Dezi Freeman: from family photographer to alleged cop killer

I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. Almost a month after two police officers were shot and killed in regional Victoria, the accused gunman, Desi Freeman, is still at large. Police were going to arrest Freeman on historic sex offenses at the time. Victoria police have deployed thousands of officers, searched more than one hundred properties, and offered the biggest reward in Victorian history, with no results so far.

When you look at his early stuff, it's very normal for a middle aged man who's interested in nature. There's photos of rural Victoria, the photos of his family. It's a very normal Facebook account. And there was a sprinkling always of conspiratorial narratives and kind of reactionary ideas, even from early on. So I have this trove spanning, you know, close to a decade of his posts, and he always had a bit of a b inw his bonnet about the legal system.

But for the most part, if you just looked.

At his early Facebook posts from twenty eighteen, you wouldn't think that there was anything out of the ordinary.

On Friday, Victoria Police conducted the largest ever tactical policing operation in Australia's history as part of our mission to find Freeman. This with incredibly rugged areas. They were crawling through caves, they were traversing rivers and falls, they were searching plantations and gorgeous in an effort to find Freeman.

The fact that Freeman still has not been caught is pretty extraordinary at this point. So looking through his history, what did you find out about his capacity as opposed to evade authorities for this long?

Yeah?

I mean, just look at his Facebook feed. You only get one view of him, but you know, he's always been interested in nature. He's clearly someone who was very comfortable traversing Victoria's wilderness, and he had for a long time and interest in doomsday prepper communities. For those who are not familiar, there is and has been communities online offline of people who believe that, for one reason or another, that civilization will break down, or at.

The very least that they will decide to.

Weave it themselves and so figure out ways to become self reliant and to be able to survive outside of civilization.

Does there tend to be, in your experience, much overlap between doomsday preppers and sovereign citizens.

Yeah, loo's a good question. I don't have a whole lot of data.

You can imagine that those kinds of world views align. If you ask someone who believes that the law is illegitimate, you might, you know, naturally, think about what alternatives that you have.

But very often, I can say from my.

Experiences of the doomsday prepper communities. You know, that ultimately fatalistic view of society, This idea that eventually something's going to happen and it's all going to fall apart, comes hand in hand with I guess, pretty negative view of society that you often see with sovereign citizens.

All right, well, tell me more about Freeman's I suppose anti authority journey online. You mentioned that quite early on he was posting about the legal system, So tell me a bit more about what he was actually putting out there and how that progressed.

Yeah, so, when you look through his Facebook feed, it was actually remarkable the way that there was just this clear journey. He was sharing well known MRAs like men rights activists.

Or figures who are popular with them.

So you know, for example, he shared stuff from Sidney Watson, a well known YouTuber who was talking about women pedling lies, trying to abuse the family call process to get custody of children.

If we all actually cared about the welfare of children, like so many feminists and other allowed screeny people like to see they do, then all sides of this would be calling to rectify a justice system that destroys the lives of fathers.

A Betina Aren't.

Also an Australian who was quite well known, Desi Freeman was sharing her.

Content saying there's an epidemic of domestic violence in this country is a gross deception and that utter insult to the bulk of decent, safe Australian men.

We shared this post of Pauline Hanson talking about how the family court system was inherently unfair to men and fathers.

We've heard about domestic violence orders brought against you know, partners. That is untrue. There's lies being told. You know, people have their own self interests, but it really at the end of the day, is it right on the other parent? Is it right for the children?

He also showed a kind of interesting I would say conservative Christian figures. He posted about Israel Flal's conflict with Robby Australia when he was sacked over his homophobic posts.

When you say, because I'm so inclusive, I can't include you, because we're so about unity, we're going to disunite from you, because we're all about tolerance, We're not going to tolerate you, it doesn't.

Make a gram of sense.

What this really is about, the truth about this is that they hate what he believes and they intend to punish him for it.

And so you know, from early on he equally had these politics, but it wasn't kind of all consuming. And I really noticed that ramping up in the lead into that summer of twenty nineteen twenty twenty, where it kind of feels like that was a change for everyone. It was a pretty terrible bushfire season. Desi Freeman was obviously, you know, very interesting the environment and had a lot

Okay, tell me a bit more about how much COVID ramped up his beliefs, and I suppose I was soo his actions.

Yeah, So there's this moment in early twenty twenty where his profile, which was varied up to that point, becomes obsessive about one thing, which was COVID nineteen restrictions, and you could see that there's just a moment in March twenty twenty where suddenly he posts about it for the first time. I think, if Ericle correctly, it's a meme like that's like COVID nineteen no actually like COVID nineteen

Of the week. And from that point you see him immediately cast.

COVID nineteen and the public health response to it as a conspiracy about government control. That's when he starts to then post about former Victorian Premier Dan Andrews. And then ultimately, as has been and you know, while we reported, you know, he would go on to file documents that would attempt to try Dan Andrews for treason.

Ultimately that was rejected, but he immediately.

Showed that he had a disdain for this kind of government control over his life. And then those sovereign citizen or pseudo or ideas, this way of like, not only do I disagree with the public health restrictions, but actually, like I actually think that he's done something inherently legally wrong. That was his way of almost enacting those beliefs.

So he showed these strong anti government beliefs. But what about the police specifically, when does he start to direct anger towards them and in what way?

Yeah, so, police, more than anything else over that seven year period was really the people who got the focus of his eye. And you know, looking back is almost chilling in the way that it was so obvious, you know, the early posts, even before things really took a turn around COVID, he would accuse them of being you know, corrupt or not good to their jobs.

In the lead up to twenty.

Twenty, he would share stories, for example, out police misconduct that we're in the media and attached his own commentary to it.

But that really took on a.

New level when they were responsible for, you know, enforcing lockdowns and mask mandates and that kind of things. You must produce your ID card before exercising a power. You're exercising a power right by questioning, you're.

Going to provide your name and address, taste hel he'd be humanizing them, he would be calling for ultimately violence against them.

He shared some images.

Once of someone else and then once he purported of his wife sustaining injuries of bruising from an interaction with police. I believe that that was to do with something to do with like a clash because of COVID nineteen restrictions, you are unhormal and he would ultimately, you know, call for the Nuremberg I against them, soference to those Nazi era public trials and ultimately executions of the German officers who were responsible for carrying out everything that happened in

Coming up what we can learn from tracking Desi Freeman's online journey cam Desi Freeman is not the first person with this type of belief system to be accused of murdering police officers in Australia. So how much overlap is there between the things that he was posting and what we know about the trains so Nathaniel Stacey and Gareth and the types of things they believed in before they murdered two police officers and their neighbor in twenty twenty two.

Yeah, I said, ultimately as philosophically not that different in some ways, but kind of almost from a different end. I went the Wienbiller in quest. I covered the shooting after it happened. Gareth Train, based on his online posts his YouTube account that I discovered he was kind of more again obsessed with these powerful forces.

A forensic psychiatrist, after analyzing diary entries, letters and text messages, told the coroner of the Trains were in the grip of a shared psychotic disorder.

He believed that he was being surveiled by the government. He believed that the helicopters flying over his property at times trying to spy on him.

The court herd Gareth Train was the dominant force. He was paranoid, obsessed with guns and spooked conspiracy theories.

The Trains and Gareth specifically cast these polices almost like a more powerful force, whereas DESI just saw them as you know, the foot soldiers of a deeply unfair thing, you know. He viewed the more as I guess you would call it, like fascists and unfair and not like a secret pot.

And cam to what extent should we consider people like Freeman as loan actors versus part of a coherent group, because police in Victoria seem to believe that he is being harbored by other people right now, which seems to suggest that, you know, he knows people, He has loyalty from people who presumably have the same kind of belief system as him.

Yeah, I mean it's hard to know again without more details about his life. Freeman was obviously on a property with several other people, you know, like he was part of a local community. He wasn't a significant figure in pseudo or movements. While he did, you know, his stories did gain some notoriety and he did have some connection to them, it wasn't like he built up a significant following.

He was just one guy in it who had.

Clearly acted on some of it and then had that interaction with police when they tried to act out that warrant in late August. So to what we can tell from based on what's been made public, While he may have people who are helping him, this was not like, you know, the coordinated activity.

Of a group. This is not a movement, the pseudo wall movement.

That's deeply organized and working together. They are a kind of broad like constellation of people who you know, have some interactions, may listen to similar information sources, but are ultimately on their own. These are people who, because of their own individual circumstances and because of their own belief system,

And unfortunately, you know this is the kind of consequence what it does.

And all of this material that you've been going through online, they show how Freeman's obsessions they kind of fested over time, and how he started to kind of make threats I suppose, and he was posting sort of fantasies of violence. So what should we take from looking back over someone's radicalization like this.

It's such a vexed problem because as someone who's paid a lot of attention to these communities, there is a lot of violent rhetoric that freaks me out, as you freak everyone out.

But I also know.

That the vast majority of those people never escalate to a point of violence like Freeman, did you know, like the trains did, it's a very difficult from the outside to know who is going to do it, while at the same time, when you look back at these you're like, I'm not at all surprised that someone who was saying these things ended up doing it.

So I'm recently authored a book. Well, one of the things that we.

Kind of understood is that you know, there are these material influences on why people believe extreme and things or conspiracy beliefs, and ultimately, I think you know, if you're looking at this group of people and you don't know which one's about to boil over, perhaps the best thing to be doing is thinking about, well, how can we overall decrease the group of people who feel that way? What are we doing to make sure these people don't get to the point where they believe that's the only

But it's also.

Worth understanding that there are circumstances that we do know that broadly lead people to these things, and so whatever we can do to reduce those I think will ultimately have some kind of beneficial effect. A man like this tries to live his life off the grid, and that's going to make tracking and understanding him difficult. I do, unfortunately think that there is just a randomness to this and that's a very uncomfortable thing to have to sit with.

To this well, Ken, thank you so much for your time my persure, I thank you. You can read cam Wilson's reporting on DESI Rhaman at krikey dot com dot a U. Also in the news today, Australian health experts, including the Peak Body for Obstetricians and Gynecologists have condemned comments from US President Donald Trump warning of paracetamol use during pregnancy. President Trump has made unfounded claims that pregnant women should limit their use of paracetamol, which he says