Delusional self-radicalisation of Wieambilla killers exemplifies a new menace
Were they mad or bad? Terrorists or deluded soldiers of God? The Trains lived in a bizarre world of entangled love, paranoia and fantasy that ended in a paroxysm of violence.
Were they mad or bad? Terrorists or deluded soldiers of God? The questions about Gareth Train, wife Stacey and her ex-husband turned brother-in-law, Nathaniel, keep coming 20 months after they murdered two police constables and a neighbour on the Trains’ lonely south Queensland property and died in the resulting shootout.
The unsettling story of what happened at Wieambilla on December 12, 2022, is unfolding in granular detail before State Coroner Terry Ryan, a descent into the Trains’ bizarre world of entangled love, paranoia and fantasy that ended in a paroxysm of violence.
It could well be salutary. Not because there is anything remotely instructive in the apocalyptic beliefs the trio embraced and sought to propagate, nor their long slide into shared psychotic delusion. The lessons of Wieambilla go to the altered security environment the nation confronts under the highest terrorism threat rating since the Islamic State organisation emerged a decade ago. While all eyes are on the potential for acts of terror arising from the febrile environment in Australia created by the Israel-Gaza war, the Trains represent a new menace.
As ASIO director-general Mike Burgess put it this week: “We last raised the threat level to probable in 2014 when we had a strong ideology, charismatic individuals that were driving people to travel overseas and fight for the caliphate and conduct acts of terror on shore. Today, it’s completely different.
“We have a broad range of ideologies, people radicalising more quickly and more people thinking violence is permissible. Social and economic grievances, conspiracy theories are also in the mix, along with traditional, religiously motivated Islamist violent extremism and nationalist and racist violent extremism.”
Burgess warns that perpetrators can strike with little or no warning and minimal planning – making them harder to intercept. This reflects the “acceleration of radicalisation”. When the threat level was lifted during the breakout of IS into northern Iraq and Syria, “individuals were often being radicalised by sustained exposure to a particular extremist ideology or to an authority figure,” he said on August 5, announcing the upgrade.
“Now, individuals are being motivated by a diversity of grievances and personalised narratives.”
As we will see, Australia’s domestic spymaster could have been talking about the Trains.
Their strange, benighted interaction and the tragedy it spawned revolved around the domineering figure of Gareth, 47 at the time of the attack. He was the alpha male, the “primary” in the group, who drew Stacey, 45, and Nathaniel, 46, into a conspiratorial belief system that evolved into an unshakable conviction they were living in the biblical end times on the dusty, 43ha property Gareth and Stacey bought in 2016 in the Tara blocks, 300km northwest of Brisbane.
As children, the trio had gone to church together in Toowoomba, two hours away. Gareth and Nathaniel’s father, Ronald, was the Baptist minister, a strong-minded man who went on to found his own breakaway church. The brothers couldn’t have been more different.
The inquest was told that Gareth had struggled virtually from the day he was born premature, after his mother, Gwen, was in a car smash. Veteran forensic psychiatrist Andrew Aboud gave evidence that the baby might have been delivered with hypoxic brain damage, “the seed” of future problems. Growing up, Gareth was prone to anger and impulsiveness, a poor student in contrast to his three siblings. He became particularly attached to and dependent on the “gifted” Nathaniel, who thrived at school.
As he moved into adulthood, Gareth had trouble forming intimate relationships. On at least two occasions female partners backed away after he suggested they enter a suicide pact, said Aboud, having reviewed a mountain of documentation including the Trains’ medical records, diary entries, their correspondence and online communications. By his early 20s, Gareth was devoted to conspiracy theories and possibly in the first throes of mental illness; it was likely he had developed a paranoid personality disorder, combined with narcissistic traits.
“He was quick to take offence. He tended to read malevolent thoughts into other people’s motives,” Aboud testified. “He would bear grudges and … was prone to feeling resentful. He adopted a certain victim disposition.”
At the same time, Gareth saw himself as being superior to those around him: he could be a bully and was hypersensitive to criticism, Aboud said. The young man fixated on guns and bodybuilding. He read obsessively about history and military strategy, devouring book after book: “He quite liked to be the person who knew everything and would tell people about all these things he knew.” Gareth tried to join the army, but they wouldn’t have him.
Yet Nathaniel – clever, successful, the junior tennis star who had dreamed of playing at Wimbledon – remained accepting and supportive of his troubled older brother. After Nathaniel encountered Stacey at church, they became teenage sweethearts. When Ronald Train set up his own ministry, she went across with Nathaniel, evidently against the wishes of her family. Her father was not happy with the blossoming romance: he wanted Stacey to focus on school. But he accepted Nathaniel was a “perfectly decent young man”, Aboud said. The couple married in 1995 – he was 19, she 18 – and soon had two children. Both Nathaniel and Stacey went into teaching.
‘Chicken and egg’ quandary
Which makes their subsequent deference to Gareth all the more puzzling. As Aboud noted, Stacey was no shrinking violet: like Nathaniel she was an “impressive” individual, highly intelligent and hardworking, who knew how to stand up for herself. When they took Gareth into their home not long after the kids arrived, Gareth repaid his brother by engaging in an affair with Stacey, apparently while Nathaniel was occupied with his studies. An understated Aboud said: “The nature of their exact relationship is hard to really understand.”
In the event, by 2001 Stacey and Gareth were married, while Nathaniel threw himself into his teaching career. They went on to live together in far north Queensland. As principal of a small disadvantaged state school in Innisfail, he helped push its NAPLAN results above the national average, earning him plaudits Australia-wide. He eventually remarried and created a new life in NSW, continuing his work with underprivileged students. He would visit his brother and Stacey once a year to see the children he had left behind.
Aboud described Nathaniel as being a caring and empathetic man, who might have been susceptible to Gareth’s propensity to present himself as the victim. There were suggestions – uncorroborated – that Gareth as a boy had been sexually assaulted by a male babysitter and Nathaniel believed his brother had shielded him. “It is possible that he felt indebted to his brother and felt that ‘there but for the grace go I’,” Aboud said. “It’s also possible … that when Nathaniel came to appraise his brother’s difficulties throughout his life, Nathaniel may well have seen that alleged sexual abuse as being at the core of Gareth’s problems, and Nathaniel may have felt that he ‘took the bullet that could have also included me’.”
The trio found common cause in other unproven sexual abuse claims. Stacey believed a predatory male relative had attacked a number of family members, her mother potentially among them. At a Train family wedding she joined Gareth and Nathaniel in accusing two close relatives of the brothers of committing preposterous acts of forced incest. Challenged to produce proof, Gareth said: “God told me.” Increasingly estranged from their respective families, Stacey and Gareth were withdrawing deeper into their private world.
Like Nathaniel, Stacey was a successful teacher, serving for a time as school principal at Proston, west of Gympie. Following the move to Wieambilla in 2016, she picked up a job teaching and as head of curriculum at Tara Shire State College, a years 1-12 school 30 minutes’ drive from the remote property. By all accounts she was a popular and respected member of staff. Gareth had worked sporadically as a groundsman over the years, but they lived simply and got by on Stacey’s salary. He had other priorities now.
Aboud said features of what would become full-blown delusional psychosis – where Gareth was unable to distinguish his paranoid and doomsday fantasies from reality – were emerging. He was personalising the conspiracy theories he was once able to joke about – tropes about Freemasons and Jesuits, Mossad and the secret state – overlaid on increasingly far-fetched religious referencing. Local crop dusters were spraying neurotoxins to change people into “meat suits”; Learjets buzzed the property on surveillance missions. He was the target of persecution because he was on to them. All of them.
Aboud said the couple’s retreat to Wieambilla posed a “chicken and egg” quandary: “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 had 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.”
Either way, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic turbocharged the angst. And not only for the Trains, as the lockdowns and vaccine mandates stirred unrest and ugly clashes with police at illegal marches. Burgess said on August 5: “Anti-authority beliefs are growing; trust in institutions is eroding; provocative and inflammatory behaviours are being normalised.
“This trend increased during Covid, gained further momentum after the (October 7) terrorist attacks in Israel and accelerated during Israel’s military response. The dynamics are raising the temperature in the security environment.”
Folie a trois
Stacey Train had always needed a strong male figure in her life, Aboud said, “priming” her to submit to her second husband’s spell. But that still leaves the matter of how this bright and capable woman, followed by the accomplished Nathaniel, came to embrace Gareth’s nihilistic beliefs about the end of the world and, according to the psychiatrist’s assessment, take on his mental illness in a rare case of shared psychotic disorder. There is no doubt Stacey was a full and willing participant in her husband’s “grand opus” – the elaborate ideological framework he constructed to incorporate his crackpot persecution theories into a perverse version of premillennialist Christian doctrine. Broadly, this holds that the second coming of Christ, heralding a 1000-year reign of peace and prosperity, will be preceded by a cataclysmic war on earth between the forces of good and evil, the Great Tribulation.
Stacey undertook the intellectual heavy lifting her husband couldn’t or wouldn’t do, combing the scriptures for verses to support their conviction that the end times were nigh. Covid, in their minds, was a critical sign that a corrupt and godless society was doomed. Stacey would create a calendar setting out when the fall would happen - between April and May 2023. The vaccine was a method of mass poisoning, according to Gareth’s opus, part of the state’s insidious effort to change people into “meat suits”, and she quit her job on December 16, 2021, the day before a mandate for teachers to be inoculated came into force.
“For her to have exactly the same beliefs as Gareth means there has to be a connection between them, and the most likely connection is that she was developing a psychotic illness as a secondary to her husband,” said Aboud, the clinical director of mental health for the Queensland prison system.
This met the classical definition of a folie a deux, a delusional disorder shared by two people. It became a folie a trois when Nathaniel belatedly bought in. His contact with Gareth had kicked up during the pandemic, coinciding with a testing period in his life.
While Nathaniel was less vulnerable in personality than his brother and ex-wife, he had “accentuated” traits making him obsessive, Aboud said. Nathaniel was a perfectionist, orderly and controlled, a man who paid keen attention to the rules and was liable to “fall foul” of anyone breaking them.
By now, he was principal of the primary school in far-flung Walgett, northwest NSW, and in bitter dispute with the NSW Education Department over possible cheating on a NAPLAN test.
On August 10, 2021, Nathaniel suffered a severe heart attack, collapsing in his office. He was resuscitated but it was a close-run thing: doctors would tell him that he had lost 80 per cent of his cardiac function.
Urged on by Gareth, he refused to take the prescribed medications or have surgery. No way were they going to put a “monkey’s heart” in his chest. Their exchanges referred reverentially to “church”, a meeting that had taken place that January at Wieambilla, when Nathaniel arrived for a one-day visit with Gareth and Stacey.
Whatever was said was so important, it had to be conveyed in person given the trio believed, emphatically, their phones and online communications were being monitored. “It’s most likely that this was Gareth revealing the grand opus and how everything came together: weather events, the worsening situation of the world, the various paranoid beliefs,” Aboud said.
He suspects Nathaniel came fully on board at this juncture, entering the shared delusion. Neurologist Christian Gericke, a professor of public health at the University of Queensland, told the inquest an autopsy showed Nathaniel had sustained no enduring brain damage from the heart attack, ruling out a physical cause for his subsequent conduct.
Ominously, Nathaniel told his brother in a recorded discussion that he had been having dreams of “going hand to hand” with the police, showing how his mindset had shifted. “For me, the significance of that is that it came from Nathaniel,” Aboud told the inquest. “It was not provoked or put into Nathaniel’s head by Gareth … it was something that Nathaniel spoke for himself.”
On December 17, 2021, he drove across the closed Queensland border in contravention of pandemic controls, his car loaded with guns and ammunition, a crossbow and knives, some of which he dumped. There would be no going back for any of them from here.
Trio go into overdrive
Nathaniel didn’t join Stacey and his brother at Wieambilla until April or May 2022, no doubt concerned that he would lead the authorities to their doorstep. For a time they must have thought they were home free. But on August 5, police called at the property to serve warrants on Nathaniel in relation to the border breach and firearm offences. Fortunately, no one was around. A calling card left by the police, however, sent the trio into overdrive.
They fortified the approaches to the sparse eight-room homestead, digging a network of fighting positions and hides, rigging mirrors and barricades across the driveway. Food and coffee were stockpiled, alongside three newly purchased ghillie camouflage suits worn by military snipers. Nathaniel had already added the two legally registered rifles he retained to their arsenal.
By then, Gareth was shooting at aircraft using nearby Tara airport, convinced they were spying. (He was videoed firing on low-flying planes.) The Trains were on a countdown – to the end times or the return of the police, whichever came first. Ultimately, these two outcomes would come to mean the same thing to them. A snippet of poetry from a 2012 Liam Neeson movie, The Grey, resonated so deeply with Gareth he quoted it to his brother: “Live and die on this day/Live and die on this day.”
Nathaniel, for his part, was sending his family scripture from the Book of Revelation and the Book of Enoch on the second coming, desperate for them to join him at Wieambilla. Instead, a close family member filed a missing person report to the NSW police, unwittingly setting in motion the events that would play out on December 12, 2022, the day of the shootout. Gareth was aware of this, and communicated angrily with the family member concerned. He had been bombarding the local police with taunting videos – possibly in a crude attempt to warn them against returning to the property, Aboud said.
The Trains also had been in touch with notorious American Christian conspiracy theorist Donald Day Jr and on December 10 Stacey reached out again online, declaring they had drawn a line in the sand. If “public state actors” – “devils and demons” in the form of police – crossed “the Rubicon” of their locked front gate, they would fight to the death, she told Day. To be subjugated, drugged and turned into “non-humans” was a worse fate by far. “We would rather die as soldiers of God,” Stacey said.
Josh Roose, an expert in political and religious extremism and violence with Melbourne’s Deakin University, gave evidence that Day’s role was critical, introducing “a more violent framing of the battle to come”. Stacey referred to him as “brother”, his wife as their sister.
After being rebuffed by Australian conspiracist Riccardo Bosi, a self-styled player in right-wing fringe politics, Gareth found the respect and validation he craved from Day. “Gareth had almost been intellectually reborn,” Roose said; he had found a purpose that conspiracy theories alone could not offer him. Stacey, meanwhile, was busy uploading videos. In one of them, she reads from the Book of Ezra, describing the horror of the biblical end of days. Fewer than a dozen people would click on to this last, forbidding testament.
On the morning of that fateful Tuesday, December 12, the Trains were up early, determined as ever to spread the word. From 6am they were engaging with a woman in the US on her YouTube channel, seeking to entice her to the property. Roose said: “That can be understood as an attempt to recruit someone to join them in this final battle … against evil.”
When the four-person team of Queensland police arrived about 4.30pm to conduct a welfare check on Nathaniel in response to the missing person report, Stacey messaged Day: “They have crossed the Rubicon.” He replied: “Dammit”.
Within minutes, constable Matthew Arnold, 26, was dead, killed instantly by a shot to the chest from Nathaniel’s bolt-action Tikka T3 rifle. His colleague, Rachel McCrow, 29, was wounded by the former principal and callously dispatched, execution-style, by Gareth. Neighbour Alan Dare, 58, who came to help after hearing the gunfire, was fatally wounded on a fenceline. The remaining two officers escaped.
Despite being repeatedly urged to surrender after police reinforcements arrived, the Trains stood their ground, pouring on the fire. Gareth was killed by a police marksman at 10.32pm, followed by Stacey, who emerged from the house with her rifle aimed at police. Nathaniel died from a gunshot to the head at 10.39pm.
Motive
So let’s end where we started with those foundational questions of motive. Were the Trains terrorists or demented Christian fundamentalists? Mad, bad or all of the above? This goes to the heart of what the state coroner must determine when he comes to weigh the evidence from the five-week inquest. Roose’s evidence is they were terrorists. He told Ryan they had set an ambush for the police, an inherently “offensive” act.
“They were motivated by a religious ideology in which the police were public state actors, as they framed it, ‘devils and demons’, and they were in a war,” he said. “That’s not different to any form of extremism and terrorism.”
Aboud was more circumspect. “What happened between these three individuals was a psychotic process, a shared psychotic process, and it involved them developing increasingly extreme views about the world,” he said. “If that’s radicalisation and extremism, then that’s what happened. But it was a psychiatric problem.”
His parting message to the coroner was pointed. None of this, not one of the six lives lost, the heartache to the families, the trauma of the survivors, would have happened had the Trains not had access to guns.
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