stacey and brother Nathaniel were extremely important to him and it was this dependency that ultimately influenced their shared delusion.
The inquest was told Nathaniel and Stacey had previously been married in 1995 after being high school sweethearts, and the couple welcomed two children.
Gareth later moved into the family home before starting an intimate relationship with Stacey while she was still married to his brother.
Nathaniel and Stacey ultimately divorced in 2000 and she married Gareth in 2001.
“The nature of their exact relationship is hard to really understand,” Dr Aboud said.
“And we’ve only got these threads of information from various people.
“I think there’s a period of time Nathaniel did struggle with what happened but seemed to get over that in several months (before the wedding).
“He remained supportive of that new marriage. He continued to see his biological children.
“At times, he even lived with them, so the three adults were living together.”
‘Suicide by cop’: Trains actions in hours before deaths. When asked by counsel assisting the coroner Ruth O’Gorman KC whether the Trains’ actions were effectively “suicide by cop”, Dr Aboud agreed those were his findings.
“The caveat was it was underpinned by their delusional thinking, and their intentions at that time were not to be apprehended by police believing that would be a fate worse than death and in fact be worse than anything they could possibly have imagined,” Dr Aboud said.
“It’s hard for me to be absolutely confident whether or not they sought to flee because they did have a greater objective from when police first entered, they were not going to seek to flee.
“The only other possibility was they might have seen an opportunity to still reach their original primary destination, which was a forecast date of early 2023, which is a date they believed was religious salvation with the second coming of Jesus Christ.”
Dr Aboud said Gareth likely had an undiagnosed paranoid personality disorder throughout his life that had narcissistic qualities.
The inquest was told that if the Trains had been arrested on December 12, Dr Aboud believed they would have been referred to Mental Health Court.
“I’m reasonably confident that … they would have been assessed by mental health professionals and would have been identified as being mentally unwell,” Dr Aboud said.
“That would have led to referral of their proceedings to Mental Health Court.”
Dr Aboud said the trio highly likely shared an “unsoundness of mind” in the form of delusions, triggered by Gareth’s undiagnosed delusional disorder he likely developed after he moved to Wieambilla.
“Everything (a person with delusional disorder does) will seem normal except in the area that is touched upon in the delusional belief, then they will be complaining abnormally,” Dr Aboud said.
“In the Trains’ case, persecutory beliefs of the delusional intensity and religious beliefs of a delusional intensity.
“They start to bring the ends of different beliefs together into something that is systematic.
“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 … that all made sense in terms of a second coming of Christ.”
The inquest previously was told at the time of the fatal ambush, the Trains believed in premillennialism, an extremist Christian ideology that believed Jesus Christ would return to earth after a period of extreme suffering.
Dr Aboud said their shared delusions, which stemmed from Gareth’s persecutory delusional beliefs, is a rare occurrence but can be brought on by several triggers.
“Delusions are not contagious,” he said.
“It’s not like a viral illness, but instead, it’s about a very unique set of dynamics based on the relationships between the three people, in this case their vulnerabilities in which they’re living and in particular, (their) isolation and stress.
“The onset of the condition in the secondary (Stacey and Nathaniel) is gradual.
“The dominant primary (Gareth) and passive secondary (Stacey and Nathaniel) may have shared experience that the primary is making sense of.
“The secondary becomes vulnerable and susceptible … the secondary gradually comes to believe it … and they then come to defend it.
“They not only share it but they embrace it.
“They defend the primary against criticism and questioning from outsiders.”
Dr Aboud said Gareth’s delusions developed over time but all focused around a belief he had that he was being persecuted.
The inquest was told these persecutional delusions manifested in different forms but ultimately led to his shared delusion with his wife and brother that culminated in the events of December 12.
“The inflicted person can believe they were subject to various persecutory behaviours by other individuals or organisations, governments or authorities,” Dr Aboud said.
“They’re starting to see all these things very much relating to them and their lives and they think it’s about them.
“It usually involves feeling that they’re being conspired against, watched, followed, monitored.”
The inquest continues on Tuesday.