Young police officers’ unwitting walk into the hellfire

The Wieambilla atrocity remains a suppurating communal wound, not just in Queensland but across Australia.

From left, police constables Rachel McCrow, Matthew Arnold, Keely Brough and Randall Kirk inadvertently entered the Trains’ deluded and lethal end-of-days recital.

Brisbane in August: for almost 150 years, the last month of winter has meant just one thing in the Queensland capital – the annual Royal National Association exhibition at the old showgrounds in Bowen Hills in the city’s inner north.

The show, known forever as the Ekka, remains a quaint and curious relic. Here, urban development has washed around the showgrounds precinct, encasing its ancient grassy oval and rickety grandstands and stockyards and display halls.

Yet here, like Brigadoon, the Ekka continues to appear every August, defying the 21st century with its carnies in sideshow alley and illuminated Ferris wheels and a flotilla of livestock trucked in from farms and cattle studs across the state. The show runs for nine days, one of which is a public holiday, as is tradition, for the locals.

Country comes to the city. Cockies in from the bush share a beer with their urban cousins in the Stockmen’s Bar. Prize bulls are led around the main arena (cricket legend Don Bradman debuted here during the 1928-29 Test series against England, scoring just 18 and 1).

And the joltingly unfamiliar perfume of cattle and horses invariably hovers about the high-rise apartment buildings, schools and office blocks of modern Bowen Hills.

It is a ritual that, for decades, has remained largely unchanged. Grandparents can still grab a Dagwood dog on a stick and a fabled Ekka strawberry sundae as they did when they were children, the whole show buffeted, year after year, by late winter westerlies.

This year, however, the fun of the fair, indeed, the entire month of August in Brisbane, will be darkened by the inquest into the horrific shootings in the tiny town of Wieambilla, 313km west of the capital on Queensland’s Western Downs, on December 12, 2022.

A country narrative comes to the city again, but in the most tragic and almost incomprehensible way. The Wieambilla atrocity remains a suppurating communal wound, not just in Queensland but across Australia.

On that Monday afternoon in December almost two years ago, police were called to a property at 251 Wains Road, Wieambilla, to conduct a welfare check. They were looking for teacher Nathaniel Train, 46, whose wife in NSW had reported him missing. They also had an arrest warrant for Train, believing he had unlawfully crossed from NSW into Queensland against legal Covid pandemic restrictions.

Stacey and Nathaniel Train.

Within moments two young police officers – Rachel McCrow, 29, and Matthew Arnold, 26 – were dead. An hour later a good Samaritan neighbour – Alan Dare, 58 – was shot and killed. And by late evening the trio of religious fanatic killers – Nathaniel Train, his brother Gareth, 47, and wife Stacey Train, 45 (who’d previously been married to Nathaniel) – were shot dead by specialist police.

On Monday this week, Queensland State Coroner Terry Ryan opened his inquest in Court 4 of the Brisbane Magistrates Court building in George Street, less than 2km south of the Exhibition Grounds. The inquiry is expected to take five weeks.

Ryan initiated proceedings with an offer of condolences to the families of the dead, and a reminder of his court’s legal duties.

“The purpose of the inquest is to inform the families of those who died and the broader community about the circumstances of the deaths, including what occurred, how it happened, and whether the deaths could have been prevented,” Ryan said.

He stressed that the inquest was “examining the events that occurred with the benefit of hindsight” and that it was not the function of the coroner to apportioned blame or to conclude that “any of those involved are criminally or civilly liable”.

In making clear that blame would not be a part of the inquest’s remit, Ryan had in fact prepared the grounds for a granular examination of the facts alone.

Blame can help buffet horror, can assist in keeping it, at least temporarily, at a distance.

But it would play no part in the proceedings in Court 4. The daily work diet of the courts and police are cold, hard facts, and this inquest, despite the immense and unprecedented gravity of the tragedy, would be no different.

It also is the nature of a coroners court to deal with death in all its guises.

But few, as this inquest already has proved in its first week of hearings, will bring us so close to that membrane that separates life and death. The entering into evidence of police bodycam footage recorded in the moments before all hell broke loose on that otherwise ordinary afternoon in late 2022 has taken us to a place we spend a lifetime trying not to think about – the moments leading up to death.

The court witnessed snatches of bodycam videos of four young police officers going about their duty on that December day. All were about the same age – in their mid to late 20s.

In the footage, they enter the Train property with casual conversational banter, introducing themselves, chatting and gibing the freshest recruit, Keely Brough. All are bound by the camaraderie of their work. They are Queensland police.

As they walk and talk, you can hear their boots crunching on the dirt track of the Train property as they walk through thin bush to the farmhouse.

The profound horror for the court, and the broader public, is that we know what the officers are walking into, and that two of them – constables Arnold and McCrow – are within seconds of meeting their deaths.

You want to scream at them to turn back. To run for their lives.

Waiting for them in this ambush are the Trains, an unremarkable trio who would have passed through life with little notice if their extreme ideas – that the world was about to come to an end as a prelude to the return of Jesus, and that police were just instruments of governments out to control their lives – hadn’t violently surfaced that afternoon.

Those four officers were unwittingly stepping into a complex fundamental belief system known as premillennialism, where suffering and wholesale destruction are a necessary prelude to peace on earth. They were entering not just the Train property but their unstable minds.

The Trains, buoyed by their convictions, were fully prepared, fully armed and full of murderous intent. They had a small arsenal of weapons, including a 30-06 Tikka T3 rifle and a .308 Winchester Ruger M77.

At 4.37pm, Constable Arnold was shot in the chest by Nathaniel Train and instantly killed. Soon after, Constable McCrow was hit once in the shoulder and twice in the left leg. In agony, she discharged her firearm to no avail. She then pleaded with her killer, Gareth Train, before being executed by a single bullet to the head.

Constable Brough fled for her life, later hiding in short grass that the Trains would set on fire in an effort to flush her out. And Constable Kirk, taking refuge behind a tree and under fire, telephoned his supervising officer, Sergeant Justin Dryer, on his mobile phone while he was being hunted by the fanatical killers, reporting that he thought his colleague, McCrow, was dead.

At 4.46pm Kirk’s bodycam footage shows a blur of grass blades and earth. His voice sounds strangely disembodied from the chaos around him, as if his words have yet to catch up with what he’s just seen and what he’s going through in that fevered moment.

“Matt’s not moving,” he says into the phone. “He’s (one of the Trains) coming over. Should I run?”

Death is stalking Kirk. And those three simple words – should I run? – linger heavily there in the bush of Wieambilla, and in the imaginations of us all.

Should he run? You ask yourself: What would I do?

The footage makes clear in that moment that Kirk has transcended being a uniformed police officer, a sworn public servant, but is a human being, is all of us, suddenly caught on that razor edge between life and death, that place where a single decision could cost him his life.

He ultimately makes it to his squad car under a hail of bullets and escapes.

An hour later, the Trains’ neighbour, Dare, notices smoke coming from next door and with friend Victor Lewis investigates the phenomenon. Both men are wary of bushfires.

Dare, too, then unwittingly enters the Trains’ deluded and lethal end-of-days recital that is playing out beyond his knowledge. He, too, is pointlessly shot dead.

While the extraordinary tranche of footage aired in the Coroners Court remained intensely focused, the broader view beyond the camera lens was again, with that hindsight mentioned by Ryan, equally as disturbing.

What the footage did not show, but what was omnipresent, was reality colliding with fantasy, and lives being lost in the friction between the two.

The reality was four police officers doing their duty. The reality was a curious neighbour investigating smoke coming from next door.

But the world they walked into on the 43ha Train property was one of imagined hellfire and wrath, a doomsday scenario that had been constructed in the minds of three people over time, aggravated by government Covid restrictions and triggered by the arrival of the police. The Train delusion encased the victims and survivors without them even being conscious of it, as invisible as a mobile phone network’s radio waves. It was there but they couldn’t see it.

Gareth Train had once declared online: “I am a son of Yahweh the creator God. Yeshua is my King and brother. I live in this world but I am not of this world. I am not perfect and have made many mistakes in my life, I am a sinner but have been forgiven.”

Observing news of anti-Covid lockdowns in Melbourne in early 2021, he also wrote: “What is the theatre of organised protest really about? What is really accomplished? Why do protestors run away from a fight they will have to have at some point? What will you choose when the wolf is at your door?”

The Trains were ready for the wolf.

During the subsequent firefight with police that night involving the Police Special Emergency Response Team, a SERT Bearcat armoured vehicle and two POLAIR police helicopters, Stacey and Gareth Train uploaded a shadowy video of themselves. In it, Gareth says: “They came to kill us and we killed them. If you don’t defend yourself against these devils and demons, you’re a coward.”

All three Trains were killed by police in a drama that had lasted five hours and 59 minutes.

At the inquest this week, lawyer Ruth O’Gorman, for the coroner, said the inquest would later hear a psychiatrist’s analysis of the Trains’ state of mind and that the trio shared a psychiatric disorder.

“They had identical persecutory and religious beliefs that met the psychiatric definition of delusions,” O’Gorman told the court.

On Thursday, the inquest heard evidence about the Wieambilla region that formed part of what was known locally as The Blocks – large parcels of cheap land where many residents chose to go off the grid.

The court heard it was a low socio-economic district where drug use was common.

Constable Craig Loveland, from Tara police, said at some properties “they’d put on a sign, ‘don’t enter or you’ll be shot’.”

He added: “Certain addresses in The Blocks … had mantraps, booby traps. You’d find pits, spikes, other things around the blocks on certain properties generally … to injure persons entering.”

This was all a far cry from the sort of country meets city experience over at Bowen Hills. During the Ekka they will have, as ever, the judging of Queensland’s best dark rich fruit cake, chutneys and marmalade. There will be showjumping and whipcracking competitions, stud beef judging and the crowning of the Stud Beef Champion of Champions.

Unlike previous shows, morning and afternoon shadows from nearby high-rises will strafe the showgrounds for the duration of the Ekka in this modern Brisbane, as the inquest and its horrors continue to unfurl down in George Street.

But some customs don’t change. Each night of the Ekka will conclude with the gunshot crack of fireworks.