Dezi Freeman lives in deer country, where big bore guns are a way of life for the hunter and the hunted
Dezi Freeman is accused of killing two police and of being an off-the-rails sovereign citizen slugging it out against 450 police who are on his tail in the high country.
The only thing bigger than Dezi Bird Freeman’s tin foil hat is the guns locals use to hunt the thickset sambar deer in the hills and valleys around Mount Buffalo and beyond.
“You need the bigger calibre to drop them,’’ explains Tim Cooper of A&W Grassi gun store in nearby Oxley. By big, he means .308 Winchester, 30-06, or .300 Winchester Magnum, the latter used in the US to kill large prey; in Australia, these are the weapons deer hunters like Freeman use to cull deer.
Now Freeman, the suspected cop killer, is being hunted in the freezing and waterlogged bush above Porepunkah, about 315km northeast of Melbourne.
“It would be a good hiding place for someone,’’ Mr Cooper says, adding that the story was Freeman might have become a doomsday, end-of-the-world reactionary.
Mr Cooper said it was possible the alleged police killer could be lurking in caves or old mineshafts, a view held by many in the district as they wait anxiously for an arrest or the discovery of Freeman’s body in the hills.
As the days pass with him evading police, more people are likening him to a deeply twisted version of the Sylvester Stallone character John Rambo, a PTSD-suffering former Vietnam veteran who fights, as a survivalist, against authority in the Rambo movies.
Freeman, let’s be clear, is no hero.
In his case, his story is even more vexed, facing questions over possible child sex offending, a manhunt for allegedly shooting and killing two police officers and wounding another and with a very long history of anti-establishment, anti-police rhetoric that intensified during the pandemic.
A local who claims to have hunted deer with Freeman in the ranges says the 56-year-old was obsessed with outsmarting authorities, boasting of having specialist aluminium sheeting designed to mask body heat and throw off police infrared detection.
He is an expert handler of drones, which police will be using against him in clear weather.
Freeman has a reputation as an expert bushman in the area, but a local crisis of this scale can lead to exaggeration and runaway speculation as nervous residents take stock of what happened in Porepunkah.
If he is well prepared with food and weapons, Freeman could be gone for months. If not, and his bush skills have been overblown, the bitter subalpine weather could force him into the open within days, opening up even more issues for police if he remains heavily armed, as is likely.
Locals say he knows every gully, cave and abandoned mineshaft in the mountainous terrain, which is so tough in winter that the settlers named their creeks and roads after wild animals or with satanic references.
Demon Ridge Track, Devils Creek, Dingo Ridge Road are part of the landscape that defines the Alps or adjacent areas.
It is blue-chip Great Dividing Range country where at night campers on the plateau in the national park are often woken by the howl of dingoes or cross-bred wild dogs.
The police search with 450 officers from across the country has fuelled speculation that Freeman, a self-declared “sovereign citizen”, may have a cache of weapons, having fled with a police handgun and ammunition, a rifle and a homemade shotgun. Police fear there may be more.
Some in the community believe police have almost no chance of finding him in the wild unless he decides to emerge on his own.
Former homicide squad detective Charlie Bezzina said Freeman’s wife, Mali, who was arrested without charge on Thursday night, would be crucial to knowing whether the alleged police killer was a doomsday prepper or just a suspected killer on the run in very tough conditions, which might include snow at the weekend.
She and her teenage son were arrested and released; she and Freeman, once known as Desmond Filby, have two children.
“This is where she would be so crucial in the intelligence for the cops,’’ Mr Bezzina said of the husband’s potential resources.
“I find it highly unlikely she couldn’t know. If he had an escape plan, what was it?
“You can’t find people who want to be found, let alone don’t want to be found.’’
Freeman allegedly blasted Detective Leading Senior Constable Neal Thompson, 59, the first man in, with a homemade shotgun through the door of a bus in which the accused killer was living. Thompson – or “Thommo” – was due to retire next week.
The next victim, 35-year-old Vadim De Waart, was also killed at the end of a homemade gun barrel; while another officer was struck down on Tuesday morning but survived with serious injuries. Seven other police were in the raid.
Special security cameras had been set up by the fugitive at the property’s entrance.
When police arrived at the scene to execute a warrant, they knew Freeman was completely odd, with a bitter hatred for police, and that he had railed against former Victorian premier Dan Andrews and the courts and had an overall disdain for the rule of law.
Freeman fought legally with a magistrate, a prosecutor and police in one incident, battled with neighbours, challenged in court his driver’s licence cancellation and was disqualified from driving for two years after being convicted of speeding, refusing to submit to a drug test and driving while using a phone.
Comments on the Facebook account Buffalo Ezi, which The Australian has verified belonged to Freeman, made clear his disdain for police and government. He wrote on a video posted to Facebook of an American police officer trying to apprehend a woman behind the wheel of a vehicle: “She should have ran over an (sic) killed the pig vomit while she still had the chance.”
In a separate comment three months ago, Freeman wrote: “The world could be such a great place if governments would simply act in favour of the people instead of being cants (sic)”.
“So idiot governments tell us to avoid cholesterol and stay out of the sun. They want to kill us,” another read.
His prolific social media activity also laid bare his views on feminism.
“200,000 innocent babies per day are murdered by feminists,” he wrote, referencing a World Health Organisation statistic on abortion.
He labelled this “an extreme Pedocidal holocaust”. Freeman also said someone who believed the Earth was flat was a “nutjob”.
• • • •
Porepunkah is the gateway to the Mount Buffalo National Park as well as Falls Creek, Hotham and Dinner Plain ski fields. With just 1000 people on the banks of the Ovens and Buckland rivers, it is a pretty town, less than 4km from Rayner Track, where Freeman and his family lived.
It is just a five-minute drive to Bright, an upmarket version of Porepunkah, with more accommodation and restaurants and higher house prices. In Bright’s main street, a handful of flowers sit propped against the notice board of the Uniting Church, with the sign above them pleading: “Pray for our brave emergency services.”
This is the church where Freeman’s estranged wife, Mali, serves food for the less fortunate through her “free fridge” charity. The tragedy has thrown an unwelcome spotlight on her – a woman many know not as the partner of a gunman but as a softly-spoken volunteer who spends her days helping others.
Parishioners who know her say the contrast between her generosity and her husband’s notoriety could not be more stark.
Inside the church hall, long-time member Kerri Farquharson said the town still felt frozen in disbelief. Streets were quieter than usual, with visitors hesitating to pass through as police locked down parts of the alpine region.
“I think everyone’s in shock, it’s certainly not something you’d expect to happen anywhere here,” she said. “It’s been quiet, there’s not a lot of people around … I think we might still be getting visitors this weekend.”
Petula Edwards recalled how Mali Freeman would collect surplus food from the local Woolworths and stock the church’s “free fridge”, ensuring those doing it tough could always find something to eat. She also volunteered at the Dumu Cafe, a former First Nations-run venture in Bright.
“She’s quiet and friendly … I really feel for her because she is such a nice person,” Ms Edwards said.
But the strain on Mali Freeman and her children is evident as police chase the suspected double cop killer in the hills outside Porepunkah, circling in helicopters above the family’s property and towards the large slabs of granite that make up Mount Buffalo.
It’s a chase police plan to win.
However long it takes.
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