Once more high on ice, Hoffmann is tempting fate as he speeds along the Arnhem Highway in a borrowed silver Proton and soon enough, he again comes to the attention of police, and is pulled over by Senior Constable Scott Aiken and Constable Ben Evans.

Hoffmann appears “calm” and is “polite and respectful” when speaking with the officers, showing no sign on body-worn camera footage of the interaction of his next “shocking, violent rampage” that would unfold in the hours to come.

“Oh f***, how fast was I going? Oh no,” he says (94km/h in an 80km/h zone).

“I just picked this up for a test drive, I’ll take it back eh.”

After the morning’s close call, Hoffmann would again change vehicles, this time borrowing a Toyota HiLux from Michael “Pelican” Makrylos, complete with a bowie knife, Winchester Defender shotgun and 50 rounds of ammunition in the back seat.

(Mr Makrylos was never charged but Hoffmann would later maintain it was the Darwin plumber’s carelessness that was to blame for his own bloodthirsty killing spree, as part of a series of increasingly convoluted mental gymnastics he would perform to avoid taking responsibility for his actions. At the trial, Mr Makrylos agreed with defence barrister Jon Tippet QC that Hoffmann had been “talking gibberish” and “freaking out” about being poisoned earlier in the day, but said he was “fine” again by the time he lent him the HiLux.)

At about 3.30pm Hoffmann arrived at the Humpty Doo property where a woman he believed to be his girlfriend, Kelly Collins, was staying, along with another woman, Carol Robinson, who was busy gluing diamante stars onto the walls of a backyard shed with her friend’s 14-year-old granddaughter.

“I hear footsteps,” the girl said as the armed gunman stalked through the yard outside.

Hoffmann came over to them, telling the pair he was searching for a dingo, before getting back in the HiLux and speeding off.

“He turned and he was still searching, looking, like, under the bushes in the long grass and he started walking toward the backyard,” Ms Robinson would later tell jurors at his murder trial.

“He was driving up, back towards me, where I was standing roughly in the middle of the yard, and he was accelerating.

“I put my hand up to stop him and he kept accelerating and was aiming straight for me and I jumped out of the way … he would have hit me.”

In her evidence, her teenage companion told the jury: “He just seemed really angry and just like he was like he was on a mission to do something.”

Less than three hours later, Damita Jerome and Cameron Ehling were asleep in their room at the Palms Motel in the Darwin CBD when they were woken by a stranger banging at their door and Mr Ehling got up to see who was there.

He didn’t recognise Hoffmann but was left in no doubt about the object he held in his hand, and soon, his worst fears were realised as Hoffmann raised the gun and fired.

“(He) ran over to me, told me to get on the ground, that there was a man at the door with a gun,” Ms Jerome later told the Supreme Court.

“I didn’t believe him, I thought he was pranking me and then he grabbed me, pushed me off the bed onto the ground with the blanket still wrapped around my legs.

“He then jumped on top of me like a human shield, trying to protect me, I could hear what sounded like, to me, glass shattering but I assume now it was most probably the bullets ricocheting off the tiles, the walls.”

Mr Ehling told jurors how he had rolled off the bed with Ms Jerome underneath him, protecting her, as the crazed gunman with a “mean look” in his eyes pulled the trigger again and again as shattered glass rained down around them.

“We lay there terrified, listening to the screaming and the yelling and then a second shot was let off through the door,” he said.

“I could hear what sounded to me like glass bouncing across tiles, I could hear metal scraping, I could hear the acoustics and the echoing from the gunshot reverberate around the room, I could smell the gunpowder.”

Mr Ehling recalled how he told his panic stricken girlfriend “to stay there no matter what happens, and don’t make a sound or move”, before again coming face-to-face with the soon-to-be mass murderer in an astonishing act of bravery that likely saved both their lives.

“I started talking and I said to him, without breaking eye contact, ‘I don’t know what’s going on mate, I don’t know who the f*** you are, my name is Cameron Ehling, I haven’t wronged anybody, I don’t owe anybody money, I don’t know what this is about, it’s got nothing to do with me,” he said.

“After I’d said that, we looked in each other’s eyes, from eye-to-eye, for what felt like an eternity and he just simply said to me ‘You’re f***ing lucky then’. As soon as he said that he just turned and walked away.”

The only witness to what happened next would not be so lucky.

The only testimony jurors in Hoffmann’s murder trial would hear from Hassan Baydoun would come via forensic pathologist Marianne Tiemensma, whose trained eye interpreted the unspeakable trauma Hoffmann’s shotgun had inflicted on the 33-year-old taxi driver.

His lifeless body was found crumpled in the back of the shower cubicle in his unit at the Palms Motel, a frying pan between his legs, which, investigators would later conclude, he had deployed in a last desperate attempt to defend himself from the relentless barrage of hot lead.

By the time Hoffmann’s fourth shotgun blast left the weapon’s barrel, Dr Tiemensma said Mr Baydoun was most likely already dead, with the resulting wound “almost bloodless” due to the already catastrophic haemorrhaging.

“(The third) gunshot wound caused massive disruption of the chest organs, perforated the breast bone, the heart,” she said.

“Then there were multiple separate (pellet) tracks spreading through the organs.”

The next stop in Hoffmann’s bloody massacre was the Gardens Hill Crescent home of 75-year-old retiree, Nigel Hellings, also in the wrong place at the wrong time during the killer’s deranged pursuit of a man his drug addled mind wrongly believed had been involved in kidnapping Kelly Collins.

(Hoffmann later claimed Alex Deligiannis, a friend of Ms Collins who was with her on the day and had previously lived at Mr Hellings’ address, was somehow involved in the fantastical plot. There is nothing to support this fanciful claim.)

Moments before Hoffmann started firing wildly through Mr Hellings’ front door – prosecutors would later accept a plea of guilty to reckless manslaughter for this killing – a backyard security camera captured two police cars travelling seconds behind Hoffmann’s white HiLux.

The patrol cars are then seen stopping and reversing away, back in the opposite direction, before a series of loud gunshots ring out and are not seen in the footage again, while two other officers told the court they ignored an order to disengage but were unable to catch up with Hoffmann.

It would be another agonisingly close brush with the law before the senseless killing spree would finally come to an end later that night.

From there, Hoffmann drove to the Buff Club in Stuart Park where CCTV footage would fill in the blanks for jurors after shocked patrons were startled away from their beers by the unmistakeable blast of a shotgun coming from the pub’s rear carpark.

The footage shows Hoffmann arrive at the Buff Club clad in a high-vis shirt and approach Michael Sisois, and after a brief discussion, he punches the older man to the face, knocking him to the ground.

“He said ‘I told you not to f*** with me c***’,” witness Sharon Ninham would later tell the court.

Hoffmann returns to his vehicle and retrieves the shotgun before he calmly strides back to where Mr Sisois is lying prone and helpless on the ground. He aims the gun directly at his head and fires a single shot before getting back in the HiLux and driving away.

(Mr Sisois, Hoffmann’s former colleague, was killed instantly, and would become the subject of another of the gunman’s wild conspiracy theories, in which he continued to insist, in the face of a complete lack of supporting evidence, that the 57-year-old had poisoned him with a substance that supposedly sparked his deadly rampage.)

Moments later, three police officers can be seen on the footage approaching Mr Sisois’ body with Glocks drawn after Senior Constable Merwan Kazem, responding to a report of shots fired, told the court he decided to park 60m away and wait for backup after he could not find a bulletproof vest in his vehicle.

Hoffmann’s final killing was not captured on CCTV but footage from the recycling yard where 52-year-old security guard Rob Courtney lived does show fellow resident Peter Boden “ducking and weaving” to try to avoid the flying buckshot before he heard his neighbour’s “agonising screams”.

But forensic pathologist Marianne Tiemensma would later tell the court that of Mr Courtney’s 69 separate wounds, it was Hoffmann’s knife that inflicted the fatal blow.

“There was one entering the right ear, right external ear canal, which entered just below the right mandible or the right jaw, and completely transacted the right internal carotid artery which is one of the main vessels that supply blood to the brain,” she told the court.

“Then another one penetrated the right internal jugular vein, so that’s also another large blood vessel that drains blood away from the brain back to the heart and the lungs, so that was also injured.”

What the footage also shows is a shirtless and blood-soaked Hoffmann then leaving the yard before heavily armed tactical police descend on the area and he is again captured on film, still armed with the shotgun, trying to kick in the doors at the NT Police headquarters in Berrimah.

Ben Hoffmann’s next contact with police would be his final one on the night of June 4, 2019, and would culminate in his dramatic arrest on the Daly Street bridge as he drove back into town with Superintendent Lee Morgan attempting to negotiate his surrender over the phone.

After Hoffmann agreed to pull over, telling Superintendent Morgan “I’m just going to stop where you want me to stop”, the first officer to approach the now triple murderer was Constable Michael Kent, who was directing traffic away from the scene of his earlier crime at the Buff Club.

“It all happened very quickly but again he said ‘I’m sorry, don’t shoot me’, he seemed very nervous that he was going to get shot,” Constable Kent told the Supreme Court jury.

“I approached the door, I said ‘Sir, can you turn your vehicle off’, he said again ‘I’m sorry, don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me’, so I reached in with my left hand because my right hand still had my radio on.

“I reached in and I turned the car engine off, I put the keys on my belt and he said ‘You guys are going to kill me’ or words to that effect and I said ‘No, I’ll protect you with my life’.”

On June 4, 2019, Matt James had only recently moved out of the property at a Darwin recycling centre where he lived with Rob Courtney when he heard gunshots coming from the hotel next to the carpark where he was standing.

He didn’t know it at the time, but the shooter was a man he would later recognise on news reports as an acquaintance and a patron of the Top End nightclubs where Mr James DJed – Benjamin Glenn Hoffmann.

“He would have had to drive past me and I often wonder if he saw me and recognised me and decided not to keep going in that area, I can’t help but think that,” he says now.

“He was an unpredictable man and this just goes to show what somebody with a skinful of drugs and unstable mind are capable of.”

As someone “connected to this in more ways than anybody else”, and in the wake of Hoffmann’s sentencing in the Supreme Court this week to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Mr James says the punishment is “absolutely just”.

“It still blows my mind that these things actually took place – none of it needed to happen,” he says, casting his mind back to the night so many people’s lives changed forever in the space of less than half an hour.

“I heard the gunshots from the front carpark and I could tell they were gunshots,” he says.

“I ran out the front to see if there was somebody out there with a gun and moments later this bloke came racing up to me with a woman in his arms, and she’d been shot in the legs, so we got her away to somewhere behind a barricade and then I ran back inside the hotel.

“I basically just forced everybody back into their rooms, telling them somebody was out there with a gun, didn’t know where they were, what’s going on but that they needed to stay inside, it was just a mental scenario.”

And with Hoffmann now destined to die inside the walls of Holtze Prison, Mr James says he hopes the confessed killer can at least find some peace following the senseless “outright tragedy for all involved”.

“We’ve got people basically just ambushed and attacked, their whole families, their lives are ruined, they must have been frightened at the time, especially Rob,” he said.

“(Hoffmann’s) life is ruined too, his family’s shattered, and none of it needed to happen, but as far as justice goes, I don’t think you could deliver any better than what’s been handed down.

“I mean he’s never going to see the light of day again but it would be even more senseless to have somebody behind bars, tortured by their own demons every day, when they might be able to have some sort of sense of peace and some sort of recovery after all of this. Let’s just hope that it’s not a torturous life sentence for him.”